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CANISIA LUBRIN


The Rusty Toque | Issue 13 | Poetry | November 30, 2017

Final Prayer in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception I


​​Who sought the theatrics: Who begged diagnosis
get us off the hook, keep us in the rhapsody,
and what force infests the night out of cad ventriloquy,
the inimical boyhood that taunts us, the symmetry of shattered-strong
 
women, even still the ones with tattoos
of swallows growing up on the small of their backs
could all look loved in the right light, the painted light
            mything your glass windows.
 
What else is worse than nuclear fallout that I do not fear?
Tell me there is nothing mad in my foreign-smelling black
and I will mouth the dusk as it canopies
this sanctimonious debris anatomized in the mirror.
            Tell me and I may sign myself with your cross.
 
When without ever coming back to fix these battered wombs,
already forgotten or only glandular to what has been
I bargain for remnants of dreams like shards of ice in the eye.
 
There is no need for ancient landscapes, no penance here
through televangelists, no grassquit slipping these vines to wine.
 
Peel back the scales of these untranslatable African songs, reveal
them more syllabled than your “Gloria.” And see the black-toothed Homo
habilis you’d expect. See queens and knights left over to check-
 
mate. What is harder to deal with than an island nowhere with
its catalytic lack of witness? The annulled
reek of bodies clustered for decades to keep from killing most things?
 
No one ever came to my door in searching –
for you, no one, except for you – 

Final Prayer in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception II

 
In the end
we’d settle on paraphrase
 
Tongues prostrate, still, like sages
after a lifetime of silence
 
With our names abandoned in
the weight of our diviners
 
Our serial practise of voice
the unthinking
 
deep within us,
crescendos through space
 
ornaments in place of moon
and air
 
everywhere,
coming like a dawn, withheld
 
bursting, we descend
with the countdown of our rebirth
 
with the return of early spring birds
littering the sky, we
 
water, hunting ourselves through
a rare falling
 
– are prepared to know our defence,
keeping it locked when we have no use for it
 
how, at first, coming home to crayon’d walls,
strokes of pure spirit and bone of the ones
who drew them, now absent, makes us
 
mad. What we ought to have heard
in the warring voices fleeing the night
as we carried on our fleeting fall –
 
was the half-rumoured lilt of thunder
in the baby’s cry demanding plot
and reasons bigger than the guns
that stole us into a twilight we struggle
to understand.
 
– Ancient sages might have
spoken that same hyperkiller language
of dilating cervixes:
 
Labour is the early war, the one less feared
whose vaporous monotones of sorrow disappear too soon
 
And mothers – already overburdened by the fallout taxes of
some distant relative’s original sin,
in which free will was enacted and land was spared
and bestowed by a God wise enough to
keep distance between earth and sky
 
– ask: who’s duty now it is
to shed the need for things to come to blow?
 
That baldheaded anomaly in the
vulva’s hoist
 
packing up its mallets, beating its sandals
one-handed, breaking tears as it enters the world
 
whose flaking skin is the utopist shade of the galaxy…
 
And who cares for these fables that console
but not enough
 
when the room half full of cobaltous children
when the age of the singing bowl
when the puppetry, fugues of string
and votive, withhold warmth only long
enough for us to clock our times
 
and return home. To the bad seeds
who’ve sucked up nicknames like
bandit and colt and cockman,
germinated from their toddling days
in company of small hulks and rubber giraffes
like secrets packed away in the attic
 
These are the children
we tell bedtime stories
of our undying
love
of the silhouettes.
 
So while we go on and limit sorrow to money and arms,
that knock-of-the-sill and conscience, blanking
the source of our ebbing genealogies,
 
our anthologized dead
still touch everything,
 
numbering the stars and known universe
as we find ourselves still prostrate beneath
a sun still raging, before any of us even break
into the work of our absence in the memorial,
 
we have been conquered,
fingers still jagged from battle,
and we go on
and we age
into nocturne.

These poems are excerpted from Canisia Lubrin's book Voodoo Hypothesis (Wolsak & Wynn):
Picture

Voodoo Hypothesis
by Canisia Lubrin
​Wolsak & Wynn
October 2017

Description from the Publisher:
Voodoo Hypothesis is a subversion of the imperial construct of "blackness" and a rejection of the contemporary and historical systems that paint black people as inferior, through constant parallel representations of "evil" and "savagery." Pulling from pop culture, science, pseudo-science and contemporary news stories about race, Lubrin asks: What happens if the systems of belief that give science, religion and culture their importance were actually applied to the contemporary "black experience"? With its irreverence toward colonialism, and the related obsession with post-colonialism and anti-colonialism, and her wide-ranging lines, deftly touched with an intermingling of Caribbean Creole, English patois and baroque language, Lubrin has created a book that holds up a torch to the narratives of the ruling class, and shows us the restorative possibilities that exist in language itself.

CANISIA LUBRIN is a writer who has published poetry, fiction, non-fiction and criticism in Arc Poetry Magazine, Room Magazine, The Puritan, The Globe & Mail and others. She serves on the editorial board of the Humber Literary Review and as an advisor to Open Book Ontario. Lubrin holds an MFA from the University of Guelph-Humber and teaches English at Humber College. She was born in St. Lucia and lives in Whitby, Ontario.
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  • Home
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