Tell

Soraya Peerbaye

• Publisher: Brick Books
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781771315555
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

A collection of poems partially based on the Reena Virk murder case. Virk was an Asian adolescent whose drowned body was found in the Gorge Waterway in a Victoria, BC suburb, in 1997. Some of the poems use found material from court transcripts. The murder made international headlines due to the viciousness employed by Virk's assailants: seven girls and one boy between the ages of 13 and 16, five of whom were white. The poems examine in part the poet's remembrances of girlhood, the unease of adolescence, and the circumstances that enable some to pass through adolescence unhurt.

The landscape without her

What’s more important? The beginning

or the end? That they went

or that they returned? And what is over?

– Tracy K. Smith

R. v. Kelly Marie Ellard (2005)

(Appealed; conviction restored in 2009)

Tillicum Bridge

On the underside of Tillicum

I turn my back to the water

lace fingers through chain-link

to look at stone

where they found

fire-altered rock, ash and charcoal . . .

shell remains from oysters,

mussels, clams and crabs . . .

(a fence around natural stone

as though stone might turn feral)

Four thousand years old

. . . the bones of fish, deer and seals . . .

fragments left

from the making of stone tools . . .

Middens, tells, the archaeologist said

(tell, a word from Arabic, from Hebrew

a site that holds evidence

of successive human occupation

to untell, to uncover the layers

of this evidence

to retell, to try to restore the site

to its original state)

. . . herring, salmon, a variety of birds . . .

Each site an event

destroyed by the process

through which we read it

broken strata

ruined interrelation of artifacts

site loss

Still we read

red, oxidized earth

scorched rock, fire-cracked rock

the wrecking-ball wisdom of archaeology

things can only be uncovered

once

Admission of Facts

And lastly,

that the identity, continuity and integrity of the body of Reena Virk are admitted for all purposes.

Craigflower Bridge

Get up.

A bridge is wood trestle below, metal

above; a guardrail

of teal-green lattice. Hennaed patches of rust.

“I need help. I need help. I need help.”

A bridge is a distance, measured in steps, in pools

of lamplight, the time it takes to cross.

In breaths. – How far did you watch her go?

– Halfway across, to where the light spreads out.

Headlights of passing cars, bright beads on a wire

that curves into darkness: Highway 1A, Gorge Road.

– Did you observe her gait as she crossed?

I thought of the gaits of Indian dance,

the little I learned, carrying

my clumsiness far into adulthood:

elephant, peacock, deer. – She was

staggering, light-headed.

A bridge is held up by belief that you will go

over to the other shore

to someone who wants you, to somewhere

safe.

Lovely, alive

At a distance, it could be

dancing,

the way I danced,

flinging my limbs out

for the tug of rib cage, the snag

at centre. Could be drunkenness, my hand

on an oak banister in a Forest Hill home, boozy

sashay of crushed velvet at my knees. My friend’s face

hazy, laughing. Lovely. Clove cigarettes

alive with tangerine coils and crackles, each drag

leaving cinnamon on our tongues.

Could be the rocking

of subway cars, the engined tow. Morning, I watched

her eyes, the fast, jittery movement of her gaze,

gemmed, blue-green, as signs and stations

veered away from us.

I want to tell you about being sixteen, seventeen,

travelling with my dad to an island

off the coast of Venezuela,

diving coral reefs,

fish blossoming in my hand,

angel, damsel, butterfly.

Boom of breath against eardrum.

Hollow pop and pennywhistle of my father’s

underwater camera, a sound

so wild it was far and interior at once.

I held onto the slides for a long time. Never showed them

to anyone.

Glass-masked, ribbed tube between lips and gums,

finned feet, I was not grace. But I could

live with it, the argument

with a lesser gravity, the dangle

of arms and legs,

gawky, undulant, tangled in sunlight.

2323...

Table of contents

• Trials
• Search
• À pleine gorge
• Who you were
• Tell
• The landscape without her
• Notice to the reader
• Notes
• Acknowledgements