Kellie L. Chouinard

UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Disconnect

Kellie L. Chouinard

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY

OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT

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CALGARY, ALBERTA

SEPTEMBER, 2012

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ABSTRACT

This creative prose poetry manuscript challenges the boundary between fact and fiction through the story of a displaced narrator and other unnamed characters, all of whom are disconnected from chronological time. Beginning in Windsor, Ontario, and continuing to Calgary, the second-person narrator interrogates the events that occur both before and immediately following her cross-country move in an attempt to feel connected to both cities. Disconnect interrogates the validity of memory and how one goes about creating a life from a handful of seemingly unrelated events, questioning whether the story is really yours if you remember it from a different point of view. The introductory essay examines the roles of autobiography, biotext, and confessional writing in contemporary Canadian women‟s literature through the works of Lynn Crosbie, Nicole Markotić, Damian Rogers, and others, and well as the influence of genealogy on the works of Daphne Marlatt and

Robert Kroetsch.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am eternally grateful for the guidance and support I‟ve received from numerous people during my (seemingly) never-ending career as a student. First and foremost, my intense gratitude goes to Suzette Mayr, the best adviser an MA student could hope for. She pushed and questioned and made me think in four different directions at the same time, without which this thesis would not have been possible. I would also like to thank my parents, Shirley and Paul, for their unrelenting support - emotional, intellectual, and, at times, financial. They understood that this was something I needed to do for me, and proudly forced me onto the plane in September 2010 when I started having second thoughts about leaving home. Thanks to my aunt Kathy, who pushed me and berated me when I questioned my motives, but who called (and called and called) to constantly remind me that I “come from a long line of goddesses.” Yes, I think I do. My sister, Amanda, for a shared childhood and summers spent searching for dinosaur bones, and for a conversation we had over coffee 10 years ago at Rideau Mall in Ottawa. Vic, for an unexpected friendship that doesn‟t believe in a 37-year age difference. Susan Holbrook, Nicole Markotić, and Louis Cabri, for residual influences from my undergrad days; especially Nicole, for constantly reminding me that “there isn‟t always a strong line between poetry and prose,” even when I didn‟t want to hear it. VS, NW, LQ, AE, and KT, who all understand my neurotic obsession with coffee, telephone conversations, and letters; who nurtured my inner geek through conversations about poetry, books, history, comics, art and travel; and who showed me that friendships can withstand both the test of time and distance. Thanks, again, to my parents, for roots and wings. Finally, I extend my gratitude to the Department of English, the Faculty of Graduate Studies, and the province of Alberta for numerous scholarships, awards, and grants that have allowed me to present my work at a few conferences and, more importantly, have ensured that I always had a roof over my head and food in my kitchen.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Approval Page………………………………...... i Abstract………………………………...... ii Acknowledgments………………………………...... iii Table of Contents………………………………...... iv

Introductory Essay: Writing the Canadian Biotext………………………… 1

Creative Manuscript: Disconnect………………………………...... 24 (1) Crash………………………………...... 27 (2) Click………………………………...... 49 (3) Skin Toxicity………………………………...... 68 (4) Sick………………………………...... 91 (5) Crossing………………………………...... 102 (6) “Sonata in F Minor”……………………………...... 117 Works Cited ……………………………………………………….. 126

iv 1

INTRODUCTION

“Disconnect”: Writing the Canadian Biotext

In the spring of 1997, a twelve-year-old version of me watched as my great- grandmother, my Meme, was lowered into her grave at St. Alphonsus cemetery in

Windsor, Ontario. I had been there before, three years earlier when my great-aunt‟s ashes were buried on top of her father‟s remains, next to the grave of my oldest sister. Memory is slippery, and images from the past often return at the oddest times. The memory of my great-aunt Leona‟s burial has been relegated to my medial temporal lobe, easily accessible. Blue-painted urn with black birds circling the sides, eternally in flight.

However, it wasn‟t until I sat down to work on my manuscript a year ago that a memory of my Meme‟s burial returned. At the time, I had been shocked at seeing my mother cry, and rather than be a witness to this moment, I had stepped back from the crowd of family members who were trying to console her. First I stepped over to a tree, and then farther, to another grave. Susan T. Dunn, 1902-1928, the headstone read. It was a simple upright slab of weathered concrete, leaning forward as the casket decomposed. I felt sorry for this woman, hers the only “Dunn” grave in the cemetery, and I began planting flowers for her every spring, laying a wreath at her headstone every December. I searched for information about Susan Dunn, and in turn, I learned about Windsor‟s history, the city‟s 2 role in 1920s rum-running. Searching for Susan‟s roots taught me about my hometown and the importance of history.

When I began working on my thesis, thirteen years after discovering Susan

Dunn‟s grave, my intention was to write a series of prose poems about urban decay and the history of my hometown. The history of Windsor had always interested me, but it became more important when I left in 2010. This was the place where Henry Ford founded the first Canadian branch of Ford Motors in 1904, and where Chrysler Canada came into being in 1926. Auto parts could easily be ferried across the river from Detroit and assembled in Windsor, cutting down the high taxes auto companies were forced to pay when the cars were assembled in the United States. Windsor‟s culture is invariably different from the rest of Canada‟s, although this is not always obvious on the surface.

We bill ourselves as members of a unique nation: Canusa. Not entirely Canadian nor

American, Canusa embodies the culture, language and history of both Canada and the

United States. We are also low-brow, blue collar, Labatts-on-a-hot-summer-day kind of people. I set out to write about my hometown, and the people who live there. And then I got sidetracked.

I did not set out to write an autobiography. But to write about my hometown meant writing my relationship with that city onto the page, which meant writing myself onto the page. Because I purposely chose to not write absolute individual truth in favour of a more generalized female experience, autobiography only really becomes important in relation to the city of Windsor, as this is also the city‟s story. While Disconnect is a biotext primarily about me, rather than a personal autobiography, it is nevertheless important to understand the history of the autobiography genre and its relation to other 3 forms of personal writing, such as the confessional, biofiction, and biotext.

For Georges Gusdorf, the patriarch of autobiography criticism, individual singularity and isolation from society (perceived or literal) are the foundations of autobiographical writing (Gusdorf 29). In “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,”

Gusdorf writes that the person “who takes delight in […] drawing his own image believes himself worthy of a special interest” and “tends to think of himself as the center of a living space” (29). Susan Stanford Friedman, however, argues against this very notion, stating that while isolation may be beneficial for male writers, it actually makes autobiography impossible for women. For Friedman, women‟s autobiographical writing is only possible when the writer feels connected to the world around her, making women‟s autobiographical writing inherently collective, based in group consciousness

(74-75).

While I tend to agree with Friedman‟s assertion of community over individuality,

I am not entirely convinced. Because Friedman does not specify the type of group consciousness she is alluding to - family, ethnic, religious, national, gender-specific - her argument falls flat. Women‟s writing does tend to include relationships, both familial and romantic, but so does men‟s writing. Robert Kroetsch‟s long poem Seed Catalogue brings the family dynamic onto the page while the story is situated in a particular time and location in Alberta. Familial group consciousness is included through the importance of land and farming, but Kroetsch also incorporates other voices into his text (Rudy Wiebe, for example, and the descriptions from a seed catalogue), thereby making himself part of a community rather than “an island unto himself” (Friedman 73). Damian Rogers, in her poem “Running Along Ontario,” also situates herself as part of a community through 4 references to her family members, an unnamed “you,” and several strangers she met in

Toronto. Rogers‟ poem portrays the self as slightly more isolated than Kroetsch‟s Seed

Catalogue narrator by repeatedly referencing moments spent alone, although both are connected to the external world through family, associations, and specific geographic locations.

Within the overarching genre of autobiography are several sub-genres, one of which is what Rita Felski calls the feminist confessional, a form of autobiography that is not chronological but fragmented and episodic (Felski 86). Felski defines the feminist confessional as literature that “explicitly seeks to disclose the most intimate and often traumatic details of the author‟s life and to elucidate their broader implications” (83). Yet the feminist confessional is less concerned with individual experience than is traditional autobiography, instead focusing on “the specific problems and experiences which bind women together” (Felski 85). In other words, the feminist confessional is communal, based in experiences likely to affect a specific gender group. A recent example of

Canadian feminist confessional writing is Lynn Crosbie‟s long poem/book Liar, which is written as one person addressing another, the “I” narrator talking to her estranged lover

(“you”). In this case, the narrator is confessing to her part in the relationship‟s end, her own actions that led to her broken heart:

I am cramped in our bathroom with a plastic bag on my head,

which you arrogate and claim,

like a mother with her child‟s urine-soaked sheets,

you run outside and scream about where I belong. 5

A mental institution, similar stations. […]

Your story was better. I was slowly coming apart, without

reason (Crosbie 96)

The trauma of attempting suicide or of your lover finding you in the act of committing suicide is certainly not a common experience, but the resulting heartbreak that permeates

Crosbie‟s entire text is common. It is the end of the relationship that is traumatic to the narrator, the ex-boyfriend moving on and marrying someone else. As part of the feminist confessional mode, Crosbie‟s text is not the story of a complete life, but is instead the story of one relationship and its ending.

