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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Elmslie, Susan, author

Museum of kindness / Susan Elmslie.

Poems.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

isbn 978-1-77131-467-1 (softcover).—isbn 978-1-77131-469-5 (pdf).—

isbn 978-1-77131-468-8 (epub)

I. Title.

ps8559.l62m87 2017 c811’.54 c2017-902793-x

c2017-902794-8

We acknowledge the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.

The author photo was taken by Wes Folkerth.

The cover image is “Simon-Geai-Bleu” by René Bolduc, used by his kind permission.

Brick Books

431 Boler Road, Box 20081

London, Ontario n6k 4g6

www.brickbooks.ca

Contents

Museum of Kindness

Material

Box

Crossing Over

The Tenants

To Mark the Day I Saw I Could Slip This Skin

Poetry

Convalescent

Genre

Faith Is a Suitcase

Legacy

A Poet Has Nine Knives

But the mob all calls me “Swingin’-Door Susie”

Material

Trigger Warning

School Shooting

•

Unteachable Moment

Now you can turn your personal gear into an on-the-go bullet-proof shield

Trigger Warning

There is never just one trauma, the therapist says

Teaching Philosophy, Revised

In Retrospect

Conventions

Blooms for Anastasia

The Worst

Threshold

Event Horizon

In Praise of Hospital Cafeterias

Adventures in Microgravity

Nightmare

Strict Bed Rest

Fury to Bed Rest

Gift Horse

New Father’s Guidebook, A–Z

My Daughter, Crying Herself to Sleep

I wanted to watch my own caesarean and see you born

Threshold

Ativan

Descent

Miracle

After the diagnosis I went to the pool to ease into cold fact

Broken Baby Blues

Happy Blues

Going Under

First Outing with Adaptive Stroller

At the Ophthalmologist’s

Grammar of a Sleep Disorder

For Magnus, at Seven

After Meeting with the School Psychologist

Quick

Going Under II

Alive

Grass

Museum of Kindness

My First Daughter

Charles Darwin on His Namesake, Charles Waring Darwin

Mark Twain, December 25, 1909, on the Death of His Daughter Jean, Who Drowned in a Bathtub During a Seizure

Icarus, in Therapy

Eve, in the Garden

Pandora @ Snoops Anon.

Babysat by Sylvia Plath

Glenn Gould’s Chair

Cry

Sponge, on a shelf beside the bath

Violet

Sex at Thirty-Eight

Happy New Ear

Brisking about the Life

Museum of Kindness

Idyll

Rosary

Bonne Continuation

Acknowledgements and Notes

About Susan

Box

Big enough for me to crawl into. It might’ve held

a fake Christmas tree, neighbour’s tv or holiday

imperishables from the Sally Ann.

I was ten, making a house in the living room.

Cut out a window, opened a door. “Look at my box,”

I called to my mother, and her friend put down his drink,

chided, half-slurred, “Don’t say that,” in a tone

that begged me to ask why. “Don’t say

that,” he said again. And in the pause

while he raised his glass in slow-mo and drank,

eyeing me, I sat back on my heels and glimpsed

the fourth wall, a spare self watching a trashy play.

“Cut it out,” my mother said, “she’s just a kid,” swatting

the wasp after the sting. “I’m just a fucking drunk,” his line.

Everything doubled, obscene, sublime—

No safety in words, then. And more room.

Crossing Over

I drove my ten-speed to the dingy salon,

drawn by the sign: Special! $10 Perm!

I wanted: loose,

moussed, wavy-on-the-way-to-

corkscrew. Body, movement. To be reborn.

I’d torn out an ad for Tampax—a blonde,

tanned, wearing tennis whites, curls buoyant

and backlit as she lunged close to the net.

No sweat. Eyes on the ball.

The small room was faded pink.

Sink, cracked. The hairdresser, named Marlene

or Noreen—I didn’t catch it—spilled solution

down my neck. Fumes stoned me. Ruined my

I’m on a sea food diet: I see food, I eat it T-shirt.

“There it is, hon” she said, squinting,

holding the mirror,

a black-ringed halo, behind my head.

“Only thirteen?”

Maureen probed (rankled or pleased?).

In my palm she planted rosary beads.

The Tenants

“You should have kicked them out when he put Ajax

on her steak.” Betty weighing in,

Betty who has mynah birds and listens to talk

radio all day, drone of male voices colourless as gin.

“And her pregnant.”

“You’re not so hot yourself!” Beautiful the mynah squawks

from her cage in the dining room.

An ambulance had come and taken Mrs. Q.

No siren. She was home within a week.

“Should have kicked them out then!”

Betty shushes herself dramatically; her finger,

a furious metronome, blurs pursed lips.

“And to torch your basement

for the insurance on his things!”

“Will Daddy come back

now that we don’t have a house?” my brother whines.

Mother isn’t talking,

there’s a smouldering ring

where her face should be

as she digs in the garbage bag of donated clothes

to find a sweater for my brother. I cling

to my house-coat because I wore it on the curb

watching firemen squelch the flames.

Beautiful shrieks in her cage.

Days and weeks I watch men rebuild our house

from my perch on Betty’s couch.

Mom must be in court or conked out on tranqs. “Shush—”

Betty hushes the birds and the news spews like ash

from the radio on her fridge. No one else speaks.

At night, we doze on the pull-out in Betty’s basement

where two full suits of armour keep watch by the bar.

To Mark the Day I Saw I Could Slip This Skin

for Billy

“That’s impossible,” I sneered at my brother, one

Saturday spent bantering in front of the tv.

The remark that sparked such incredulity in me

is lost to the darning pile of memory,

along with my sundry worn-out resentments from

growing up the scrawny four-eyed baby of the family.

Though I do clearly remember his reply,

sing-song, prepackaged: “Nothing’s impossible,”

in a tone somewhere between Mom’s pep talk

and the mischief-nicked baritone of Jack Palance

hosting Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

I had to bite:

“Some things are. A snake driving a car.”

I thought I had him, but he didn’t skip a beat,

he pointed at the tv, which was showing a cartoon.

And without a thread of triumph, impossibly cool,

he said, “Look,” just as a snake hopped into a car,

coiled about the steering wheel, and sped out of sight.

Convalescent

I think: if I am dying then I will want to go to the beach.

Someone will prop me on a chaise longue

(I even like hearing the words chaise longue)

under a canvas umbrella snapping like rigging in the wind,

facing the ocean, of course. I’ll drink Evian

(liquid yoga, my friend calls it) from a glass

with a bendy straw. I see a hand,

not my own, supporting that glass

and another adjusting the pillow behind my head.

Then my friend begins to slice me an Alabama peach.

What does this mean? I’m sure it’s neurotic

to devour convalescence as a genre.

It’s not so bad, my friend says: It means

you’re always getting better.

Means you’re already past the worst.