TRUTH IN FORGERY
for Lee Israel*
Hope fell off posture
when Truth slept with the camera.
Even though Buddha brought just a stick to the jungle,
people power history with guns
and accumulate material
—this parking lot generation.
We know North in dirty work,
not romanticism or the reductionist screen.
Perhaps craving truth is enough,
pandemic children.
All of us actors aim together to please heaven.
But go into sweetness by moving enormous rage,
earn life and convince truth to hear us again,
though the late hour.
*From
cut ups of Lee Israel’s forgery of Louise Brooks's letter
VARIATIONS
ON A THEME OF LIGHT
Cracked
the window at midnight
to
see the meteor showers, sliding it steady
on
its tracks, married the train vibration,
breathing its
metre with clenched jaw down
three roofs, slid on shingles past their window,
leaped
down the
carless street, feet light under the bass
of yellow lamps drowning constellations
till
I saw Cindy where the stars
drummed down through the trees
the cops would not believe
the
playground could be a teen's aperture
for
poetry and the Pleiades
but they got
called off and we stayed
until first
light, our spines cold on the bars
from arranging
meteors into solo
light variations
before day tyranny
BEACH ORIGAMI
I unfold myself
on the beach,
reduce burden
of bag and shoes,
letting
purpose sink into
sand.
I make a concave
with belly and
legs.
easing bends
breathing
creases,
each shape a
facet for sun.
my soft body
looks better
against the
shore's arc
where there's no
difference
between anatomy
and wave.
I drift long
after
the other
concaves empty,
their limbs
linear
stacking
vertically,
casting hard
shadows.
LIP-SERVICE
the hygienist who reports cryptic alphanumerics
from a map of my cuspids
tallies future payments in arcane units
to avoid telling me to my face
my teeth are rotten and my mouth is liar
of faulty contours—a lair
they will conquer
—tongue behind dam, speechless & coerced
to push out grins
after just a pinch, they expect faculties to slip
with the local aesthetic & whitewashed music
to go along with their thousandth rehearsal
of vacation banter & concerns about the interest rate
while I gag on silent rage,
stare into ceiling tile and bald florescent tubes
during their drilling rite
hoping for that wayward hygienist
again
who drops f-bombs and teaches me useful acronyms
like Resting Bitch Face
ANATOMY OF A CLOUD
alone, never lonely
gravity untethers me—a lonely cloud
percolated on the couch.
I rise from droplets to cumulous.
feel part of it all
this far down
when sky monoliths don halos
of opulent spectrum spilling light into me.
when I'm not dragging personal shade,
I gather up in the misty ascent,
infused with mountain dew
and foil scraps in the back alley—
my head in the clouds—lightstepping
gutters and failed social safety nets.
I fly through pores of matter,
wash through photons when I ditch
the couch of existential dread. I leave
my laden body for a skin of wet molecules,
little globes that curve up from stones,
supersaturate and cry oceans
only to explode again in colossal white,
broadcasting a swirled sea into space
from a giving basin
that shores me in ether
all over blue.
Jessica Lee McMillan (she/her) is a poet and teacher with an English MA and creative writing certificate from SFU’s The Writer’s Studio. Her recent/forthcoming work can be found in The Malahat Review, QWERTY, The New Quarterly, Crab Creek Review, and CV2. Jessica lives on the land of the Halkomelem-speaking Peoples with her little family and large dog.
She is an emerging writer in her 40s and identify as a
first-generation Canadian, White Settler woman who is pan and femme.