Felski goes on to note that one of the major differences between the feminist confessional and autobiographical genres is the confessional‟s blurred line between fiction and absolute truth. As Felski explains,

The obligation to honest self-depiction which constitutes part of the

autobiographical contract is here [in the confessional] mitigated by the

feminist recognition that it is the representative aspects of the author‟s

experience rather than her unique individuality which are important,

allowing for the inclusion of fictive but representative episodes from the

lives of women. (84)

This is not to say that confessional writing is entirely (or even mostly) fictive, but that this sub-genre of autobiography allows for the inclusion of details which the author‟s memory has deleted, or which the author would not otherwise be privy to. Here I am 6 thinking specifically of the poem “out-takes from rewriting” from Susan Holbrook‟s

Misled. While autobiographical details are inserted into other prose poems in this book

(in “Crush,” for example), “out-takes from re-writing” draws attention to a point of view other than the author‟s. “Is it really my story if the memory begins from the driver‟s point of view?” Holbrook asks before describing what the driver sees from his windshield:

Blonde hair to the waist, pink shorts, red and white T-shirt that says

Canada „72, though I haven‟t seen the front of it yet. I know I was wearing

that; it became a crucial element later as I struggled to establish his m.o.

The T-shirt the only motive I. Can‟t remember what shoes I was wearing

because he never saw them. (70)

Here, the author‟s memory is presented from the point of view of the man who showed her his penis when she was seven, only reverting back to first-person narration after the fact. “He‟s smiling,” Holbrook notes, “but I can see his desperation for this favour. The fender nudging my right leg, and to my left the gutter” (77). The physical details are all provided from someone else‟s perspective, but Holbrook‟s own authorial voice takes over after the initial shock of the “man showing me his meat and veg when I was 7” (Holbrook

79). This initial shock quickly turns to denial for the narrator, who is unable to relay the story to Mrs. Hardy: “I couldn‟t tell her I was no longer sweet,” Holbrook writes (78), adding that Mrs. Hardy “saw my blush and stutter and didn‟t know the lie was not in what I said but in what I withheld” (79). This poem discusses an experience “which has

[…] been repressed and rendered invisible” (Felski 90), through the narrator‟s childhood desire to remain “sweet” (Holbrook 78), and thus fulfills one of the central obligations of the feminist confessional. 7

Holbrook‟s discussion of the assault begins with a description of clothing, items the “small girl” (Holbrook 70) is wearing when the man first sees her. Such objects are referred to throughout the entire poetry collection and become important as the reader tries to create characters out of these lists. In “Why do I feel guilty in the lingerie department at The Bay,” for instance, the sales clerk is introduced through her “pink silk blouse, black sweater vest, lipstick” (Holbrook 42), and is not named until later on. This association of people with objects is something that I have attempted to incorporate into my own project, by identifying people primarily through their possessions or body parts.

For example, Victoria is described in relation to her feet (since she drives barefoot), and the unnamed “she” is almost always described by her hands, as she is the cellist, or the cellist‟s spine. The rapist in the first section, “crash,” is identified as being left-handed and having rough skin, but these are the only physical markers ascribed to him. The narrator herself (the “you”) is described by material objects - the white sandals or the torn biking pants and silver cross necklace - and temporary external developments, such as the rash and cracked skin. The characters, including the narrator, are all fragmented and tied to body parts and material possessions.

Robert Smith indicates that an inherent problem of autobiography, aside from its narcissistic nature, is that the first-person narrator, in attempting to portray absolute honesty, “ends up not only as […] philosophical delusion but as a linguistic one too”

(58). Smith explains by quoting Louis Renza, who refers to the literary “I” as a

“transparent signifier” (58), so overused in both fiction and autobiography that it no longer indicates authenticity, but instead serves as merely another literary trope. There are, however, few alternatives to the “I” narrator, especially in autobiography. In Misled, 8

Holbrook uses multiple points of view, drawing attention to the constructedness of the poems. Although much of the book is written in first-person, “out-takes from re-writing,” for example, includes first, second, and third-person voices. Here, Holbrook presents a list of “things you can rewrite” in second-person, while the sections of the poem about growing an ovarian tumour are all written in third-person. This intersection of different points of view subverts the idea that autobiography needs to be absolutely authentic, and instead indicates that the book is a constructed object, a representation rather than a truthful re-telling.

Both first- and third-person narrative suggest completion and character stability, writes Dennis Schofield, whereas the second-person narrator is “always in the act of becoming” (41) and is therefore not required to carry the same amount of authority as a first-person narrator. The second-person narrator, Schofield argues, confronts the actual condition of subjectivity, “as ruptured, disparate, and produced” (43; emphasis in original). So while the first-person narrator, according to Smith, is expected to embody an element of truthfulness even though it is overused and therefore lacking in contemporary authority, the second-person narrator draws attention to its inherent non-authority by announcing its nature as something produced by the author, and not necessarily representative of the actual author. In my own manuscript, the narrator‟s “I” becomes

“you,” which is my attempt at resolving the problem of linguistic delusion and the obligation for truth by creating a chasm between the author and the subjective narrator‟s voice. Because my manuscript is not absolute truth, nor absolute fiction, the second- person narrator is used to draw attention to the unauthentic and constructed nature of the text. Here, the second-person voice represents the narrator‟s fractured state and allows for 9 the inclusion of stories that are not necessarily my own, without drawing attention to the fact that the stories are not always mine. In my attempt to subvert the traditional autobiographical form, where the narrator is represented as “I” and the reader (or addressee) is referred to as “you,” the “you” in my text is used to represent the narrator, while the “I” represents another person outside the dominant authorial voice. In this case, when the “I” does appear, it is in quotes by other people or the fictional diary entries of

Susan Dunn that preface each section.

A prominent feature of feminist autobiography, according to Felski, is the inclusion of biographical details, such as birth dates, and of photographs, in order to “link the text to the life and act as a guarantee of its authenticity” (84). These details are often included in any form of biography and are not applicable only to feminist writing. My own project includes certain biographical facts and photographs, however, my facts are not tied to the narrator (whose “facts” are often blurred), but to the other women who appear throughout the story, primarily Susan Dunn. And unlike the photographs that appear in traditional autobiographies, the photos in my own manuscript are not of the narrator but of objects and other people. When I was choosing images to use in my manuscript, I looked specifically for photos I took in Windsor, but where I do not appear.

The only image that I appear in is the photo of my feet on a sidewalk plaque proclaiming the phonetic spelling of Detroit, which opens the “crossing” section and was chosen because I wanted to emphasize both the act of walking around a different city and the location of the crossing (Windsor-Detroit). The photo of the paint-spattered sink at the beginning of “skin toxicity” was taken at the visual arts building at the University of

Windsor, and is used here to highlight urban grime, to visually represent the toxicity that 10 this section discusses. Each of the photos in my manuscript represents a sensation felt in

Windsor, whether tactile (my feet on the plaque), visual (the dirty sink), or emotional (in the case of the photo that opens “sick,” of a short-haired woman looking away from the camera). Other photos, such as the man standing on a beach and the telephone, were chosen to highlight the act of leaving or the desire to leave, and the need to communicate.

At the same time as I am adhering to Felski‟s implied rules of autobiography by including photographs and biographical details, I am also consciously subverting them, undermining fact and truth in order to blur the line between pure autobiography and fiction.

Marcel Proust identifies memory as “des fragments d‟existence soustraits au temps” (709), essentially fragments of a person‟s life subtracted or withdrawn from time, where chronology has no importance. When Lyn Hejinian writes her autobiography as fragments of prose poetry in My Life, she challenges the notion that autobiography consists of chronologically sequenced and ordered moments that, combined, equal a complete (or almost complete) life. Unlike the sub-genres of biofiction or biotext, authors of traditional autobiography, Gusdorf writes, attempt to “reassemble the scattered elements of [an] individual life and to regroup them in a comprehensive sketch. […] The autobiographer strains toward a complete and coherent expression of his entire destiny”

(35). Hejinian‟s text is necessarily incomplete, as evidenced by her own editing and additions. The most recent edition of Hejinian‟s text, produced in 2002, develops into a book of 45 prose poems, each containing 45 sentences, representing the author‟s age through addition of lines and whole poems cemented to the original text.

