Not One of These Poems Is About You

Teva Harrison

• Publisher: Ambrosia
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781487006914
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Literature

From Teva Harrison, the award-winning author and illustrator of In-Between Days, comes a powerful work of poetry and art in which she continues to explore what it means to live with metastatic breast cancer.

In this remarkable, frank, and gut-wrenching mix of words and images, Teva continues on her journey, grappling with what it means to live with metastatic breast cancer. She plunges deep into her inner world, shadowing the progression of the disease. Reality takes on sharp edges: the swell of cancer and its retreat with chemo. Her inner corporeal reality versus her outer manifestation of health, vitality, and femininity. Holding fast to the great love of her life, while preparing to leave him behind. Contemplating who she was before cancer, and who she is now.

Starkly honest and wholly profound, Not One of These Poems Is About You distills life to its essence. Teva Harrison continues to gift the world with her clear-eyed insight and her open heart.

Dream, Dreamer

Bad sleep again.

Dreams so powerful that I bolt

upright in bed,

but they dissipate immediately.

Why can’t they linger?

A tiny gift of the absurd

edifying to make

the uneven rest bearable,

desirable, even.

Or are the dreams so awful

that my subconscious

is doing me a favour by

rendering them null?

Still, like most things,

I’d rather know.

For too long, now, medication

has changed the architecture of my sleep.

Dreams moved out of order.

Instead of burbling to the surface

at the end, they play out in the dark.

These new meds, though,

they’ve restored my body’s

natural sleep cycle.

Every night, I twitch

awake

from a story or a memory.

I’ve lost the ability

to differentiate.

Sure that it

will return

if I just let it,

I stare into the receding

forms as they fade,

like fog burning off in bright sun.

The adventures I had.

The fantastic lands

that I flew to, sweeping

over forested mountains.

I’d give anything to

remember my dreams

like I used to in my childhood.

If only, I could still tell my mom

the whole story over breakfast,

maybe bore her to death

with every detail.

These new drugs make me sleep.

Deeply, and for a very long time.

Remembering my dreams

would lengthen my experience

of the day,

filling half with adventure

or absurdity.

They might balance

the time I spend

in the hospital or in pain,

or both.

Of course, the dreams could

simply mirror my days,

but I have more faith

in their creativity.

I’m certain

that I can slough off my body’s

limitations in sleep.

That I can fly and find

my way back to the boundlessness

of my childhoo...

Table of contents

• iPraise for Teva Harrison and Not One of These Poems Is About You
• ivAlso by Teva Harrison
• viiLespwa fe viv = Hope makes life
• Ode to the Pacific Ocean
• A Pocketful of Stones
• When I Become You
• 13Shiver Me
• Feathering the Nest
• Sunburned & Peeling
• Stasis
• The Things I Do to Keep Cancer on the Down-Low
• Falling, Without You
• Maybe I’m Just Tired
• Up to the Edge
• Intimacy
• Brittle Air/Electricity
• The Points We Turn On
• Voice
• Self-deception
• Edges
• Closer
• (s)pacing
• Shallow Breathing
• Sustenance Song
• Closer and Closer
• Dream, Dreamer
• Wrecking Ball
• I’m Not Her
• Morning, Unbroken
• Shifting Shadows
• Deliver the Day
• Morning (I Am)
• Teva Harrison (1976–2019) was an author and visual artist. She wrote and illustrated the critically acclaimed graphic memoir In-Between Days, which was the winner of the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Nonfiction, a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Joe Shuster Award for Cartoonist or Auteur, and was a Globe and Mail, National Post, Kobo, and Quill & Quire Book of the Year. Forty-five works from In-Between Days have been exhibited in a solo show at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Teva was Principal Illustrator for the National Film Board/National Theatre production of playwright Jordan Tannahill’s Draw Me Close: A Memoir, a virtual reality theatrical experience blending live theatre and virtual reality technology.