Poetry by Liz Howard, “Transit of the Morning Star”
- Liz Howard
-art by sab meynert, At the Brink, At the Mouth
-ink on paper, 2013
Commuting across the known sun I take up the red morrow
To wield the ornament of my heart over this caustic city.
Completely unsentimental raining down my brainy hollows
Upon that which is not quite song or flesh possessed
But an impulse toward being I should set about mastering.
Endeavouring to pass forward in all earnestness
The clover crown of my girlhood’s power.
Visage at the fore and hip flicked out toward
The call and response of future haunts
Wherein you love me as I stand. A woman.
The wildness of a requisite Sunday dress
Climbing those birch and fir trees, recalcitrant.
Against the request of my caretaker
for I was an Indigenous girl in those branches
divining survival from what green I could see.
Puberty, all constellations a constant
My long last reckoning past starboard.
Pole star above your navel, love, tracking
How to read the orientation of a body
Past dusk. The fact that gravity
Could cull any meadow, sheer milk
Evening primrose a bastion for little
sparrows. It was as if I knew finally
But the immutability of skin called me
Equal parts poise and putrefaction.
Lavender hordes assembling
And disassembling my name.
Bad infinity, no tincture.
Only your face, a solar curtsy.
My wet heredity that can never be erased.