CHRISTINE NEGUS
The Rusty Toque | Poetry | Issue 2 | February 27, 2012
THINGS YOU CAN MAKE MAPS OUT OF ...Houses like family
Returned from the dead The stillness was stifling I could describe the neighborhood in darkness But walking the street The sky greying above I no longer knew Who lay behind the facades The adjacent home Had the same stone sculptures Cold like epitaphs Marbling their front lawn It was still yellow Though dulled over the years Looking through the window My breath like apparitions on the glass Hazed glimpses inside The TV was no longer in the corner The blue walls now a satiny red Enveloping the living room I had once dropped a gerbil Brought to show the woman next door On the front lawn At the time The grass seemed to reach out beyond its boundaries As I looked for the animal Now it seemed minute In the kitchen it was warm The kettle was whistling Steam through the florescent light As the gerbil fought its return Back into its plastic home UNTITLEDIt was 1998 and me and my dad were watching the Winter Olympics. Figure skating was on and there was a girl doing her routine. It seemed effortless and aimless as she followed the edge of the rink, even though I knew she was going really fast. She was wearing a pink outfit with sparkles and strips of chiffon that fell down around her hips and under her arms. I thought the strips looked like severed limbs but not yet detached. Just flapping, hitting her body, reminding her they were still there, that they used to be a part of her even if she couldn’t feel them. I was 6 and sitting in my living room watching figure skating thinking that would be so terrible. That’s what I thought it would feel like if I were in a major disaster or if there was an apocalypse. I would be the last one left with a bunch of dead things hanging around. I started crying. My dad noticed and I walked over to him and he hugged me and then I started crying louder and my mom came over and she started hugging me. I knelt on the ground and they were both hugging me and I was holding tightly onto their necks, crying. I can remember the couch’s red brocade, the blue and yellow striped shirt my father was wearing, and the figure skater that was spinning and spinning and spinning, the flaps just hitting her in what seemed like slow motion, forever. |
CHRISTINE NEGUS is a multidisciplinary artist and writer who received her MFA in 2010 from Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois and her BFA from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario in 2008. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally, with notable exhibitions and screenings including the Montreal Underground Film Festival, Cambridge Galleries, Art Gallery of York University, Xpace Cultural Centre and Images Festival where, in 2008, she won the National Film Board of Canada's Best Emerging Video/Filmmaker. Her first solo exhibition, you can't spell slaughter without laughter, opened in January 2012 at Gallery TPW. Negus' short “the loneliest animals” is included in the anthology Blast Counterblast edited by Anthony Elms and Steve Reinke.