I want a death as real as possible
Poetry | Terese Mason Pierre | Issue 46
Myth
Last week there was a shooting at the mall. Ever bold, you claimed it gave us one more talking point, our legs entwined at the back of the cinema, breath snatching. The daylight squeezes, drips over us on the way home. Always a risk—walk on the field or the road, our prayers wiped away with the orange sky while animals grazed. Those people, you say, in their own heads, trying on dresses, buying school supplies— then, some harsh red ending. I want a death as real as possible: old age, a shooting, falling from a cliff, my maroon frightening the sea. Ever broad, you’d rather die through myth, come upon the antagonist of your mother’s disciplines, driving alone at night, shaking the wrong tree, sleeping at the opposite end of the bed, pride matured into an iron noose. I always need to think about what part of me would be mourned—and on that, you say we diverge. The moon has plans for us, the grass grabs at my feet. We cross the road and I lose my shoe. I am almost hit by a car. We kiss at the top of the hill. Fireworks go off somewhere but don’t illuminate the sky. A dog barks. In the field below, a creature moves back and forth, drinking the blood of cows.
Brink
The salt road encroaches on the river, or perhaps it’s the other way around, short spray stealing sediment each year. Remarking this model mourns me to you. When it is time for your own turning of earth, I should search or you in the empty sky, in the fingerprints on the fabric of my skin and hair The river is deep and deadly. To swim is to make a statement, or rather, to test a question. Who shall pull me out, who will call out to me to return to pallid land, out of watery opportunity. In the blue dark, I hold your hand and don’t let go. You have no family here and the work bleaches your bones— the moon in your chest squeezing salt water down your untouched flesh. After you tell me, I stare at the sun for several hours, ask a different kind of question. The universe hears and sends rain, sends floods to satisfy me, but fails.
Excerpted from Myth by Terese Mason Pierre ©2025 Terese Mason Pierre. Published by House of Anansi Press www.houseofanansi.com
Terese Mason Pierre (she/her) is a writer, poet, and editor whose work has appeared in the Walrus, ROOM, Brick, Quill & Quire, Uncanny, and Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her work has been nominated for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, Best of the Net, the Aurora Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Ignyte Award. She is one of ten winners of the Writers’ Trust Journey Prize and was named a Writers’ Trust Rising Star. Terese is the chief programming officer at Augur, a speculative arts nonprofit, and co-director of AugurCon, Augur’s biennial speculative arts conference. Terese lives in Toronto.
Myth by Terese Mason Pierre House of Anansi Press. 2025
Myth, the much-anticipated debut collection from the multi-talented Terese Mason Pierre, weaves between worlds (‘real’ and ‘imaginary’) unearthing the unsettling: our jaded and joyful relationships to land, ancestry, trauma, self, and future. In three movements and two interludes, the poems in Myth move symphonically from tropical islands to barren cities, from lucid dreams to the mysteries of reality, from the sea to the cosmos. A dynamic mix of speculative poetry and ecstatic lyricism, the otherworldly and the sublime, Pierre’s poems never stray too long or too far from the spell of unspoiled nature: “The palm trees nod / at the ocean / the ocean does / what it always does / trusts the moon completely.”
Friends ‘with benefits’ tour the wonders of Grenada’s landscapes; extraterrestrials visit the Caribbean and the locals don’t seem phased; red birds “saunter airily like tourists,” La Diablesse lures helpless suitors to their dooms. This collection asks: How can myths manifest themselves in our daily lives? What do we actually mean when we say we love ourselves and others? And how do we pursue/create futures that honour our truths, histories and legacies?
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