Humanity’s Slow Crawl
Aldona Dziedziejko‘s ‘Mammal Mouth (Linaria Vulgaris)’ won second runner-up in our 2021 Magpie Award for Poetry, and appears in Issue 32, Autumn 2021.
Final judge Renée Sarojini Saklikar praised it for its ‘fantastical images and interesting line breaks coupled with strong verbs and lush sound.‘
And we are delighted to share with you another of Aldona’s wonderful pieces.
Of this new poem, Aldona tells us, “(L)ike ‘Mammal Mouth’ it plays with language. … It is a sort of a riddle that asks the speaker in the poem to describe some common household objects to the ‘you’ in the piece — the reader or someone I may have held a similar conversation with. I investigated the word ‘scavenger’ and let the various meanings guide the stanzas and what I chose to include about what I was seeing around me. The ‘hardscape’ in the title is ironic because it refers to man-made environments, and we are put in the role of scavengers in the poem. At its core, the piece is about communication, technology, origins, as well as a collection of experiences that renders the mundane unfamiliar. I hope I can coax you to see the objects in a new light, to give them new lives.”
Hardscape Scavenger
to scavenge: to refuse
You sit on the kitchen counter
hold tight
my morning
in Aurora and clay.
Your beauty is in
your triple demitasse
heavy and reliable, sneering
at a Royal Albert. My fingers wrapped
around you & the vista outside lingering.
to scavenge: to show
Thin as a mast,
your mantle—long,
slim above, green snowflakes stacked
like stars, you’re well groomed
black-spruced with mystery.
to scavenge: to inspect
River rubble, rocks from the bottom
settled here.
Let grey smoke
wash over your pebbles
pure as charcoal, ash
from bedrock, live crust
once a witness to
humanity’s slow crawl.
to scavenge: to clean
Hanging blonde
you’re supposed to
hold peace in your bleached
braids instead
you heat-stink
of cat piss. A shag marking
its territory. My love cares for you,
brushes you, pours bleach
down your back.
to scavenge: to collect
TV sky – a hologram
that holds Cumulonimbus
in The Simpson’s opening
above houses, fences, lawns.
Cheap and smug, a cartoon picture,
unlike pleinair brushstrokes
in watercolour, no veil
across the horizon.
to scavenge: to refuse
What I did not find
settled on my tired pages, scrawled:
Ceramic mug
Black spruce
Fine pebble gravel
Area rug
Young summer clouds.
What you define as found,
defies what it is that is looked for
and stories are born out of cracks
in crags, as the heat sparks &
spits out precious metals.
to scavenge: to show
I found
a rock that sparkles
in the light
you say you found a device with arteries
of copper, silver, gold spelling out
our messages in tiny windows.
You hold a wire nest for humanity,
I move towards you: like
a magpie, a magician, a gatherer
hold out my semaphore arms
desperate to show you
signals.
To read ‘Mammal Mouth (Linaria Vulgaris)’, and for more from Issue 32, visit our bookstore!
And for your chance to appear in the pages of Pulp and on the blog, enter the Bumblebee Flash Fiction Contest, open now until February 15th!
Aldona Dziedziejko is a first-generation immigrant writer and educator. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in CV2, subTerrain, Poetry is Dead, BAD Dog Review, the Ekphrastic Review, Northern Appeal, Humble Pie, Sky Island Journal, the Capilano Review, Fiction Southeast, and elsewhere. She has also received the Lina Chartrand Poetry Award (CV2). These days, she’s working on a poetry manuscript, Clickbait, that explores the technology/nature dichotomy and human origins. She is a settler and teacher in a Northern Canadian hamlet in the Tlicho region belonging to the Dene people. Visit her on Instagram @mushka_writes, or her blog inlandseas.exposure.co.
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