National Poetry Month : Kayla Czaga,

THE FUTURE

Did you know the queen
has two birthdays?
I read that in a book
of facts I picked up
the other day in a bookstore.
The book was helpfully
titled 1001 FACTS.
Just knowing about
the queen’s birthdays
makes me feel
as if a thin membrane
has been peeled off
my unknowing and it—
my unknowing—
throbs pink and raw
and possible. Fact:
a group of salamanders
is not a slither,
but it’s a rhumba
of rattlesnakes,
a currency of queens.
Factually I pushed
the book back
into its wedge of shelf.
It resisted—other
books had expanded
to fill the absence,
as if 1001 FACTS had
already been forgotten.
I don’t know what
I’m supposed to be
doing in this
long vague afternoon
that is adulthood
with no real occupation,
much money or children
but at the bookstore
my purpose felt
tangible. I would
learn 1001 FACTS.
I would learn Tolkien
used Finnish as a base
for Elvish grammar.
I would learn everything
humans know
about the mangrove
killifish which spends
its nonviolent
hermaphroditic existence
mostly off the coast of Mexico
but can live for
sixty-six days on land
breathing through its skin.
Then my purpose evaporated
like peach juice.
I left the bookstore
and entered a street
so infected with tourists
I forgot everything.
Is learning facts from
glossy books a sort of
knowledge tourism
I wondered fleetingly
while I watched
a woman wipe mustard
from the blooming face
of her progeny
and say something
that sounded scolding
yet sweet in a language
I didn’t recognize.
The official birthday
of the queen
is celebrated by the state.
Her second birthday
is the private day
she slid into the world,
sticky and naked
as anybody.
I wonder if the queen
when she’s alone
knows what
she should be doing
or if she stands
in her birthday suit
in front of the mirror
and says, “huh” how I do.
Except the queen
probably doesn’t have
so much crap tattooed
all over her body.
Could knowing about
the Nazi weather station
in Newfoundland
actually improve
anyone’s inner life?

Could knowing anything
do anything more
than aggregate more
collective anxiety?
I want to say yes,
yes knowledge is precious,
yes the future exists and
yes we will live there
together, breathing
poems through our skin
but I am uncertain—

I (with my second
hidden name
used only for tests
and travelling
which is the same
as the queen’s)
am royally uncertain.
In the time it took me
to flip through 1001 FACTS
and write this all down
the only thing
I know for certain
is somewhere
a fact has been born.
One day it may be
printed in a book.
Someone has travelled
historically fast.
A monument has collapsed.
In Namibia, several
impala have nibbled
a radioactive plant
that will cause
their offspring’s
offspring to glow.

Kayla Czaga is the author of two collections of poetry—For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions, 2014) and Dunk Tank (House of Anansi, 2019). You can find out more about her at kaylaczaga.com or @kaylaczaga on twitter.

National Poetry Month 2015: Kayla Czaga,

The Commissar Vanishes

       Biography of Nikolai Yezhov, former head of the NKVD


On the line, you sign Nikolai; you unpeople                                                   1939
and unsign.  You twist the tourniquet
until your skin purples.  Stalin has paperwork
on paperwork on you.  The days are too gray
for ghosts.  Stalin, you salute; Stalin has paperwork
on the line, in the alley. In the alley, you unmouth
mouths until they say, da, and sign.  Turn and turn
the tourniquet.             Half-bent over                                                             1937
the bathtub, her scream on top of your scream.
You bleach the woman’s shadow
from your walls, watch it wallow down
the drain.  Her body cracking, filled with midnight,
filled with Nikolai.       Stalin’s height is carved                                               1930
into your doorframes. You salute it in insomnia,
needling another vein off its hinges—your blooded
whites, lids black and buried beneath cheekbones. 
A black-haired ghost, her coal-swollen throat
mumbles, Nikolai.                   Faces fall off,
half your foot gone, and the ground blooms
bodies.  Still your name sticks, Nikolai stitched
into your pockets by a ghost—who was she?  You shoot                                1921
white soldiers until they turn red, the country turns
red.  The country blossoming with bodies—who
was she?                                  Each road is her
broken spine.  Each night you hunch
in farmers’ fields, eating rats and weeds.
The ghost leans into your shadow, asks you
to unremember her name.  Already it is a coat
you left behind.  Each syllable unravels.  Weather
mutters it, now, Nikolai—the windsocks inhale
her name.                    

                                    In your birthplace,                                                       1915
they bury Marya in the roots
of the town’s only tree.  In her life, she tightropes
tombstones, steals golden teeth.  You call her
little pickpocket, burrow into her                                                                    1909
body like grave dirt.                 Days you stalk
school grounds, trade punches for marbles
for Marya.  You and Marya skip                                                                     
school to steal vodka and oranges.  You and Marya.
She tastes like oatmeal.           In the decade-long
dusk, your mother shreds cabbage while you deflate
the hearts of neighbourhood cats.  She is
singing, Nikolai, Nikolai.                     For so long
you have been a small child in the Siberian snow,
shin-deep.                    She is singing, Nikolai.                                                1895

Kayla Czaga is the author of For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions, 2014), which was recently nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She lives in Vancouver.