Hejinian portrays a life made up of fragments: of sensory associations, history and 11 language, and details. This is not a typical autobiography, there are no “facts” nor photographs, and yet it is the product representing the author‟s life. Rather than give the reader plot and story, Hejinian gives language: “From hypochondria come sentences and memory. In California during the summer the shadows are very dark and cool, the sunlight hot and bright. But, because we have only seven days, the light seems to be orderly, even predictable” (Hejinian 55). These lines give location and a form of sensory understanding about California summers, but they are more invested in language than story-telling. What is “fact” in this text? What is “fiction”? Hejinian seems to leave that to the reader‟s imagination.

In his discussion of biofiction in the afterword to the tenth anniversary edition of

Diamond Grill, Fred Wah writes that his intention is to “suggest narrative through intertextuality” so it does not “feel too settled and defined or concluded” (181). For Wah, the autobiographical form can be constructed through language rather than experience, can suggest “a life made palpable, comprehensible, imaginable” (185), and does not necessarily have to encompass an entire life. Nor does it require plot (Wah 186). My own understanding of biofiction (or autofiction) is that this is life writing at its least structured.

Facts become less important than language and sense memory. Hejinian‟s text, by this understanding, could be read as biofiction, not because it rejects fact, but because it rejects plot and order in favour of language, of sensory experience.

Joanne Saul, in her book Writing the Roaming Subject: The Biotext in Canadian

Literature, defines biotext as a melding of “the „bio‟ (with an emphasis on the „life‟: including the family, relationships, and genealogy) and the „text‟ (the site where these fragments are articulated in writing” (4). Whereas biofiction allows for the inclusion of 12 forgotten moments, the biotext is more closely related to traditional autobiography. Saul identifies the main characteristics of the biotext form as displacement, fragmentation, and community, and goes on to discuss these characteristics in relation to four Canadian authors who have been marginalized due to race, sexual orientation or place of birth. Saul uses the term “displaced” in relation to cultural identity and language rather than simply geography, discussing the implications, for Daphne Marlatt, of having been born in

Australia and raised in Malaysia (Saul 57-58). The biotext, Saul notes, depicts individual fragmentation by rejecting linearity. Like biofiction, in the biotext, “different narrative threads cross, bend, and entangle one another. […] [T]he past interrupts the present and vice versa” (Saul 28). It is through such textual fragmentation that the authors are able to work through their experiences of displacement, rather than simply representing such experiences (Saul 4), as a traditional, linear autobiography would. Finally, Saul explains, the biotext “challenges the focus on the unified subject of autobiography by stressing the community that the self is rooted in” (20). This emphasis on community over individuality is important to biofiction and the feminist confessional as well as the biotext, however Saul believes the biotext takes this emphasis further than other autobiographical sub-genres, stating that for each author in her study, “the impulse to write actually begins with the search for a family member” (20). Hence the importance of that term, “genealogy,” in Saul‟s definition. My manuscript includes the voice of Susan

Dunn as well as a few poems that discuss my search for her heritage, and although biologically she and I are not related, I treat her as family. The proximity of her grave to the graves of my family members, my attachment to her grave, as well as the intensive genealogical research into her family that I have done over the past fifteen years, have led 13 me to think of Susan as a de facto member of my maternal family tree.

Genealogy, it seems, played an important role in the writing of my own manuscript. In March 2011, I headed to Halifax, Nova Scotia, for five days to present at a conference, and while winding my way through a cemetery near Dalhousie University, I came upon the grave of a man named George Dunn. The headstone was being replaced, and workmen in orange vests were in the process of lowering a new marble slab onto the exposed earth once occupied by a simple piece of concrete. The original headstone, now lying off to the side, told me this George Dunn had been born in 1840 and buried in 1946.

The new stone corrected this: he died in 1926. How curious, I thought, that it would take so long to correct such an obvious error. Wouldn‟t the original headstone carver have caught this mistake? I approached one of the workmen, who was carrying a thick binder, and he told me that the original stone had been purchased by the man‟s nephew, another

George Dunn, but the mistake hadn‟t been caught until recently, when the elder George‟s great-grandchildren came to visit his grave. I explained that for the past twelve years, I had been caring for the grave of a Susan Dunn in Windsor, Ontario, who had a brother named George. Could it be the same George? The workman opened his binder and showed me a photocopy of the original headstone acquisition form, signed neatly by a

Mr. George Dunn of 72 Crawford Avenue, Windsor, Ontario. I was standing at the grave of Susan Dunn‟s uncle, a man I had never encountered in my years of genealogical research into the Dunn family tree.

When I returned to Calgary to continue my thesis, Susan wrote herself onto every single page. As much as I wanted to understand my own history and its inextricable ties to Windsor, I needed to know hers. She slipped into the earliest drafts of my project, as 14 the image of the cello-playing woman who repeatedly appears and then disappears, much like Fred Wah‟s father appears throughout Diamond Grill, providing elements of biography that mingle with Wah‟s own childhood memories (Saul 20). When I finally gave Susan a voice and allowed her into the text, she became the only first-person narrator in a story about me.

Saul‟s definition of the biotext as a meeting place between the self (and its genealogy) and text, with an emphasis on fragments of the past interrupting the present

(Saul 4, 28), opens up the possibility of labelling more texts as biotext. Fred Wah calls

Nicole Markotić‟s Connect the Dots a “biograph” (back cover blurb), but by Saul‟s definition, it could be considered a biotext. The book‟s opening poem, “stand there, talking,” is deeply invested in the ideas of family, fragmentation, and place, with

Markotić listing the locations of her siblings in relation to her own unmoving narrative self: “Lorraine leaves our house, travels to Germany. Roland moves to Montreal. Yvonne and hers south of Drumheller. I stay in the here. Michelle (again and again) moves to

Toronto to Calgary to Toronto” (12). The poem opens with the father-figure leaving, and the removal of Markotić‟s siblings leaves only the narrative “I” and the “you” (the mother-figure) rooted in Calgary. Unlike the mother, attached to the home and kitchen, and the narrator, who lives “a few blocks […] away” (Markotić 16), the father is not rooted, and his leaving is repeated throughout the book. In “our father,” he leaves only to return and offer linguistic history (Old English and Indoeuropean words for the word

“sister”) before finally telling the family history the narrator had been asking for. Here is where genealogy comes into play. More than offering the names and locations of her four siblings, Markotić now writes a different kind of community into her text: “I get the 15

Jewish grandmother. and the hints of Gypsy. I get the homosexual uncle you won‟t talk about” (61). Although Markotić feeds the reader bits of genealogy and her own life and relationships, there is always an emphasis on the constructedness of these poems, an admission that this book does not equal a complete life. “I am not who I say I am,”

(Markotić 89) she announces on the book‟s final page; the book‟s narrator is not necessarily Nicole Markotić, just a textual representation of her. Markotić concludes “our father” by writing, “I walk forward out of my 20s, out of your tellings, and the stories you don‟t speak mimic my own writing, my own hidings” (62). The story is not over yet,

Markotić seems to be saying, and this book is the written fragments of a small fraction of a life.

Throughout Connect the Dots, the telephone serves as a connection between family members who are present and those who are not. In “stand there, talking,” for example, the telephone allows the mother to talk to her family in Germany, to call the narrator when Yvonne goes into labour. But the telephone also provides space for endings, as in “no goodbye, just:,” where the narrator‟s relationship ends with her partner hanging up the phone. “the goddamn telephone. can‟t hang up on a person in person,”

Markotić writes (19), signalling a physical distance between the “I” and the “you.” This tactic has been adopted into my own writing, with the “click” that signals an end to the relationship between my narrator and her sister. In my own manuscript, that repetitious

“click” is final, there is no further suggestion of a relationship, but Markotić‟s narrator continues the relationship with her ex by addressing him in the poem, by searching for artefacts at the city dump, and by inserting the past break up conversation in the middle of the present. 16

Rejection of linearity and emphasis on place/displacement and community also factor into Daphne Marlatt‟s Touch to My Tongue, placing this book within Saul‟s definition of the biotext. Saul notes that all of Marlatt‟s writing is infused with “the intersections of autobiography, fiction, theory, the fictional nature of memory, and the fabrication of a textual self” (58), but certain texts, such as Touch to My Tongue, Ghost

Works, and Steveston are also invested in ideas of place. In Ghost Works, Marlatt travels to England in search of her maternal history, and her mother “is a ghostly presence that haunts Marlatt throughout her travels” (Saul 60), while in Touch to My Tongue, Marlatt is preoccupied with her partner while traveling along the Trans Canada Highway. Rather than the story progressing in a linear manner, from West to East, Vancouver to Winnipeg,

Marlatt‟s prose poems in Touch to My Tongue loop back on themselves through remembering, inserting the past into the present. Marlatt‟s poems here are about absence, the narrator traveling away from her lover, who is rooted in Vancouver. Unlike

Markotić‟s narrator, who is rooted to Calgary while her siblings and father all disappear, in Touch to My Tongue, it is Marlatt‟s written persona who does the leaving, all the while being reminded of her lover at every turn in the highway. Saul writes that in books like

Steveston and Vancouver Poems, Marlatt “attempts to write herself into a world she wanted to be a part of and into the history of a city she wanted to belong to and didn‟t”

(63), presumably because of her identity as an immigrant, but Touch to My Tongue writes her away from Vancouver, illustrating the importance of displacement that Saul believes is so crucial to biotext writing.

