poems for a girlhood
Brick Books
COPYRIGHT © Soraya Peerbaye, 2021
COVER ART Karine Guyon, There is Light
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Title: Tell : poems for a girlhood / Soraya Peerbaye.
Names: Peerbaye, Soraya, 1971- author.
Description: Originally published: St. John’s, NL, Canada: Pedlar Press, 2015. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210123168 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210123184 | ISBN 9781771315548 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771315555 (HTML) | ISBN 9781771315562 (PDF) Classification: LCC PS8631.E395 T45 2021 | DDC C811/.6—dc23
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Brick Books wishes to thank Pedlar Press for their care in publishing the original edition and their permission to republish it in this new edition.
We also thank the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts Council for their generous support of our publishing program.
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Trials
Search
Rainfall
Tide
Silt
Current
Reena
Silt
Willow
Saanich
Admission of Facts
Washerwoman
Autopsy
À pleine gorge
Gorge Waterway
À pleine gorge
Hyoid
Slow time
Stones
Tendre la gorge
Who you were
Lagoons and lakes
Chemistry
Beauty
Nothing, nothing,
Skin
Safety
A good mother
Tremor and flare
Tell
Examination
Admission of Facts
Satellite
Shoreline Field
Craigflower Bridge, south
Craigflower Schoolhouse
Craigflower Bridge, north
Satellite (Mistrial)
Clean
Inland waters
See them say
The landscape without her
Tillicum Bridge
Admission of Facts
Craigflower Bridge
Lovely, alive
Narrows
Life in these waters
Curfew
Her throat
Chandlo
Enough
To tear with the teeth
Notice to the reader
Notes
Acknowledgements
Magnolias in bloom, each trial held in early spring.
Pink-white curve of petals like skinned knees.
Newspapers opened to her eighth grade photograph:
black curls, bronze smile, heirloom gold earring.
In the courtroom, articles of clothing suggested her.
Exhibits. Out of the pleather jacket her torso emerged;
out of her clog boots, her stance. She believed in this,
that her body could be enough. As a girl, I would have liked
to be like that, to have her daring. Still – hard to say,
if I’d have been her friend – her ardour, pungent, dangerous.
Even flowers are ranked, said the woman watching
the proceedings with me. Roses are worth more
than daisies. Lilies more than daffodils. I want
her body to stand, be its own testimony. Instead
it’s the jacket, held before the witness,
open, declarative,
while the fair-haired girl behind Plexiglas
says nothing.
To be sure of nothing
but moon waning gibbous. Her body
in the Gorge, drifting.
Dewpoint. Night wind blowing
seven kilometres per hour. That the water
would have been near 9.9° Celsius . . .
. . . That there was no rain in Victoria on November 14th, 1997,
but that
it rained several days between then and the 22nd . . .
Eight nights. To be sure of nothing
but rainfall, careful
measurements. The tenth of a millimetre. Notations
of absence. Trace, nil.
Would I have seen her?
The tide tugging her gently past
the Comfort Inn; houses, tall and gabled,
the bridge and its passersby.
This is not a hidden place.
The graze and drag of her,
clumsy, obstructive in the divided
caress of eelgrass.
No search. Eight days.
Nights,
the moon returned, made chalk tracings around her shape.
The Gorge, thick and brown
with sewage, run-off. Rainwater
carrying copper, zinc, mercury,
hydrocarbons in the storm drain. Contaminants
in the watershed.
Wood debris from decades
of sawmill and log boom operations
by the Selkirk Bridge.
. . . silt, shells, bottles, trash, eelgrass . . .
Drifts of anoxic water. Sediment, heavy, clogging
the gills of fish.
Her jeans, knotted around her ankles,
coming undone,
unbodied.
Her garments . . . saturated . . . soiled . . .
They read currents by the constellation
of their findings. A light covering of silt
in the folds of her clothing. Ribbons of eelgrass,
green on one side, silt-laden
on the other.
She could have been a girl, a boy, a fish,
whatever –
Warren said –
the night of his arrest, her body not yet found.
She sways, shifts,
a hunch the current follows.
Chagrined, it sifts the shirt,
the camisole, the effortless hair.
(Earring tangled there, gold crustacean.)
She is a slow, sunken spin, slow sweep below. Silt-
stroked eyes. Silt-stroked tongue. The inlet of her
mouth, silt-stroked teeth.
In the aerial, deep greens give way
to blues, brown
and cream of shallows.
Like the cloud-and-wind paintings we made
in Grade five, the year we studied Persia:
ink and turpentine floated on water, whorled,
before we laid the blank sheet of paper
down.
– Where the yellow tree is, there?
– Yes.
– And we’re to look below
to that small, darker object?
– Yes, mm-hm.
Quarter moon high in the sky at dawn.
The Gorge in flood tide.
Saanich, a Salish word, saline
language in the mouth: to emerge,
as from water.
. . . what a child might call
a jellyfish position,
rounded shoulders, arms and legs draping downwards
in the shallows.
. . . in a small cove, said the diver,
where there is little movement, so things
gather.
November leaves, trash, hair
snagged in the reeds.
The sluggish current turning and returning,
obsessive.