My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems

Amber Dawn

• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781551527819
• eBook ISBN: 9781551527949
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

STREGHERIA INSTRUCTIONAL #1

For a spell I directed my fear at the waning moon. She’s the oldest woman

around and she knows to flinch left from a punch.

Do women learn how to take punches from the moon?

Our crises are as recurrent as the lunar cycle, true

though far less visible than a halo.

For the fuck you moon spell I allowed myself

thirteen and a half nights each month to tell

the waning moon fuck it

fuck this fuck me fuck him fuck him

fuck her fuck pain fuck poor decisions

fuck indecision fuck power fuck blame

fuck forgiveness fuck powerlessness fuck

fuck anger fuck pretending not to be angry

fuck silence fuck lateral violence fuck

fuck this noise

fuck this noise

fuck this noise

and fuck him

and fuck

this noise

and fuck

me

When the moon disappeared, I took a breath.

Reset. Reflect.

The new moon is a time to ask for guidance.

FOUNTAINHEAD

Sure, I’ve tossed three pennies over my left shoulder into Trevi

Fountain in Rome, but the mermaid fountain in Piazza Sannazaro

Napoli is my favourite. Napoli is a city of mermaids. I lost count

of mermaids. Two tailed and bathing in cracked frescoes. Marble

reliefs carved into arched doorways. Mermaid faces on old coins.

I almost bought myself a Tears of Parthenope necklace. A gold

chain hung with two blue teardrop shaped Swarovski crystals.

Parthenope and her sisters swam (or flew, myth shows sirens as half

bird or half fish. Either femme beast works) to Ulysses’s ship to curse

him with their song, but Ulysses tied himself to the mast, stopped

his ears with wax and withstood. The entire crew of men survived

simply by not listening, so the story goes and goes. The defeated

mermaids wept at their failure and salt water filled the Bay of Naples.

Parthenope died from the shame and was swept ashore. Her blonde hair

turned to sand and her body, stone. A beach I myself have walked along.

I audibly sobbed before the gorgeous baroque blood of Artemisia

Gentileschi’s famous Judith Slaying Holofernes, on permanent

display at the Uffizi. A man my father’s age asked me nine

times to leave the gallery with him. One of the only Italian

phrases I know so well that my subconscious has spoken it

back to me in dreams is lasciami stare. It means leave me alone.

I drank too much at the strip club in Pescara, Abruzzo as a topless dancer

listed the times homophobia nearly killed her. I understood her perfectly

when she asked what Canada is like. Is there libertà per lesbi in Canada?

I furiously recorded the words that I misunderstood in a notebook

as if I might one day retroactively follow meaning. I couldn’t call

upon language fast enough to console her in real time. I couldn’t say

fuck this shit, I’m so sorry or chin up, tits out, you know or you

deserve better, femme. I’ve come to associate speaking half a language

or less than half, a tender handful of comprehension, with being

a survivor of sexual violence. My body has breath and spasm where it

should have words. My body can picture ease and desire, but is forever

learning how to say what it wants. I spent a humble lifetime looking for

others who too labour to live inside their skin My kink is to loudly love those

who’ve been told to keep quiet. Erotic boom. I want outlaster love. Against-

all-odds love. I, finally, want myself, and I want slick fluency in this desire.

While in Napoli I wrongly read a museum label to say that Parthenope

wished to marry Circe the sorceress. I read queer determination, and imagine

how that ancestral beach might feel if my mistranslation was an origin story.

Imagine if the grounds we walk were built from queer love? What song

would our queer scion sing six thousand years from now? What shape

would story take? If our bodies were safe and fluid loose, waxy and loud

and fluent in a madrelingua, in a kin spit, in the looped vernaculars

we have long deserved, then imagine what words we’d know so well

that even our subconscious could speak this love back to us in a dream.

BOOTHEEL

I launched my memoir in a classroom at the University of British Columbia

not the creative writing classroom where my perfect bound thesis is shelved.

It was a glass walled hall where human relationships are studied.

The tenured professor was there, seated in the back row beside his TA.

It was late March and raining. The coffee urn and free pastries made me

think of AA meetings. I told the audience the earliest missing women’s

posters appeared in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in 1998. I told them

that it was a tr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: Speak Your Truth
• The Stopped Clock
• Hollywood Ending
• An Apple, or Haunted
• How Hard Feels
• Stregheria Instructional #1
• Fountainhead
• Bootheel
• Outsider Artist
• Tragic Interview
• Stregheria Instructional #2
• Dear IncorrectName
• Touch ≠ Touch Screen
• The Ringing Bell
• Acknowledgments