Tesseracts Fourteen: Strange Canadian Stories
Page 30
A Ghost in the Window
The ghost
A ghost at noon
The ghost at the table: a novel
The ghost dance of 1889 among the Pai Indians of Northwestern Aizona
Ghost hunters: William James and the search for scientific proof of life after death
The ghost in the atom: a discussion of the mysteries of quantum physics
The ghost in the house: real mothers talk about maternal depression, raising children, and how they cope
A ghost in the window
The ghost of Peg-Leg Peter, and other stories of old New York
The Ghost or The woman wears the breeches. A comedy written in the year MDCXL
Ghost plane: the true story of the CIA torture program
The ghost talks
The ghost walks
The ghost writer
The ghostly lover
Ghosts at my back
Ghosts before breakfast
The ghosts call you poor
Ghosts from the nursery: tracing the roots of violence
Ghosts have warm hands: a memoir of the Great War 1916-1919
Ghosts in photographs: the extraordinary story of spirit photography
Ghosts of Rwanda
Ghosts of slavery: a literary archaeology of black women’s lives
Ghosts returning
The ghosts that haunt me.
The Mad Scientist’s Shopping List for Hosting a Barbecue
time machine, sauerkraut, Dijon, disembodied brains
Acmetm mind scanner, hotdogs, hamburgers, buns, dials
tomatoes, olives, carrots, bread, butter, beakers, mayonnaise
pterodactyl food, potatoes, tin foil, corn, ketchup, relish
briquettes, lighter fluid, flame thrower, matches
mechanical man, salad, salad dressing, croutons
lightning rod, jumper cables, neck bolts
cooler for beer, pop, various organs
pie, Cool Whip, antigravity suit, shrimp ring, steak, steak sauce
Van de Graaff generator, cheese, crackers
paper plates, napkins, plastic cutlery and cups, more dials
Acmetm death ray, three bags of ice
Collecting Bird Farts for Dummies
First you need a bottle with a lid, and quick hands. Next, place the open end of the bottle near the bird’s bum, and collect the fart; then put the lid on quickly. Finally, label the contents: the name of the bird (Ptarmigan, Long-tailed Tit, Little Green Bee-eater); the date and time. Do not be concerned about the dignity of the bird. The bird will soon forget, its brain is so small that it can barely remember its own name, let alone the early worm it had for breakfast. Birds have no historical memory, otherwise they’d celebrate the anniversary of the first bird to stop being a dinosaur. People may think you’re peculiar, collecting bird farts, but just tell them, “There are people who like red doors.” And that should shut them up for a while.
Catman
The first superhero
was Catman.
He was half-cat, half-man.
Leaping tall sofas
in a single pounce
and spitting atomic furballs,
he fought crime
when he wasn’t licking
himself or sleeping.
They built a Cat Signal
for when they needed help,
shone it against the clouds
hoping Catman would see it
and come to their aid.
It was ignored.
At the Temporal Café
At the Temporal Café each table has a sunset view, and time stands still for you at that particular point of evening when skylarks drink in the last remnants of sunshine, and your food arrives before you order it, before you have a chance to send it back.
At the Temporal Café you can revisit the past, so you can hang out with friends you haven’t seen in years, parents who’re passed away, relive days of triumph, when it was all up to you and you came through.
You can experience again that kiss that lingered on.
At the Temporal Café you can introduce your new boyfriend or girlfriend to people no longer around, and they’ll say, “She seems a bit tall”, or, “He talks a lot, don’t ya think?” but they’ll like your new friend, nonetheless, and be happy for you.
At the Temporal Café there is no closure, just the promise of one, and as you leave, the people you met there fade into ghosts.
Alien Spaceship
I stepped onto an alien spaceship,
the smooth surfaces, the walls
seeming never to end,
glowing like fireflies.
I stepped onto an alien spaceship,
the signs in an unfamiliar language
next to images that could mean
food, quantum reactor, or toilet.
I stepped onto an alien spaceship,
found a window in one wall
and saw thousands like me,
terrified, looking for a way out.
Beautiful with Want
Nine Poems by Sandra Kasturi
Rampion
A young girl is like nothing
so much as a lettuce;
new, mouthwateringly crisp.
Your skin, so pale it’s almost green—
that’s why Mother has locked you up,
so suns and sons can do no damage.
