Spotlight series #88 : Dessa Bayrock
Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.
STATEMENT
These poems, I think, highlight a kind of unreality — the ways and places in which the world warps even as it remains real. This is what I try to get at with the best of my poems (which is of course to say my favourites of my own poem)s: a liminal space, unique to poetry, in which what is and what is perceived become tangled up or even a bit lost, blended, reimagined.
In fact, all kinds of mechanisms can produce this blur, this weird unsettled ground, this dreamlike kind of whimsy, this ominous suggestion of more. In these poems it is the literal dark, the determination and adaptability of children, and the ineffable meat machine of the body — mechanisms of change or chance which echo the larger mechanism of the poem. Here, pain can become a lens for a shifted perspective — whether that pain is existential or all-too physical.
The speakers of my poems are always trying to understand this shifted perspective as a blessing or even as a kind of magic — even as they often run in the other direction as fast as they can, and who can blame them? The alchemy of poetry increases the saturation of these moments’ hue, highlighting the magic — weird, painful, illuminating, or otherwise — that exists, all the time, just under the skin of our actual world.
TWO POEMS
being a true account of the 5th avenue scouts’ semi-annual excursion into the dark
Listen, I don’t tell this story lightly. Take it as a warning,
not a dare. Take it as a cautionary tale. A history. A record
of our travels, merit badge by merit badge, palm
by sweaty palm. There we were, in these very woods,
nubivagant in the fog, dense and sweet as mother’s milk.
We were dense, too. Idiots, really, each hiding secret hopes
behind this semi-annual excursion into the dark. Jones,
for instance, was after the woodscraft badge, but Bergeron
was after monsters, which was the real problem — too many
late nights spent in the unknowable terrarium of the internet,
staring hard into each conspiracy theory, each blurry
photograph. The Bloody Crake, he told us, but not
before we’d set up camp, sun draining out of the sky
like the last runny sludge of mustard in the bottle. Reubens
looked just about ready to balter right on out of there,
but Johnson held her back, told her to think of the badge
for valorous conduct. We’d vote on it, he said, when we all
got home, unanimous, promise, and she settled down
but didn’t look happy about it. The Bloody Crake. A monstrous
rare bird, Bergeron said, with a beak like a blade and wings
as wide as Singh was tall. Singh wouldn’t kill a man, though.
The Bloody Crake — well. Bergeron tried to tell us more
but we wouldn’t let him, trying instead to bank ourselves
against the fear, the dark, those weird internet corners
that Bergeron took as gospel. He was clearly obsessed,
had this idea bigger than all of us, decided — of all things —
to catch the Crake. He was sure it existed, primeval and huge
and just waiting to be tamed, sideshown, made rich by.
You had to give him that: the kid had some kind of sheer
unwavering nerve inside him, tuned tighter than a high wire,
and who were we to wrestle that away from him? I’ll admit it,
we let him stay up by himself, a wavering silhouette in the fog,
pitiful flashlight staring up into the trees, where the the thing
was said to roost. What harm could it do? But then it started —
what I could only call the hunt. Johnson went first, a scream
and then nothing, a bloody patch where his tent was, nylon
ripped open from the top. Jones was the first to run, feeling
the trees to find north — earning that woodscraft badge after all —
before something plunged from the branches above him, sharp
and screaming, his body sudden viscera. Then Reubens
and Singh and I were running too. Bergeron was lost for good,
we figured, no sign of him, his sudden absence a lacuna.
We assumed the Crake got him, maybe first. But to this day
I still don’t know: was the bird there, in the forest? Or
was it just a lonely boy in the dark with a machete like a beak,
violence sprouting out of him like feathers? Here’s all I know
for sure: something bright and bloody whizzed past us
in the dark. I don’t know what it was. I hope I never do.
second metatarsal spell
one foot after one foot after one
broken foot and all this for a limp
like an echo of a wound. See
how it ripples like a stone
in the water, disappearing
like a print in the sand —
but what does sand remember
of what was stepped into it,
what gap it had to work
to fill? Imagine Ozymandias
sinking in the desert, and that
is this poem of a broken foot,
of four months with a cane
and a funny little knob of bone
new-budded in the night. Life
works to break us down, and this
is perhaps never as clear
and present as in that great
green field lit up in the night
like a surgeon’s theatre, as if
it predicted what could happen,
as if that crack of my metatarsal
had already rung out in the air,
like a bell, like a shot, like
one foot after one foot after
a second metatarsal cracked
and lit up like a glowstick.
Dessa Bayrock lives in Ottawa with two cats, one of whom is very loud and almost always nearby. She recently completed a doctorate about Canadian literary awards. You can find her, or at least more about her, at dessabayrock.com, or at @dessayo on Instagram.
