sarah wise : poetry : on canadian dramamine

on canadian dramamine

Chopping along to the tune

Of what marimba once meant

I was conveyed aboard

Silken waves

Among the San Juan Islands

On a ferry offering

Duty-free liquor for sale

I, journaling devotedly,

Attended to my travel writing;

Adhering to low-stakes admissions for awhile,

I did well to avoid

My typical crown molding approach

Or moulding, if you prefer

(I do)

I tested out my tooth on
Japanese paper—

All premium-silky, and such—

In a B5 notebook

With six-millimeter rule

Each page numbered and dated

Luxury pointed to prestige…

And so it began again

I couldn’t help but envision

An epic narrative

Bigger than life—

With all its fogged marcasite,

Splintered particleboard,

Saturnine epoxy;

I strove instead to evoke

Gloss enamel—

White everything, if you will

As in the clapboard upbringings

Of my respective ancestors

(Imagined though they may be)

Shortly, I became

High as a homing pigeon on Gravol

Lucid-dreaming in a land of

Adjacency

Where bleating lambs jumped off cliffs

To their deaths,

Resurfacing alive and

Without scratches

Where pounds of fake plastic straws clogged up

My pet whale’s arteries

And where Nicholas Ray kept making movies

Frozen as was his head in the place of

Walt Disney’s

It all made sense to me

When I suddenly awoke,

I wondered aloud:

“What the fuck is ‘consequence delivery’?”

A crew member asked me to quiet down

I had disturbed the ecstatic reveries of my seat neighbors—

That is, robbed the seasick of their exception

Token me!

I was reminded of that time at empathy training

When my crow’s feet and laugh lines gave way to

Sudden cipherings, like:

(a) Monotony drives me to the bathroom;

(b) America is ever, or seldom, in the present tense; and

Too little, too late:

From the dark of November comes the lemon tree,

Interspecific occupancy dwindles,

And a silicone cast of the Venus of Willendorf

Luxuriates in tide pools of Triaminic;

In the interstitial remains,

With little traces tripping, fripping to the fore,

The order of this offensive

Takes the form of Ultra Corinthian

And its ancillary portholes

Do little to drain the figurative swamp