Copyright © 2022 Anne-Marie Turza
Published in Canada in 2022 and the USA in 2022 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
www.houseofanansi.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Fugue with bedbug : poems / Anne-Marie Turza.
Names: Turza, Anne-Marie, 1976- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210375620 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210375639 | ISBN 9781487010720 (softcover) |
ISBN 9781487010737 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8639.U79 F84 2022 | DDC C811/.6—dc23
Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk
Text design and typesetting: Laura Brady
House of Anansi Press respectfully acknowledges that the land on which we operate is the Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee. It is also the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit.
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.
A Fallen Leaf Covered the Whole of a House
The house was a bungalow size.
And the leaf, a leaf
found in drifts every year, near a tree.
We stood at a window: and could see nothing.
Not a guess or a glimmer.
We love the dark. It has heard our voice
and our supplications. We wish. We wish
to hurt no one. We play piano
very poorly. In the key of type O negative,
blood anyone could marry
to never again be ill.
What.
We go to the what and touch it,
only in thought: like this.
We are doing this all our lives, one of us says.
It sounds in our heads like good piano sometimes.
One of us is a binary number.
And one of us is fog.
And one of us is a nurse.
We are only ourselves.
There are distinct possibilities.
We work the pedals with whatever limbs
we have. We have failed so far
at everything. Shh.
We offer marmalade to one of us
who doesn’t know what that is.
And we eat it with a little salt in the dark house.
We do not need rescuing.
What Is This? The Futureworld?
Same as the afterworld? Adventitious breathing sounds
in both directions. The mind is an interrobang, a zip-filed
mark of kick. Or a distant crackle, actually a chip bag. Off-
target, unfurnished with an air bridge. But this isn’t me, I’m not this
venturesome. What is nothingness? I hope to persist somehow
in a radiant 4.5-centimetre ordinary idea belonging to a not-
human future animal. Many similar impossible things are true
already: light in a laboratory twisted into a French braid; or two
quantum whatsits, aloof in space, sharing the same exact ...