Saul writes that the biotext explores the sense of cultural displacement felt by racialized and marginalized writers (24), and although her meaning is applied primarily 17 to immigrant and minority writers, I believe displacement can be applied to other forms of movement as well. In Susan McMaster‟s poetry collection, Crossing Arcs, she uses the biotext form to confront her mother‟s Alzheimer‟s diagnosis and to show the sense of displacement her mother feels due to her memory loss. In the poem, “Orienteering,”

McMaster writes of her mother‟s move to a long-term care center, saying that “She‟s figuring it out / with her Girl Guide compass. / Where the doors go, / how the walls fit. /

Marked her table / with a line pointing north” (58). Although her mother has not moved very far geographically, her new residence is not quite home yet, and her sense of displacement comes through in McMaster‟s description of this “figuring it out” (58).

In an interview between Lola Lemire Tostevin and Fred Wah in Subject to

Criticism, their conversation about Wah‟s book Waiting for Saskatchewan turns toward a discussion of place. Wah, who was born in Saskatchewan, says that his book is an attempt “to deal with a geographical reality or concreteness that we all carry. Place as stain, the stain the world makes on a person […]. [T]here‟s something unresolved about that place for me” (Tostevin 51). Writing about the province where he was born, then, is

Wah‟s attempt to deal with his sense of displacement, to reconcile his father‟s history and the “stain” Saskatchewan left on Wah with his own life in Vancouver.

I opened this essay by saying that my original intention had been to write a series of prose poems about Windsor, about “Canusa.” Although I ended up writing biofiction, this manuscript was only possible as an attempt to write through my own sense of displacement. As Markotić writes in Yellow Pages, “in order to be from a place, you must leave that place” (38). Markotić‟s fictionalized character of Alexander Graham Bell learns displacement by leaving his home, by creating a list of “countries he no longer 18 belongs to” (38), and then spends the rest of the book attempting to fit himself into North

America. In Touch to My Tongue, Marlatt writes herself away from her Vancouver home, but her leaving is filled with remembering that city and her partner. Had she remained in

Vancouver, the book would not exist. Had I remained in Windsor, this manuscript would not exist.

In Saul‟s introduction to Writing the Roaming Subject, she notes that in each of the texts in her study,

a missing family member is associated with a place other than “here,” be it

the author‟s birthplace or the parent‟s birthplace. Questions of home,

place, and the movement between cultures therefore play a significant role

in each of the narratives. (24)

My own manuscript has multiple missing family members and friends, all of them associated with Windsor, much like Markotić‟s Connect the Dots, where the missing siblings are associated with other locations outside of Calgary. Rather than highlight the continual movement between Windsor and Calgary, I instead attempt to highlight the differences between these two locations by writing Windsor‟s temperatures in Fahrenheit and Calgary‟s in Celsius, by naming streets as often as possible (a rarity in Calgary, where streets are numbered more often than not), by listing driving times to other cities near Windsor, and by referring to the proximity of Detroit (in the section titled

“crossing”). But there are also cultural and linguistic differences between Windsor and

Calgary that add to my sense of displacement and informed my choice of syntax. In

“Canusa,” we speak a different language, a combination of Canadian and American

English and, in my family, Quebec French slang. “The French I spoke at home was not 19 even a written language,” writes Tostevin, and the numerous versions of French she has picked up “have often felt like different languages” (17). When I began school at age five, I was shocked to discover that the language I spoke at home was not considered

“real,” that, more often than not, it was un-writeable and untranslatable. Twenty years later, when I moved from Windsor to Calgary, I was again informed that my language was not correct. While “Canusa” English announces that Calgary has three syllables,

Alberta English promises only two. Rather than highlight oral differences between these two dialects, my manuscript uses clipped sentences and an adherence to lower-case letters in an attempt to work through my sense of linguistic displacement.

It is not nostalgia that propels Wah‟s writing of Waiting for Saskatchewan, it is instead an act of working through his own sense of displacement, of understanding “the memory […] of the flat, the plain” (Tostevin 51) of Saskatchewan. In her essay, “„Syntax

Equals Seriality‟ In bpNichol‟s gIFTS: The Martyrology Book(s) 7&,” Markotić writes,

“It is this word „through‟ I am learning. How do you get to the other end when you don‟t believe in ends?” (186). The biotext, says Saul, is always an act of “working through” rather than simply representing history, place, and displacement (4, 24), and does not expect ending. By intertwining the past and present in a non-linear fashion, the biotext acts as “„an extension of‟” a writer who is still in the process of discovering him/herself

(Saul 4), and his/her relationship to a location other than “here.”

The inclusion of Susan Dunn in my manuscript is not an act of nostalgia, but of working through a history I can never fully understand. Initially, my interest in her life was simply due to the location of her grave and the absence of another Dunn in the same cemetery. I wondered what would cause the death of a 26-year-old woman, and began 20 creating elaborate stories of a youth filled with rum-running and death from pneumonia.

My curiosity surrounding her untended grave led to years of genealogical research, and I eventually uncovered several similarities between Susan and myself. Like me, Susan was born into a working-class family. I was born in Windsor and my father worked on the line at Chrysler, while Susan lived in Cowdenbeath, Scotland, with her mother and nine siblings, her father working in a coal mine in another town. When Susan and her younger sister, Margaret, immigrated to Canada in the summer of 1925, they already had one brother living in New York and another in Windsor. Margaret eventually moved to New

York, where she died in 1988, while Susan lived for a year in Ottawa before joining her younger brother George in Windsor in 1926. Two years later, she suddenly became ill and died of kidney failure within three days. These facts are easily obtainable from provincial death records, church records, census information, and immigration forms, but the facts don‟t tell me how she lived. Through the second-person narrator, I have attempted to write my own displacement in Calgary, but the first-person narrator shows

Susan‟s displacement in Windsor, even though her voice in this text is fictional.

This manuscript emerged from my desire to reconcile my history in Windsor with my current life in Calgary. Markotić is correct when she writes that “in order to be from a place, you must leave that place” (Yellow Pages 38), but she only hints at the sense of displacement that comes with leaving. Like Daphne Marlatt trying to “write herself into a world she wanted to be a part of and into […] a city she wanted to belong to and didn‟t”

(Saul 63), I write Calgary onto the page of my manuscript in an attempt to place myself in this city where I don‟t yet belong, and to remove myself from Windsor, the place I used to call home. This manuscript is my attempt to work through my own displacement, 21 my sense of not belonging: “you‟re not from anywhere,” my manuscript announces,

“because Windsor doesn‟t appear on your one Canadian map. nothing survives south”

(87). But this manuscript also attempts to bring the past into the present through the voice of Susan Dunn. Susan is in every poem, only not always in the same form. She jumps from 1927 to 1987, and then plays cello in the rain outside a Detroit café twenty years later. She‟s the one who can‟t survive at the tip of Southern Ontario - my narrator has already left for Calgary.

Works Cited

Crosbie, Lynn. Liar. Toronto: House of Anansi P, 2006. Print.

Felski, Rita. “On Confession.” Women, Autobiography, Theory. Eds. Sidonie Smith and

Julie Watson. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1998. 83-95. Print.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Women‟s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice.”

Women, Autobiography, Theory. Eds. Sidonie Smith and Julie Watson. Madison:

U of Wisconsin P, 1998. 72-82. Print.

Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” 1956. Trans. James Olney.

Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton:

Princeton UP, 1980. 28-48. Print.