Her hands wind in your hair
each morning up the tower,
its vertical path pointing heavenward.
She reads you fairy tales in one incessant moan
of strange vowel combinations. She never translates them.
And then she is gone.
You are left alone again
with the weight of your hair
a security blanket, a shroud.
One night you pry open the cupboard
where her indecipherable books are kept.
You don’t even know what writing is.
But there are images in strange colors of beings
with straight bodies like yours, unseamed faces.
You touch your oval cheek. Imagine
it is mirrored on the page.
Her rage at your betrayal is a thing of legend, of myth.
She is the towering fury, shredding every story
into pieces smaller than your fingernails.
Then she’s leaping out the window
at the end of your braid, the weight of her
nearly breaking your neck.
Later, you lay fragments of fairy tales on your skin,
paler than the pages. Water runs from your eyes
and your chest winds as tight as Swiss clockwork.
You take your sharpest tool, a soft gold dinner fork
to your hair, but the white-blonde strands just coil
about your feet like fat, malcontented serpents.
One night, after weeks of giddy solitude,
down to your last sup and last cup—
a new voice at the base of the tower.
It is a being like you, but larger, its skin darker,
the sounds it makes, deeper. He climbs up your hair,
just like Mother. His touch, you learn later, rougher.
He watches you and speaks. Strange noises, his voice hard
with consonants. You listen for her voice,
but it is gone from your head.
You put your hand over his open mouth,
feel the ignition of warm breath on your palm.
Your hand moves from his mouth to the iron at his belt.
>
The knife is sharp and cuts your finger with joy.
You draw a curl from your temple
across its edge, pallor floating free to the floor.
You run to the window. Weightless.
Invisible Train
The steam train chuffs through the night,
ghosting over rails made gleaming
by the alien light of distant stars,
the moon’s round paleness.
The specters of cattle low in the rattling cars,
their sounds too faint to be heard
by anyone except perhaps other spirits,
passengers of cars crashed long ago.
Ghosts can no longer have collisions—
their interactions in this world
fraught with molecular dissonance,
they loiter at crossroads, railway crossings.
Unseen hands pick up invisible hymnals
in the chilly churches that dot the towns
along train lines clitter-clattering
their way over the turning world.
The steam train pauses in each place,
rests its length as ethereal passengers
embark and disembark: cattle and coal,
children, soldiers back from emptied wars;
Undelivered packages in faded paper,
fading even further into spectral antiquity,
steamer trunks filled with bodies or books,
husbands, wives, parakeets and prams—
All traveling anywhere and nowhere,
stopping to sing in ghostly choirs,
grazing on grass long gone into the otherworld,
resending lost telegrams, rekindling ashes.
The infinite train hums on its rails,
clings to the earth, carrying with it
the longing dead, their yearning eyes—
a silvered rotoscope flash, unseen, gone.
Moon & Muchness
My moonsicle sour-candy-pocked moon!
I have licked and loved you to a dim luster,
the hollow-smooth swell of an orchestral bassoon,
a worthy glow that can only be mustered
by the administrations of my spectral
tongue. Let us lap up the song-elevated
spheres! —the phases and phrases of their kestrel
migrations, the meandering paths of crenellated
stars. Let us tower and fall to crumbled-
cake battlements, forge to life from god-dusted bellows,
and spoon-feed the sun in all his pie-humbled
runcible wit — let us be beam-struck bedfellows.
We can swallow the universe in its entirety,
its star-spackled, moon-freckled boundless absurdity.
Big Bee Story
I have a bee in my shoe, its buzzing
erratically loud down by my heel,
its plush body increasingly fuzzing
against my sock, its yellow-striped keel
clearly unmoored, or perhaps lost at sea,
a sort of dirigibly-fat, apian
ghost ship, damned for whatever sins bees
commit, a veritable Flying Dutchman,
a bumbleship, doomed to sail far from hive
and home, mysteriously pulled into orbit
around my ankle, where it now thrives
in its existence, its bee-busy gambit,
just as our planets elliptically do—
perhaps the sun grows weary of us, too.
The Medusa Quintet
(i)
Was I daydreaming by the seaside
when the gods gave my sisters everything,
gave them the gift of forever?
I know you worried, mother.
That night you pressed my face into warm clay.
“It’s a life mask,” you said. We hang it
on the wall next to the Blue Willow plates
from your grandmother. I notice you leave
room to hang something else. Me.
