Waiting for the Stena Line Ferry / Something to Look Forward To

Two exclusive poems from Fawn Parker on eating ash and the long sort of death you had before you were born.

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 alongside us. This is Fellow Travellers.

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Waiting for the Stena Line Ferry

Anticipation: life is waiting around,
So too travel.

The long sort of death you had before you were born.
The orange kitchen.

Melamine in the overhead cupboard.
You come to know this as life.

Your father snapping his gum,
the doctor’s small hammer,

your kneecap against the ice rink,
a stern knock at the front door.

Your mother’s nameless associate
waiting by the kettle for a mug.

You’ve swaddled your mind in magic.
The lie of the godliness of the parent.

A brief stain on the bed linen that,
to you, looks like a Christmas angel.

The house is an immaculate space.
All things always newly clean.

The way you might imagine heaven
under the clang of the school bell.

Much happens when you are out,
even more while you sleep.

Churning in this warm machine.
The frozen lake from an upstairs window.

One great sleep. A door opens and closes in the same place.
The best kind of story. The vaguest of movements.

Here you are somewhere in the great yawn of an hour.
This one.

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Something to Look Forward To

You’ve buried
your father in a vase

casting a bloat
-bellied shadow

over
the bookshelf

sweeping its arm
across the piano

where your wife
practices slowly

and badly some
simple melody for children.

You cannot be in rooms
cannot bear the suspension

of the memory of the weight
of the pull toward the floor

All things come crashing down
a cloud ascending settles

A trilling white key
a skeleton

It is not original
the appalling human urge

to consume some ash
though it will barely

tide you over
until dinner

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FAWN PARKER is the author of five books including novels What We Both Know (M&S), nominated for the Giller Prize and Hi, It's Me (M&S), nominated for the Writer's Trust Atwood Gibson Prize, and the poetry collection Soft Inheritance, which was awarded the JM Abraham Atlantic Book Award and the Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize. Her work has been published in The Walrus, Hazlitt, Literary Review of Canada, and elsewhere. Fawn is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick and the Poet Laureate of Fredericton. 

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.