Hejinian, Lyn. My Life. 1987. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2002. Print.

Holbrook, Susan. Misled. Red Deer: Red Deer P, 1999. Print.

Kroetsch, Robert. Seed Catalogue. Winnipeg: Turnstone P, 1977. Print.

McMaster, Susan. Crossing Arcs: Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me. Windsor: Black

Moss P, 2009. Print.

Markotić, Nicole. Connect the Dots. Don Mills: Wolsak and Wynn, 1994. Print.

---. “„Syntax Equals Seriality‟ in bpNichol‟s gIFTS: The Martyrology Books 7&.‟”

Beyond the Orchard: Essays on The Martyrology. Ed. Roy Miki and Fred Wah.

Burnaby: West Coast Line, 1997. 184-190. Print.

---. Yellow Pages: A Catalogue of Intentions. Red Deer: Red Deer College P, 1995. Print.

Marlatt, Daphne. “Touch to My Tongue.” 1984. The New Long Poem Anthology. Ed.

Sharon Thesen. Toronto: Coach House Books, 1991. 183-200. Print.

Rogers, Damian. Paper Radio. Toronto: ECW, 2009. Print. 23

Saul, Joanne. Writing the Roaming Subject: The Biotext in Canadian Literature. Toronto:

U of Toronto P, 2006. Print.

Schofield, Dennis. “The Second Person: A Point of View? The Function of the Second-

Person Pronoun in Narrative Prose Fiction.” Diss. Deakin U, 1998. Web.

Smith, Robert. Derrida and Autobiography. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print.

Tostevin, Lola Lemire. Subject to Criticism. Stratford: Mercury P, 1995. Print.

Wah, Fred. Diamond Grill: 10th Anniversary. Edmonton: NeWest P, 2006. Print. 24

Disconnect

The body of Melissa Roach was found Sunday in a garbage bin in London, Ont., one day after her father reported she had been kidnapped by a hitchhiker he picked up on his way home from the University of Windsor library.

- Ottawa Citizen, 29 July 1986

when you finally do stop talking, everything ends with click. doors slam shut windows lock phones hang up heels stumble away bow drops bike chain clanks brakes metal glass & you in the middle of the road watching blood drip from fingertips

(1) CRASH 28

in a box under a floorboard: 5 paper clips, 3 thumb tacks, a day planner, a business card from the salt mine, 1 pencil stub, 2 earrings, 1 pair of leather gloves (size small), 4 loose sheets of paper, 1 book of matches, British stamps, small manila envelope filled with notes notes in the box:

February 1928 - George had the doctor here last night, but penicillin is more than my paycheque affords. I said let go. You know what‟s coming, don‟t you. All I want is an endless stream of sleep, & your hands against my skin.

January 1928 - I went looking for you again, but all I found were your fingerprints inside dusty books. Your house is empty, the windows boarded up, & I kissed the wood. I think it‟s your hands I miss the most.

a car. a backseat. the softness of the seat fibres against your stomach, cheek. that smell. too many evergreen air fresheners, old gym socks, expired food. sharpness & warm liquid running red down your scalp & neck. eight stitches to close, then a roll of film in a Nikon, art show exhibition of your naked body, flesh in blue & purple. fingers restless, strumming

Jane Doe: white with brown shoulder-length hair, pierced ears, type O blood & straight teeth. weighed 110 pounds, was 20 to 30 years old & between 4‟10” & 5‟4” tall. washed up on the shore of the Detroit River near the Monroe Power Plant on March 31, 1982

the left hand is the problem. placement of his left hand under the waistband of your jeans. right hand positioned at the bridge, you learn the difference between half & whole step finger placement. knees dirty from the cemetery & fingers invisible the strings. ambidexterity rare in humans except stringed musicians. guitar & cello made for right-handed use, but the left does the heavy lifting. count the vertebrae in your thoracic curve: place cello here & the bridge should be even

fold the map into a paper crane & label but every morning your bike travels west. migration / stagnant

an x-ray dated 1997. two cracked cervical vertebrae, one cracked thoracic. metal bar through your belly-button over-exposing the negative, but a re-do shows the same. say you slipped playing hockey. say you fell off your bike. you misplaced your foot on the steps

things learned through trial & error: don‟t navigate the city using a map from 1977. streets change names & directions all run backward. Chrysler plants #1, 2, & 6 long gone, & the salt mines relocated farther west. town of Tecumseh swallowed by east Windsor & transit runs west into LaSalle, stops at the race track to improve gambling odds

I wanted to know, if I get this then what do boys get? Her answer was I‟d find out someday.

- T., grandmother

your father drives you across town, past the disappearing hospital at the intersection of University & Crawford, two-lane roads, rotting & forgotten houses with RIP Tupac & Angelo loves Reba painted across boarded windows. outside city limits, triangled between the salt mine, sewage treatment plant & city dump, the air smells raw, chemical, dead. same smell emanating from the tank two days after your goldfish, Salamanca, was discovered belly-up & coated in algae. along the river, houses hidden in bush, skeletal cars on front lawns & cinder blocks lining over- grown driveways. your father points: a street sign mangled, illegible, partially hidden in trees, but no road to match. behind the houses, cramped forest blocks sunlight & walking paths. perfect place to hide a body, you say as your father‟s truck crunches stones & drives west, toward the salt mine

A Sandwich South man who left his 2-year-old daughter alone in a car for almost 3 hours on a hot day in July 1986 and then disposed of her body in a garbage dumpster was sentenced today to 3 years in the penitentiary.

- Windsor Star, 12 February 1988

she says the girl in white was raped, thrown into a shattering mirror. minus most of her memory. & the chapter where you at eighteen became this. three seconds/twenty-eight minutes/five hours when his cells mingled with yours

& do you think he‟s cute

It’s ok if you do.

he slams the door without answering her & drives off. up Pillette. you pull the cord but he just keeps driving. over to Central & the bus station. he parks at the back, between 2 other buses, really old ones, & he gets up &

Does he say anything to you at any point?

What do you say or do?

expired driver‟s license in a sock drawer. evidence of your inability. reliance on the bicycle & you circle the city disappearing in July. only bike in car-central & no yield signs. stopped at a traffic light you watch the chemical depot burn. music store fuelled by paper & wood

trauma occurs at the level of the verb

you: trauma occurs at the level of the street-corner

6-year-old Ljubica Topic abducted, Drouillard Road. raped. strangled. your mother offered a ride at lunch. your father questioned: single white male, rented a room two houses down from. you never leave Windsor alive

her iced hands on your skin. voice the heat of Texas. she builds you a fort outside her hotel, borrows snow piled along the road. from her room she watches Detroit, but inside the fort your breath steams warm onto her hands. she plays Mozart‟s 40th using her feet & you say Dvorak & position the bridge

1. first position 2. neck position 3. viola position 4. violin position

this is how it happened: you weren‟t wearing a helmet. Canada day 2008 & you were biking downtown side streets. only bike in car-city, & no designated lanes. maybe you drank too much water (maybe you didn‟t drink enough). glanced down at the map clipped to your handlebar, lines drawn in black ink (route marker). looked up at the point of impact. the car‟s front end colliding with your bike/colliding with you. metal kissing skin more upset about the silver cross torn off your neck than about the blood. dripping from your arm, fingers, down your leg. riding pants torn knee to hip. leg torn up. the car with a smashed headlight, gash across the hood. the woman driving yelling at you. like it was your fault. like you had the stop sign you couldn‟t hear her over the ringing in your ears. kept hearing her car & your bike impacting, the crunch of metal on metal. couldn‟t feel the throbbing down your right side on your next bike ride, you look down at the map still clipped to the handlebar & are surprised to see drops of blood dried on the paper, on the black routing lines. surprised to find blood dried on the brown leather handlebars & seat, on the orange-painted steel tubing

Terror of disorder keeps you up at night, or terror of order does.

- Susan Holbrook, Good Egg Bad Seed

his tongue prying into your mouth, sandpaper skin, left hand unbuttoning. you: pushed flat against the shit-brown floor, chewed gum dirt candy wrapper used condom. say of course you wanted, but not him. say you had your eye on. you dreamed the scar on her left elbow, perfect match to your right hip. this story really begins downtown but every sidewalk reminds

the left hand is the problem. bones curved around a steering wheel in perpetuity. what other job can you sit on your ass 8 hours a day? you’re very pretty - can I kiss you? pretty girls have no personality, are the ones who commit suicide. or so you‟re told. the left hand is the problem here, dipping under the waist of your jeans. whole step finger placement & slide the bow across. E flat against a ribbed floor. imagine if Tennyson could have taken a pill & forgotten the whole thing

all you had was a name. stolen cemetery registry pages give you a date: 11 February 1928. microfilm reels after microfilm reels. women trace history through the maternal side. years of church records trucked down the highway from London, then an update to library genealogy website subscriptions give you an immigration record (1925), a brother in Windsor, a sister in New York, 6 siblings in Scotland & a maternal line traced to 1820. a death record says kidney failure & you wonder if that‟s the connection

On the way to Woodstock, he bought green garbage bags, and near London placed the child‟s body in one bag and the diaper bag and other items in a second bag and threw them all into a dumpster.

