Fugue With Bedbug

Anne-Marie Turza

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781487010737
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Poetry
• Index: Literature

The much-anticipated second collection from the author of The Quiet.

Anne-Marie Turza's Fugue With Bedbug is part musical reference, part portraiture, a series of uncanny poems attending to time and mortality, an eccentric essay, and a musical score. Using the fugue form as a quiet compositional strategy, Turza argues that the mission: "in afterthought, was Jell-O, a salad of delicate intent and shimmy …"

Also by the author

The Quiet

Copyright © 2022 Anne-Marie Turza

Published in Canada in 2022 and the USA in 2022 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
www.houseofanansi.com

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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.

For P.

***

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 ...