09-03-2024
Tyler Pennock
Excerpts from BONE
PAGES 9-10
Fear takes any form it can steal
and wears it – like elegance at a gala
replete with broad smiles
a world of comfort wrapped around you
Fear has a way of building itself
out
of the deepest cells
scars breeding as a fire might
on dry grass
It is always something inside
that the world eventually teases out
The most hurtful things
can’t impact the space
one’s own nightmares hold –
(twenty years ago)
the force of a cue ball in a shoe bag
whipped at the apogee
of my boyfriend’s hardest throw
wasn’t enough
I was safe
Standing over him,
bleeding
on his face, I knew:
No act can harm me
the worst has been done
Back then,
terror
had much further to travel
to get past the scar tissue
but fear
is inquisitive
stubborn
I had a friend who would press his hand on the accumulating ice in a freezer
repeatedly, over months
until his hand claimed its own space
in the deep freeze
In my habit I imagined the imprint
of a hardened hand on the soul
of a child
turned adult
turned child again
by memories that won’t give up
their hold
ice giving way
to repetition and the slow melt
the slow and lustful
surrender of one force to another
the learned helplessness of the ice matching the despair
of a child
turned adult
turned child again
fractal beauty melted
by frequent – unprepared – unsafe, touch
In the light-memory held by the ice
we are dissembled
PAGE 62
Seriously
if wolves are more civilized than you
then perhaps you’ve got it wrong…
PAGES 92-93
Once
I think, perhaps, that we understood
our humanity got in the way
of living well
and that we aspired
to the same harmony
that animals had
And you fools called it
animal worship
totemism
-from Bones selected by Fall 2024 PoemoftheWeek.com Guest Editor Hollay Ghadery.
Tyler Pennock was the inaugural Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences’ Indigenous Artist-in-Residence at Carleton University in Fall 2013. They are a two-spirit adoptee from a Cree and Metis family around the Lesser Slave Lake region of Alberta, and is a member of Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation. They graduated from Guelph University’s Creative Writing MFA program in 2013.Their first Book, BONES (Brick Books) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Indigenous Voices Award for Poetry. Their second book, BLOOD was released in September 2022. They also teach at the Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto.
