National Poetry Month : Shannon Maguire,

A lien

i stand at the sink

looking through a window

(i am not thinking of Dennis Lee)

my skin bleeds on my hands

as i scrub my hands

i think of W. Benjamin

and translation

the tart pans piled

in the dish rack speak

in echoes of ingredients,

of the lives

and afterlives of recipes,

the foreignness

of cells, the work of the other

inside of a self (as in allergy)

& how translation

has a kinship with cooking

just as an altered tart is a blooming

in the present of a recipe:

Although translation  cooking, unlike art,

cannot claim permanence for its products

[e.g. dairy-free, grain-free etc. butter tarts],

its goal is undeniably a final, conclusive, decisive

stage of all linguistic   culinary creation[1].

“like a fruit & its skin,”

the supposed original cells

of my hands are a harmonious

content & language irretrievably lost

down some drain

in my mother’s young adulthood

& my hands are robeless,

the skin sinks now

& my hands bleed

because they are revitalized

by cell’s kins, imperfect translations,

vital acts

i stand at the skin

it is the screen of my body

(i am thinking of Erín Moure,

who brought me to Benjamin

& the work of language

& translation

& so much more)

“Out there,” the virus copies itself faster

than mechanical reproduction…

& i know to stand at a sink, looking

through this window

a hundred times today

Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario

April 18, 2020

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[1] Walter Benjamin. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, 1968, 2007. p. 75

Shannon Maguire has published two full-length collections of poetry, fur(l) parachute (Book*hug 2013) and Myrmurs: An Exploded Sestina (Book*hug, 2015) as well as four chapbooks, including Fruit Machine (Ferno House), which was a finalist for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. Their poetry has also been a finalist for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and the Manitoba Magazine Awards (Best Suite of Poetry), and they have been published in anthologies and journals including Best American Experimental Writing, 2014. Maguire edited and introduced Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure (Wesleyan UP, 2017). They were also a co-guest editor of a special issue of Contemporary Verse 2 on Northern Ontarian Innovative and Indigenous Poetry and Poetics (Winter 2017).

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