blood / self

"now you're in Guelph: the very word sounds like onomatopoeia for puking"—Jenna Jarvis

Discordia does not, it turns out, hate everything. Every other week, we share a piece of new or gently-used work from an artist who's earned our respect.

There is art that moves us, and there is art that moves with us. This is Fellow Travellers.

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blood

i.
Byron Avenue
is not an English garden
is a butt-end of triplexes
a bottle-green neck of trees
is a naked privileged child
rising from a storm drain
and collapsing in the flood

ii.
go quintuple-fuck yourself
seal up ass and pre-taint
and eyes and ears and nose
with smoke
and puke
in middle school
when we started our cycles
in tandem we'd
menstruate into a tub
together always and
see if we really were
blood sisters

iii.
in junior school—
fuck off, I should have
been the one in private school
the one in that private place now
keep walking under the Queensway
hospital's that-a-way

iv.
all of those funny talking
French alligators and British seabirds
in powdered wigs
returned home
to their families and eggs
upon realizing that they hated
domestic life went right back
to chopping off each others'
limbs

v.
now you're in Guelph:
the very word sounds
like onomatopoeia for
puking

self

Recursive mimicry-of-mimic: for free transit, steps, night 
elsewhere, I self-present. Everything comes back
to the Latin. Some words are better in direct
questions. Circumlocution in
self-evident contexts.
Universal constants: the network goes down, the public service stops
pretending to do what it says on the tin, everyone knocks off, so I am
not where I ought not to be. Alone. Being a private 
sector worker when I’m not freelancing or unconscious
I hadn’t known the computers crashed out (as the kids say)
the same day my name printed on a wristband. I inquire hesitantly
using Messenger in the same house if it’s deliberate
or a coincidence or some fanciful requisite third thing
like serendipity

someone was here in the very early morning, again 
at noon, now well before 5:00pm. I learn all the above, so
it’s a semi-coincidence, which is a fucking brilliant
compound, which is my entire fucking point. Ellipses manifest:
Can always let me know if you need
a late night lift to Emerg or whatever.
Can’t imagine how you got to
whichever Emerg it was [insert visual representation 
of eesh sound, i.e., squaremouthed grimacing emoji].
I respond: I walked from the station in the middle of the night. 
Er, that is not the correct answer, except it is. I’ve manifested
temporal-contextual awareness, emoji audible
down the hallway through my closed door. Say
less. I don’t want a next time. I appreciate contingency.

A previous version of “blood” originally appeared as a broadside from In/Words circa 2013.

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JENNA JARVIS has lived in several places. Her poetry has most recently appeared in *These Days* and *Bad Dog*. She holds a BA (2013) and MA (2022) in English Literature from Carleton University, where she featured in several *In/Words* iterations as a contributor and/or editor.

Interested in being a Fellow Traveller? Email your poetry, prose, visual art, etc. to discordia.sucks@gmail.com. We pay (not much), and pieces are collected a few times a year in a small print edition.

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