- Windsor Star, 12 February 1988

(2) CLICK 50

December 1927 - There was a woman at the library today who reminded me of you. I said your name out loud, but she didn‟t turn. I think about kissing a trail down your back. What would you have done? My brother asks me if something‟s the matter, & all I do is lie to him. That woman at the library stole your face, but she wasn‟t you.

November 1927 - It snowed last night & I dreamt that I walked outside this house naked, stood in the snow. The wetness felt like summer between my toes, but really I was waiting for sleep. It‟s easier to skate across a frozen river than to smuggle by ferry or truck, but all I want is an endless stream of sleep.

unfold the map & grid lines all point north. the river pulling away, & Peche Island only accessible by boat. under the tunnel cars turn skeleton with cases of whisky still in back seats. the river doesn‟t freeze anymore

you are not there when your niece is born. your sister said click & meant. stopped at a red light somewhere between home &. stopped at the cemetery, knees dirty from headstones. bike the city three times over but really you want to hold her

A yurt has to be part of it. Don‟t you just want to run away & live in a yurt sometimes? Or disappear in Thailand. Or Vancouver. I could be homeless in Vancouver & not exist anymore.

- K., aunt

1992 your sister dug up the backyard looking for fossils. made you help, carry away buckets & fill. August: the rotting carcass of a pool under your mother‟s herb garden. pucker your lips & pretend gills & fins

Ford City 1904. original wagon works gone & statues in place. down Drouillard the condemned houses, a meth clinic, the empty lot where they found Ljubica Topic‟s 6-year-old body, 1971. life- size replica of Ford‟s Model T. you pretend a cross-country drive through northern Ontario or the prairies, or south. in the houses, showers spray zyklon b

half a word into your sentence & she said click. turn down the tv & watch buildings burn on mute, dial tone buzzing your ear drum

what if you hadn‟t sent the letter. hadn‟t danced the mailbox listened for the hollow swoosh as it fluttered to the bottom waited for the Canada Post truck to empty the red box on Sunset Ave in April 2009. what if she hadn‟t gone to work that day & picked up her mail & read the letter & dialled the phone. conversations end in click & you‟re left holding the black receiver sitting in Ryan‟s chair in Ryan‟s office at the student union at the University of Windsor. what if you dialled the Windsor-Essex school board. what if they knew her mistake. what if she didn‟t learn anything from you just kept going forgot you wrote the letter forgot there was a crack & you fell into it. what if you had a time machine & could un-send the letter un-sign it un-write it. what if click

1892: Two women burn to death when oil ignites. Had attempted to use kerosene on wood fire, reducing everything to ashes.

Brighton Beach, west Windsor: “a minefield of old tires and roofing shingles, engine blocks and busted toilets, aluminium siding and rusted-out mufflers, dryers and freezers, love seats and tub chairs, three-legged tables and two-legged chairs and anything else it would cost you ten bucks to truck to the dump.”

- Paul Vasey, The Age of the Cities (5)

exhibit: bike the city in July. when your niece is born, you are stopped at a traffic light somewhere between home &

your left ovary sliced open & hungry. stitches pointing an arrow north to your belly-button & empty space. everything shifting internally to the left: compensation for loss. Lauren bandages scar tissue & enforces rehab through cake & coffee before leaving for China. sends you an ovary-shaped greeting & a photo of a café that was named after you

white cordless phone smashed across tiled kitchen floor. she said click. plastic embedded in the bottom of your left foot

your plaster of Paris handprint, painted blue. the back dated 1990, but it must have been before. one finger cracked in the move, 1989

Helped deliver hand bells for a while but that was the pits.

- T., grandmother

half a word into your sentence & she said click. turn down the tv & watch buildings burn on mute, dial tone buzzing your ear drum. smash the cordless phone on kitchen tile & white plastic embedded in your left foot. travel the pieces when you leave

you never leave

if you stop scratching long enough, you‟ll see they aren‟t insect bites but a slowly spreading rash. red bumps screaming their way north up your arms & neck

“The victim was a helpless young child… who died a slow agonizing death caused by the swelling of her brain when it was subjected to high temperatures.”

- Windsor Star, 12 February 1988

(3) SKIN TOXICITY 69

October 1927 - George & Anne are expecting a baby. I should be happy about becoming an aunt, & all I feel is this weight of sadness hanging around me. A baby. Something real instead of this pretend life I have. You were what I wanted, & your hands tracing my skin when we snuck into the apple orchard behind the Baby house.

September 1927 - Every day I pass a church with little white crosses in the yard, & I want to go in & ask forgiveness. Today I lost my job because I am always sick. George says they must know I pretend motherhood when I cross the ferry with that buggy, even though I am not the only one pretending.

Don‟t get me wrong - I loved being with Meme & I know it was important that she have someone with her, but I was a kid! & you know, I‟ve been someone‟s caretaker ever since & I don‟t think I‟d know how not to be one.

- S., mother

your apartment across the country mapped around your childhood. bathtub reserved for self-help reading & autobiographies. or Superman comic books. at 12 you knew: this the one place you could cry in private. imagine yourself floating in a pot of alphabet soup or Georgian Bay. leave the tub & wrap yourself in Superman pyjamas long past expiration cook books & renovation manuals reserved for the kitchen, circa 1950. your mother‟s frog apron dangling. tired of waiting for the landlady, you repair cupboard holes yourself, slip her the bill with next month‟s rent. tape American & metric conversion tables inside the cupboard to hide the living room your father. replaced the worn corduroy loveseat & orange rocker for a plaid set. your father always in a plaid shirt, cigarettes tucked in pocket. most girls steal mom‟s clothes, but you wore dad‟s hockey sweatshirts & plaid jackets until college. stole his t-shirts for bedtime & layering

prohibition not just about alcohol & gambling in a border city. banned Ulysses mailed from Ernest Hemingway in Europe to Barnett Braverman in Windsor, smuggled one at a time across the river, then mailed across America. every one bootlegged

4 plastic bins cross the country with no supervision & arrive with 6 new address labels each, another roll of duct tape wound around the lids. contents of box #3: 13 t-shirts, 1 pair of yoga pants, 2 sweaters, 9 hooded sweatshirts, 7 forks, 6 knives, 12 spoons in various sizes, 1 frying pan, 3 bars of soap, 1 rotary-dial telephone sweatshirts not always yours. 2 inherited from your brother-in- law, 1 stolen from an ex-boyfriend, 3 bought at Value Village because 1980. 1 taken from your father‟s closet. 1 bought (on sale) from the University of Windsor bookstore when you started your (first) degree. 1 was her

(the home place): your father used to fix things. had a workshop in the basement, old pickle jars full of nails & screws & bottle caps lining the shelves & the perimeter of his desk. used to be, he could fix anything. you brought him your broken toys & they came back fixed. brought him your broken radio, the portable record player, the chain from your bike. everything fixable. except

when you announce your leaving, six months before it happens, your father starts on a regimen of weekly panic attacks. your mother takes him to the hospital each time, afraid to tell you in case you change your plans. he never minded that your sister left. every summer for three years, he drove her to Ottawa. but Calgary so much farther. & cold. he tells you the coldness. then piles his old sweatshirts & long-sleeved t-shirts on your bed before the anxiety

it doesn‟t matter which building, the symbolism is the same. smoke rising over the city & power lines coated in ice. fire fuelled by paper in the party warehouse where you bought. next door the chemical depot & someone yells arson. no electricity for a 3 block radius, everyone reads by firelight she says: there are enough abandoned buildings, why burn one that‟s occupied every week another fire until nothing. the city ash & debris

when you think about him now, it‟s only the scar criss-crossing his chest. seven years removed. not the orange sweater you wore when you first met him or his eyes like your father‟s or how he explained road layouts or his voice singing you across the city, in his car on the expressway that was named after the Chrysler president who died in 1973. in his bed in his apartment on Lauzon Road, your finger traced that scar. etched into his skin summer 1992. he said: her rape was his fault, his girlfriend, his responsibility to walk her home. both of you dismembered so many times, that scar now part of your skin‟s memory

no need to set an alarm. the Russian cargo plane arrives every morning at 5 with a new shipment of war. in the navy they call you ladyhawke

it‟s the heat you want. record 125.6° with humidity, July 1988. refold the map & label Alabama, California, prairies, east. bike the city 4 times over & avoid. the river invites swimming but don‟t jump. position your fingers at the bridge & round up

