MÉIRA COOK has published three previous poetry collections with Brick Books. Her poetry has won first place in the CBC Literary Awards, and a poem from this collection won the inaugural Walrus Poetry Prize. Her first novel, The House on Sugarbush Road, won the McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year Award. Her second novel, Nightwatching, will be published in May 2015. She lives, writes, and talks to herself in Winnipeg.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Monologue Dogs is a series of contemporary dramatic monologues. Every “voice” has its own imagined rhythm and nuances of poetic speech that are as vibrant, wayward, mournful, errant, or unruly as the characters who speak. Setting the lyric against street argot, archaic language against deflating or ironic feints, metaphors against declarative sentences, the elegiac against the ribald, classical or literary allusions against anachronistic references, these monologues reflect our own disordered subjectivities. In the words of Molly Peacock: “Read her for a fresh, contemporary and knowing sensibility—not to mention an unforgettable sense of humour.”

THE ALMOST-BOY

Liar! yelled God. But Geppetto was the kind of father

who liked to knock things into place. First

was a grin on his terrible face (he held it there

with nails, he held it there with resolution).

The second was Mr. Bones, that loose-

hinged, cartilage-jawed whatsit.

Rubbing him raw from inside his loose death.

(He took out his ball-peen Forever and hammered out

a boy.) Which was also the third thing, the boy,

wailing like a ghost in the wailing season.

Stop! begged Geppetto. But the boy

had set himself off like a car alarm

beneath the flight paths of magnetic geese.

Ah, my son, my son! God had Geppetto by the neck,

and was shaking him out

by the folds of his argument.

The fourth thing was lies, the fifth what lies

half-buried. Some damn thigh bone

of a bleached raggedy story. The sort of thing

that fathers whistle up, spitting in their palms

and knocking on wood.

The last thing, and the one after that,

was crookedness.

The difference between pain, and pain

without explanation. A limp creature

jerking between crossed sticks.

They were trying to quicken the almost-boy,

God in his lab coat and Geppetto in his wings.

But he kept getting tangled in the mesh

of cat flaps and cradles and strings.

And they all lived, says Jacob Grimm . . .

Here’s how it begins. My sister Lotte

knows the stories.

My brother Wilhelm writes them down.

Our mother yanks open the forest

and throws us all inside.

The birds have eaten the bread crumbs,

cries Lotte. And the cats have eaten

the birds. (The wolves the cats, says Wilhelm,

the axe the wolves.) In the end,

not even the Angel of Death can stomach

such hunger. Here’s how it goes. The stories

circle us and begin to wail.

We are just dreams, they say. If you die

we will never be born. One by one, the stories

step forward and offer their names.

Han-sel, says one. Gre-tel, says another.

Ah, that is butter. Ah, that is honey

on warm bread, sighs Lotte, licking her fingers,

and Wilhelm is already straddling the one

called Rumpelstiltskin. Around us,

the stories kneel down on all fours.

The hunger to be borne is an animal

offering its haunch for the mad dash

through the jaws of enough enough

enough. Here’s how it begins

again. My brother, my sister, look back

at me with keyhole looks. Already

they’re growing smaller, red helium

memories tied with string. Or how

time flows both ways

when the river thaws. Spring is still

a palindrome here in the Hanau valley.

Dear Lotte, Dear Wilhelm, once upon a time

every story was the story

of our mother’s starvation. The wild

wild hunger that stalked her as she followed

her stiff white breath into the forest,

throwing us, like grains of salt, over her shoulder.

For luck, for love. For ever,

if only we’d known what ever was for.

Bone Shop