My death mask. One or the other.
My sisters snicker behind
their perfect immortal hands.
(ii)
It’s Tuesday
and I’ve angered the goddess.
She tears me in two
and stitches me back up.
The new me, hair writhing
and a face to stop a bus.
My sisters say I don’t look any different.
They go back to their mirrors.
(iii)
I’m not allowed out after the unfortunate
incident with the neighbors.
There’s mother again, afraid for my life,
our lives. If only I could be married off
to some handicapped princeling,
someone safe. Poor blind Oedipus.
He would have been perfect.
(iv)
News has arrived from the Oracle.
A hero with winged feet en route,
his face bright as a sword.
The sisters are aghast, can’t believe
anyone would have me.
But in my own stories,
I’m the desired one, the youngest princess,
the one who breaks the spell, stops
the wolf, saves everyone.
(v)
Mother readies my dowry;
the snakes braid themselves
into an elaborate headdress.
I am beautiful with want.
A Curse for Alice
To bed, to bed with your beautiful head,
the small of your back, the fall of your hair;
let the lull of the stars and the lead
foot of sleep, iron the creases in your fair-
weather face, your twirling carnival heart.
The stars! The stars, big and Van Gogh round,
spinning like teacups at the Queen of Tarts
Ball, where cards and angels are thrown to the ground.
Let even your swords fall or be swallowed
by themselves, if sword-swallowers remain
unavailable. Let your candle-tallowed
fortunes go to smoke in spiraling refrain.
Off with your head, off with your beautiful beauty,
your darling-drained, echoing, star-hollowed empty.
Wild Boars in Berlin
Thousands of wild, tusked ancestors of domestic pigs have discovered the charms of urban living in Germany’s capital city. Some humans are happy to coexist, while others see the boars as a pest that should be eliminated.
“In Berlin’s Boar War, Some Side With the Hogs,” by Marcus Walker, Wall Street Journal, 12/16/2008
dapplesides whiskersnout wild in the flower
shop five fat little boarlets running rampant
through the hybrid teas Double Delight
and fragrant Floribunda Sexy Rexy scattering pink petals as sows squeal
bristleback daddyboars grunt toughguy
tones lumbering lost into Alexanderplatz
grinding up garden laburnum and laurel tabloids telling of pigs needing police
protection against lean hunters licensed
to target flank and hock into sniperscope
stalemate against enviropig enthusiasts tusked ancestor of Babe Wilbur Hen-Wen
sheepshifters spelling champions oracular
prognosticators famous literary personages
in pigform overshadowed now by vigorous
tiptapping of unruly hooves on pavement
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br /> Circe-called four-footed wriggling
rooting reversing that natural order
of pigs vs. people freeing fenced farm
brethren of bacon porkchop hambone fears
in an untamed unashamed riotous rout
through the streaming streets of ballyhooed boar-ridden Berlin.
Bluebeard’s Grandmother
If you must marry at all, my dear,
marry the handsome, the honey-tongued,
the man of wealth, of dead-bolted
double-locked rooms; marry the tiger,
the wolf in the suitor-suit, the giver
of unblemished keys, of pearlescent
pure eggs into your hands,
so clean, so pretty! Don’t you worry,
my dear. My grandson will put red
onto those cheeks.
Talking with the Dead
There is no answer, no solace from the dead;
Your teeming anguish is nothing to them
But the roar and roil of earthly dreads
That carry the memory-ticks of blame,
The bombs of rage and need. The dead deny
These arrows, deflect them back toward you;
Pale presences that refuse your outcries,
Your farewells, turn away from every new
Gash their visitations open up. But hush
Yourself to bed — lay down between the sheets
Of your thready sorrow; let the tireless push
And pulse of sleep wash you clear of such defeats.
Though the dead may still not answer you in dreams,
Their manifest will be naught but sighs and seems.
One Nation Under Gods
Jerome Stueart
On every channel, the nightly news tracked Lady Liberty as she walked whisper soft across America, in case you wanted to see her yourself. She didn’t always walk through Kentucky. She tried to cover every state of the country in a year. So if you were poor or tired or the huddled masses, you could look up from the street and see her gray body passing overhead, see her torch light up your face and find yourself taken up in her skirts as she passed. It was the best thing for the poor, they said.