Transmitter and Receiver

Raoul Fernandes

• Publisher: Nightwood Editions
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780889713093
• eBook ISBN: 9780889710467
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Debut talent Raoul Fernandes’s first offering is Transmitter and Receiver, a masterful and carefully depicted exploration of one’s relationships with oneself, friends, memories, strangers and technology.

The three parts of this collection are variations building on a theme—at times lonely, sometimes adoring, but always honest. Wider areas of contemplation—the difficulty of communication, the ever-changing symbolism of language and the nature of human interaction in the age of machines—are explored through colloquial scenes of the everyday: someone eats a burger in a car parked by the river (“Grand Theft Auto: Dead Pixels”), a song plays on the radio as a man contemplates suicide (“Car Game”), and a janitor works silently once everyone else has gone (“After Hours at the Centre For Dialogue”).

Forthright and effortlessly lyrical, Fernandes builds each poem out of candor and insight, an addictive mix that reads like a favorite story and glitters with concealed meaning. Rather than drawing lines between isolation and connection, past and present, metaphor and reality, Transmitter and Receiver offers loneliness and longing hand-in-hand with affection and understanding: “The last assembly instruction is always you reading this. A machine / that rarely functions, but could never without you.”

Transmitter and Receiver

Copyright © Raoul Fernandes, 2015

all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, [email protected].

Nightwood Editions

P.O. Box 1779

Gibsons, BC v0n 1v0

Canada

www.nightwoodeditions.com

typography & design: Carleton Wilson

Nightwood Editions acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publisher’s Tax Credit.

This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled, ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free and printed with vegetable-based dyes.

Printed and bound in Canada.

library and archives canada cataloguing in publication

Fernandes, Raoul, 1978-, author

Transmitter and receiver : poems / by Raoul Fernandes.

Poems.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-0-88971-309-3 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-0-88971-046-7 (html)

I. Title.

PS8611.E749T73 2015 C811’.6 C2015-901128-0

C2015-901129-9

For Megan

By Way of Explanation

You have this thing you can only explain

by driving me out to the port at night

to watch the towering cranes moving containers

from ship to train. Or we go skipping stones

across the mirror of the lake, a ghost ship

in a bottle of blue Bombay gin by your side.

I have this thing I can only explain to you

by showing you a pile of computer hardware

chucked into the ravine. We hike down there

and blackberry vines grab our clothes as if to say,

Stop, wait, I want to tell you something too.

You have an old photograph you keep in your

bedside drawer. I have this song I learned

on my guitar. By way of clarification, you send

me a YouTube video of a tornado filmed up close

from a parked car. Or a live-stream from a public

camera whose view is obscured by red leaves.

I cut you a key to this room, this door.

There’s this thing. A dictionary being consumed

by fire. The two of us standing in front of a Rothko

until time starts again. A mixtape that is primarily

about the clicks and hums between songs. What if

we walk there instead of driving? What if we just drive,

without a destination? There’s this thing I’ve always

wanted to talk about with someone. Now

with you here, with you listening, with all

the antennae raised, I no longer have to.

The Goodnight Skirt

Permission to use that snowball

you’ve been keeping in the freezer

since 1998. For a poem? she asks.

What else? I say. I’ll trade you, she says

for that thing your mom said

at the park. What was it?

“God, that mallard’s being a real douchebag”?

Yes, that one. Deal, I say. Okay, how about

the Korean boy who walks past

our house late at night, singing

“Moon River”? Oh, you can use that, I say,

I wouldn’t even know what

to do with it. But there is something else.

I’ve been wanting to write about

the black skirt we’ve been using to cover

the lovebird’s cage. The goodnight skirt.

In exchange, I’ll let you have

our drunken mailman, the tailless tabby,

and I’ll throw in the broken grandfather clock

we found in the forest. One more, she says.

Last night, I say. The whole night.

She considers for a while, then,

Okay, that’s fair. But I really had something going

with that lovebird. All right, I say, write it

anyway. If it’s more beautiful than mine,

it’s yours.

Bioluminescence

Walking through the sensor gate at the public library

after a heavy reading, you fear the alarm

will go off from what is held in your mind.

You reassure yourself with the thought that no matter

how fuzzy it gets in the wire-tangled AV room,

you are still lunch, with possible leftovers,

for that wolf and her cubs. You have to imagine

the wolf and her cubs, obviously, but it helps.

When it comes down to it, it’s completely dark

just a few millimetres beneath the skin, no matter

how real the flickers on your nerve endings feel,

what with this strong coffee, this pulsing sky. You remind

yourself deep-sea life forms have...

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