July 1987: 2 blocks from home there‟s a man in a car, a woman flicking ash out the passenger window. she holds the back door open. cowboy boots pressing the brake pedal but you never see them. your white buckled sandals submerged in a puddle, fingers wrapped around pink playground stones. is this really your story if you remember it from his body? fingers tapping the steering wheel & toes blistered, sweat dripping between shoulder blades from 87° plus humidity. the last stolen girl plunged into the Detroit River

things learned through trial & error (mostly error): rain boots aren‟t warm enough for Alberta winters, even when they‟re lined. even though you got away with canvas runners all winter in Windsor. salt will only melt the snow & ice until the temperature dips below 5° Celsius. egg won‟t always coat the noodles without congealing, no matter what the recipe says

smoke curling up & over the river. every morning another building removed. today the chemical depot. today the flag store. today the stationery shop, massage parlour, burrito restaurant. yesterday the music store, fire fuelled by paper scores & stringed instruments. find a backpack & call it arson. no electricity for a 3- block radius & power lines strung with ice cross the street at every corner. everything east intact, but west of Drouillard erased

coal-burning steel mills, sewage treatment plant, Detroit River offering a one-mile buffer zone from River Rouge factories & rainbow-coloured smoke. so far west, not even city anymore. over-grown yards & cars decaying along narrow roads, pot holes filled with mud or gravel. Brighton Beach: the dump

skin toxicity

you breathe toxins. rainbow-coloured factory smoke congeals in river water, in summer humidity. toxins buried in all your food: yellow dye tartrazine: a coal tar derivative blue dye triphenylmethane: petroleum-based additive red dye carmic acid: derived from the carcasses of the cochineal beetle partially hydrogenated animal shortening: beef fat or pork gelatine, made from boiled bones, tendons & skin of pigs bleached white flour: the common ingredient used to bleach flour is chloride-oxide, the use of which has been linked to the destruction of the pancreas & a form of type 2 diabetes high-fructose corn syrup

(motor oil, bugs, road tar, pig bones)

roman mythology: Victoria the winged goddess. if you could alter, you would grow wings, triangle of auscultation. tattoo feathers inside your rib cage not over. she drives barefoot, naked acceleration & 12 hours north. gives you 5 hours of conversation but doesn‟t wait for answers. never in one place long enough

We used to grab cereal out of the box & the roaches would run. The whole building was infested. When Leona & I had to do dishes, she would go to the bathroom & come out when they were done. Every night was the same thing.

- T., grandmother

she wasn‟t the first to leave. one brother in New York, one leaves for Montreal & then Windsor. father dying from the coal mine in Lumphinnans. Susan & Margaret leave together, but Margaret the only one with a job. she takes the train to Ottawa, cleans & cares for a little boy, & says: in 3 years she‟ll meet up with Susan & George in Windsor. she wants to travel. wants high fashion, a brownstone in New York City, upper east side with a view of the East River. Susan settles for less. a room in George‟s house in exchange for half her wages. she cleans houses & cooks for 5 months before losing her job. George works in the salt mine, but women aren‟t allowed, so Susan takes liquor across the frozen river. bottles strapped into a baby carriage & sewed into the lining of her coat offer more financial security. she smokes on downtown corners, cuts her brown hair short, & stops going to church with George. Sundays are the best days to cross by ferry, when the guards are careless & can be bought. Susan confesses her sins to the priest but doesn‟t wait for absolution

1. point it out on a map of Ontario

2. describe driving times from major cities: 4 hours south-west of Toronto, 2 hours from London, 30 minutes south of Detroit - the only city in Canada where you can be south of the US, just don‟t tell the Americans & ruin their already tenuous sense of geography

3. tell her you‟re really from Toronto, can speak 6 different languages - English is not one of them

4. you‟re not from anywhere because Windsor doesn‟t appear on your one Canadian map. nothing survives south

river water looks warm under the surface. touch jagged ice & come away with drops of water clinging to pink skin. across the river another country. another language. inflection from straight line of speech, words curved at the beginning. downtown disconnected, every syllable means something else

in the basement, dad shows you a trick: golf ball in hand, he cuts through plastic shell & peels back layers. inside, tightly-wound strings of elastic spring away from a tiny rubber ball. watch the elastic bits peel themselves back, ball hopping around the uneven cement floor. pieces of elastic fly across the room until the rubber ball stops dancing, naked, resting in a hollow point. you find another golf ball & watch your father cut into the white shell. already the elastic straining

Ford City, 1904. the original wagon works plant long gone, but the statues remain. down Drouillard Rd, condemned houses & a meth clinic, empty lot where they found the 6-year-old body of Ljubica Topic, 1971 you learn the park with a bronze statue of Ford workers assembling. spring days you ride your bike there to sit inside the Model T, life-size. pretend a cross-country drive through northern Ontario or the prairies, or south. when you leave, you take only the parts of yourself that fit inside a suitcase

(4) SICK 92

August 1927 - Three days ago I watched you take the ferry to Detroit. I helped you pack your belongings, & you gave me your signet ring. Detroit to New York by express, you said. New York to Europe. Your voice said you wanted to sleep through days of ocean & wake to Africa, but your eyes said you‟ll watch everything you pass. It will be months before your postcards reach me & your name printed on my thigh disappearing.

July 1927 - Last week at the library you showed me a book about Africa. Pointed on the map to where you‟re going. Rhodesia sounds like a flower, I said. Your laugh stuck in my throat for days.

your leaving seems ridiculous (you never claimed not to be), everything out of place - the pink luggage & plane ticket with your name printed

Allison packs her bags but leaves no forwarding address. asks you to let her know that you landed ok, but won‟t admit to your leaving. see you in December, she says. like it‟s next week. when she left 10 months ago, she refused the word goodbye. replaced it with: see you in August. you call her long-distance on your rotary-dial telephone, but no area code for hotel denial

things learned through trial & error: telling your second grade teacher to fuck off will land you in the principal‟s office & after- school detention room. asking your university professor to stop saying fuck in lecture (or to stop mentioning which authors she knows - the result is the same) will get you a failing grade on your presentation

when you select the proper type of LeBel Arts Building (formerly Packard of Canada, Ltd.), create a printable document containing the required number of (unionized) students to prevent an uprising equal to (or greater than) that of Sept/Oct 2008. repeat as needed. Ryan calls you long distance to say you should have made an effigy of. repeat the Detroit riot. no occupation of the president‟s office, just a burning effigy

he said the giant chessboard & challenged you to a game. but you analyze everything except the board. look: his fingers moving plastic

two days before Iraq, you sew peace signs to your jeans & pin them to your jacket. stand with a sign at College & Huron Church, truck traffic intersecting to & from Detroit. 25% of all North American merchandise trades over that bridge. steel sternum. you, the only protestor too young to remember Vietnam, go because you want to believe it‟s 1967, not 2003. three blocks from the protest, take a pill that makes you forget how to breathe, you see everything in ultraviolet, neon glowing everywhere. stand away from the protest because you wanted Vietnam, not this. five years later, Andrew comes home from Afghanistan in a military-issue casket & you line up along Tecumseh Road to watch, not protesting anymore

know a boy in high school who drives you down to Brighton Beach, to the end of Chappus Street. rusted green „87 Plymouth parked away from street lights, hidden under October red maple trees, radio tuned to a rock station out of Detroit. says his dad worked at Canadian Steel before unemployment. Romanian accent echoing your ear drum. he works nights alongside your father, piecing together engine parts at Chrysler. mornings he comes to class with grease under his nails, calloused fingers. you tutor him in English in exchange for stolen beer, kissing outside city limits

your left ovary sliced open & hungry stitches pointing an arrow north to your belly-button & empty space. your uterus is moving toward the left

100

what if your psychiatric history didn‟t read like The Bell Jar. mis- diagnosed depression 1998 2001 2003 2006. ADD is a common side-effect of rapid-cycling bipolar 1 with greater likelihood of suicidal tendencies (you are not here) & excessive behaviour. manic periods are accompanied by insomnia & caffeine-intake bordering on obscene. obsessive-compulsive disorder means you label & sort possessions at 4 in the morning according to size & weight. organize books by height

101

to edit information linked to another object, subject. refrigerator hum. you crumple on the kitchen floor because nobody said it would be this hard. how to reconcile your history with what the professor says. we poison the drinking water in China by sending back dead technology. maybe it‟s selfish, you think, but what about our water? two-headed fish pulled from the Detroit River & the highest rate of death from pollution. Toronto trucks its garbage south for burial. all Windsor‟s good for: a place to dump toxins. everybody believes Ontario ends with Toronto, nothing south except waste

102

(5) CROSSING 103

June 1927 - At the beach today you told me you‟re leaving. I wanted to chain you to me & keep you here.

