Emily Hass
Emily Hass is a third year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto St. George campus studying English and Philosophy.
roach poem i
in this geo-windowed catechism of natural light,
this dust scratched gem of polished wooden floors and
sweating clay-coloured walls lie the keepsake corpses
of German cockroaches.
a proclivity for secrecy, love of sliding bones
and small, tight spaces
contractile tissues like
throats, made the stringy connectors
quiver with dizzy anticipation: here is a chance for
a link, and with a link a set, and with a set
a delicate clasp, a needle in your eye or two hooks, click
click curled lick from the quick, surrender swift!
and i rift, adrift, eagled o'er bald
split o'er sawed, crow cock cawed
outlawed, i spill thence from the east, a roach,
encroached a fine feast.
in the light we are marooned, yellow-bellied
streaked with violet light and violent flight.
out of breath out of breadth stuck on racks sunken sacs
the heaviest death, the gentlest rest, on our backs
the transient light welcomed examination,
with legs curled high she reeked of expired salvation
for the fissures and cracks he wrenched and rubbed
raw her spinal retaliation
and pinned to board she spilled an egg sac of seed
hooks and eyes, crumbed intelligent lies, feelers for
spies, muffled throat cries; all of her cracked mirrors,
wet fevers and tender trials,
unwincing
he pinned all
unreviled, to the lapels of giants and rapists
and thieves.
dust and insect bones crone melodious
elegies up all our sleeves,
catacombs echo simpler reprieves.
after the extermination/ affordable luxury
the level of fantasy in worn out reality
is approximating ecstatic heights
like a fever when taken she is
bright-eyed and wondering she is
tongue-tied and faltering she is extinguished
by the movement of water those migratory
sea birds
the quiet ones never choose exile,
it comes to them over a natural course
they trickle on, fan out, hard pressed and
reaching further from the well-worn depth
and then they sink into the earth like
the quiet burials before them
only breathing
you may think you’ve made it, escaped
the mass. but as long as you remain on
this earth you’re liminal. there will always
be a priest sitting alone in a confessional
and there will always be a crucifix
and there will always be an o altitudo
because in drought there is dust
at first the silence stirs the hammer anvil
stirrup the last tilt in this axed axiom equilibrium
after all who can deny the harmony in
the following sentence is true
the preceding sentence is false
who can deny the breathtaking threshold of
anti-science or neo-humanism
who doesn’t love in the mist of creeping chaos
the throwback to ritual,
the manicured lawns and superstitious
democraphiles, the one act of community
we all so love to defer on to our manifest
destiny brethren; prefer the retreat into the inner and
the boredom that destroys our time-management
the old ticker
o artificial intelligencers, you too will one day
be slowly worn and broken by the
lewis elixir by the
as we sit,
and wait,
and swallowed up by the sea and parched in
pilfered pieces, flaking off in dry land
all of this could be yours
and in the escher stair apartment, the whole
shatters because the windows are leaking,
the cockroaches have all died but the
city is stealthily entering and your viral lungs
are absorbing and the current sweeps you
up and away, adrift, rot, and dismay the
delicate bones of all your cornered enemies
