Alison Smith: Two Poems
WHAT PEOPLE LOVE TO LOVE ABOUT PRISON
after Jen Hadfield
what people love about prison is the radical separation
what people love about separation are the handwritten letters
what people love about letters is first-person narrative
what people love about the person is tragedy
what people love about tragedy is a glimpse of gallows humour
what people love about humour is the rising above
what people love about rising is nobility
what people love about nobility is vengeance
what people love about vengeance are the rules about snitching
what people love about snitching is the insider’s language
what people love about language is the uniform of belonging
what people love about uniform is the sense of containment
what people love about containment is the furtiveness
what people love about furtive is the passage of contraband
what people love about passage is the vehicle of ass
what people love about the vehicle is physical ingenuity
what people love about ingenuity is the chance to win respect
what people love about respect is what they’ll do to the pedophiles
what people love about what they do is the assumption of a code
what people love about the code is the clarity
what people love about clarity is the purity of heart
what people love about purity are the saints
what people love about saints are the bones
THIRD TRIMESTER LETTER
THIRD TRIMESTER LETTER
The midwives say I worry too much and swallow
this: our souls are in the womb of God.
And so the swifts behind your old apartment, like whirling dervishes,
ecstatic, funnel-fall into a chimney with no house.
I stand waiting for a feminine, cosmic exhale.
My soul’s fetal ears are useless nubs. Others,
optically developed, said depleting ozone was God’s effacing cervix.
Their minute taste buds know that missing species
are dissolved nutrition for we, the amniotic chosen.
All I can say is She. We. She. We. Like kegels,
these orphic contractions comfort, even pleasure, but during
Big Events, don’t we melt like sugar pills?
Take this: a pregnant woman needs help to turn her
wrong-facing fetus. Where does that leave souls?
Either God is pregnant, helplessly cherishing her innards
or she’s over there: gloved, seldom seen (and then, between
the knees). I can’t think that existence gets Placenta and the Hand.
So I am diagnosed pregnant in the left-brain.
My logic tells me I should lie as still as God
for the palpation of your next letter. Each time
I say God is pregnant, I mean Right me, I mean Help.
Alison Smith lives in Nova Scotia. She is the author of The Wedding House (Gaspereau Press 2001), Six Mats and One Year (GP 2003), and the chapbook Fishwork, Dear (GP 2009). Her poems have appeared in Guernica Magazine, Fjords Review, Event Magazine, The Malahat Review, and Understorey.