May 1927 - This morning I curled back into your bed & counted the pink scars crossing your spine. Thoracic curve, you said. Cervical, lumbar. The scars traced my fingers but wouldn‟t allow my lips.

104

when Jackie dies, you take a bus under the river & get off in front of a stairwell. ride the people-mover 3 times in a circle & pick up a paperback & yesterday‟s newspaper. collect 16 discarded pennies, 5 quarters, 8 dimes. down Broadway you spot a café & exchange your found coins for strong coffee. sit outside until the rain. until your t-shirt soaks. life in the fun house. see Candy run.1 she: yellow dress as wet as. brown hair bleached & if you do the math she‟s almost as old as

1. Line gratefully pilfered from Candice Bergen. 105

it‟s her hands you miss the most. the left hand is the problem. she does everything in reverse & the bow held backward in curved fingers

106

if you had more time, you would refold & start from the middle. dusty church basements leading out to cemetery dirt, not transverse trapezium. planting flowers the spring before you leave, you accidentally dig up the original grave marker. steel sternum labelled 846. you dig up kidney disease & wonder if that‟s the connection. if you had more time, you would start here:

107

Claire was stillborn, & because she wasn‟t baptized they wouldn‟t let her be buried in the Catholic cemetery. She was buried outside the fence. Later someone planted potatoes there & I went crazy & pulled them up & put a little fence & some flowers. She was my baby.

- B., great-grandmother

108

you say hands are the sexiest part of the body. carpal, metacarpal, phalange. life read through veins under skin traced paper. hers: fine-boned & delicate. her fingers caress the bow & slide through Stephen Eicher. your own skin cracking in Calgary cold, rash spreading fingers to shoulders. rosin the tips

109

a map of Windsor folded to 3 inches square, 5 drops of blood obscuring the blocks between Erie & Ottawa, Kildare & Moy. epicentre of disaster. at a 4-way stop, she didn‟t. sheets of your skin still coating the hood of her car, the intersection where you fell

110

she is never in one place long enough for her voice to imprint inside your one good ear drum. through exposed flesh, her spine outlines itself. trace your hand along the ridges & repeat names out loud: cervical vertebrae, thoracic, lumbar, sacrum, coccygeal. count the 12 vertebrae in her thoracic curve, the space between her shoulder blades, muscles bunched from the weight of factory work, from threading engines together 7 days a week

111

driving the 401 south, Tilbury equals civilization. Tim Hortons & OPP & a park dedicated to Tecumseh. travel south & your car circles the city, concession road, sideline, old highway 2. the road turns, then turns again. south becomes north & you follow the river, follow the constant rush-hour traffic east through narrow city streets. you could turn around, but the destination is still the same

112

she slides her fingers across your throat & subtracts warmth. breathes ice. inside your apartment thermostat 81°. count the 5 vertebrae in her lumbar curve, tailbone, cervical atlas/axis. index finger distal tracing sweat beads across translucent skin

113

I met my husband in 1941. We worked in the same factory, measuring bullets. Alphonse made 5 cents an hour more, but he was a man. We didn‟t have equality back then - I was just glad for a job.

- R., great-aunt

114

grid lines all point north. the river pulling away & Peche Island only accessible by boat. under the tunnel cars turn skeleton with cases of whisky still in back seats. shoes & baby buggies used for smuggling sunk in the sand & the swimming area roped off to protect from undertows. every 5 minutes another cargo ship. coast guard. tunnel & bridge jammed all day & the homeless woman doing her laundry in the river. you catch & throw back poisoned fish

115

SS Metagama sails to Montreal from Glasgow, July 1925

Campbell, Mary Ann (38) Campbell, Kenneth (5) Campbell, Mary Anna (6 mos) Dunn, Margt Patterson (21) Dunn, Susan Devine (23) Elder, Henrietta (37) final destination & occupation: Dunn, Margt Patterson - Ottawa, domestic Dunn, Susan Devine - Windsor, domestic

116

when you leave, her lips imprint on your cheek. inky fingers still frozen, early September. refill the wine glass but avoid the border. implication of crossing: probing questions & the power to turn you away. jet fans in the tunnel provide unused oxygen every 90 seconds. plan a summer spent driving the prairies & 2 bodies & map your stops. circle the country but never dip south. you still refer to Algonquin Park as “up north” but the map says otherwise

117

(6) “SONATA IN F MINOR” 118

April 1927 - George does not approve, even though he saw those crisp bills fold out of my pockets. Three trips across the river & I‟ve made more money than he makes in a month at the salt mine. Anne warns me of the dangers. Don‟t look too desperate, don‟t talk to anyone, don‟t ever get caught because they‟ll take me away to the sanitorium & have me sterilized. You laugh when I repeat this, tell me the policemen are blind from all this whisky.

March 1927 - Last night I saw you across the bar. You were writing something in a small book, talking with two women. Laughing the way I was taught a woman never laughs. Head thrown back & I could see all of your teeth. When you spoke to me, your accent mimicked mine.

119

if you could live in reverse, start at the ending & work forward. you would know what to expect. grieve before. & the city wouldn‟t crumble, only grow. 1985 & you could be unborn, evaporate toward /becom(ing). your grandparents (after spending a lifetime together) would un-meet at the corner of Tuscarora, 1954. buildings de-construct, river un-pollutes itself, bridge & tunnel unwind into steel beams & screws & concrete tubing. fire unbuilds the city & buildings spring up over night. Windsor might be re-named: the Ferry, or South Detroit, or. un-take Ojibway land, return to Quebec, back-sail to France. un-name , un-label, re-write history/future into something different. no cars, only. start at the end & read the city backward, a confused chronology. say:

120

At dusk on May 14, 1971, Ljubica was playing in a parking lot near her home with her 8-year-old brother when a stranger called them over and offered Ljubica $8 to help him with a job. The coroner‟s report said she had been asphyxiated. Her face was badly beaten, her teeth and right leg were broken, and she had been sexually assaulted. The killer, who would have been covered in blood, escaped into the night.

- The Gazette, 7 July 1999

121

when Jackie dies you take a bus under the river. backpack full of paper & your t-shirt as wet as. hold the door for her dragging cello & ask for Dvorak but she gives you Hendrix. later the funeral & you repeat string sequences in mid-air

122

your leaving means a lie. feet still planted in southern Ontario mud. breathing Windsor air. plastic bins criss-crossing the country & 4 hours on a plane. your sister said click on the phone & white plastic embedded in your foot

123

her plane circles YQG for 2 years & you map out what you want her to see. draw Calgary with sticky notes pointing. where to stand to make the mountains look touchable. where to steal pebbles from the Bow River. plan coffee & her hands pressing. fingers caress the bow & slide strings. steel sternum 846. every morning airport line-ups but she: never in one place long enough. never travels farther west than

124

18 months after your leaving, you return to the homeplace: a boomerang. at the Capitol Theatre for Fred Wah, you sit next to an American, 3 rows back from your American-born professor. between breath stops you hear her laugh. the reason for your leaving. Fred‟s voice, & her laugh streams from the rafters, breaks. the syllable is where it happens, swim through language. Susan T Dunn swallowed into the belly of the river, but that initial only stands for itself. last night I saw you across the bar. you were writing something in a small book

125

126

Works Cited

Bergen, Candice. Knock Wood. New York: Ballantine Books, 1984. Print.

Holbrook, Susan. Good Egg Bad Seed. Vancouver: Nomados, 2004. Print.

Mandal, Veronique. “Will DNA solve 28-year-old child murder?: Windsor police have

„fingers crossed.‟” The Gazette [Montreal] 7 July 1999: A10. Web.

Price, Ron. “Roach sentencing follows guilty plea.” Windsor Star 12 February 1988: A3.

Web.

Vasey, Paul. The Age of the Cities. Windsor: Art Gallery of Windsor, 1997. Print.

“Weeping father charged in tot‟s death.” Ottawa Citizen 29 July 1986: A1. Web.