The way a frenzied starling / builds her nest in May, / one clutch of twigs / at a time.
Poetry | Annick MacAskill | Issue 42
Bottled
Light slow as honey in its antique shell, rubber stopper lazy at the end, snarled curl of the lip ring silver round glass—yes, glass, but thick, the kind that keeps you guessing, stretching for the other side. The way a frenzied starling builds her nest in May, one clutch of twigs at a time. The light unclaimed through my delay, seeping in as if from nowhere, stilted, clotted as in the water in the white-shelled tank I saw one inverted summer day in Melbourne, where a squid lay slumped in a corner like a pile of unwashed laundry, her eye a steady accusation before the rounded window that glimpsed our own grey-glimmer world.
Praying for Rain
I didn’t want to post the poem so I sent it to my lover, who at least was safe, over in the green land. Even this felt like a risk. For once I wasn’t worried about the writing— already there were bad poems sprouting in my feed, and mostly I was thankful for them. I tweeted a good one by someone else, an older piece not about the fires inhaling the sinking forests, the poet’s voice so wet and cool on the recording that accompanied her soft seeds of text. This seemed safe enough—after all, she wrote of a whole other continent. Tired of wilting, I watered the plants because they needed it, fed the dog because she needed it, walked her with a KN95 over my breath (on the asphalt she vomited haze-streaked sunshine), made scrambled eggs again, then checked the weather on my phone because this was what I needed, the promise of rain. I told the internet I was praying for rain, but wouldn’t share that poem I tried to shape into a prayer— the combination felt both a sacrilege and dangerous. I couldn’t stop thinking about the water bombers sent from Newfoundland, how big they were, how much they carried, and how little they could do. The worst blasphemy, this ingratitude for something infinitely more useful than poetry. Still rain seemed like the only hope, the way it might charge the gaps left by humans, machines, and words. I had my first hot flash in a heat wave, the itch in my breast coming from both within and out of me, Googled patron saint of rain and found Isidore the Farmer, a Spaniard who went to mass before work but met God only in the fields— a cerulean pattering through the wheat, the slate roar of ahistoric relief. Isidore also busied himself puttering about with food and animals— maybe he was more worried than faithful, and we just remember him different. Saints can do so much for the living without changing a thing. When I get worried, I pray to God, too. I promised this was not a prayer. I wonder what my ancestors did when they needed rain on those farms in Cape Breton, France, and Scotland, imagining rites passed down then lost like silvery seeds slipping through the invisible cracks in my hands, unable to catch but cupping still, fingers permitting the orange glow of light, losing those falling treasures, while below, sudden depressions like gradually opening mouths in the grey, dry soil.
Votive by Annick MacAskill Gaspereau Press, 2024
Votive considers various forms of devotion and our often fraught attempts to respond to “our confusion, our curiosity.” These are poems concerned with the way we use stories, old and new, to connect our experiences, and the way we persist in our quest for love, hope and meaning when language falters —“What we couldn’t say we found in the skies.” MacAskill’s great gift resides in her facility for coaxing things evasive and intuitive into crisp form and language, in voicing what “so quickly I /knew and knew and knew.”
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