Nora Fulton
Cold Chain
The three of us met at the celebration.
The process took much longer once
but, as a celebration, it slowly began to pride
itself on being indistinguishable from utter defeat
and started to coo more and more
at its living bridle.
The first time we looked at it
was the time we looked at it together,
and that circumspection, aka “our tray,”
née huge red flag, used to go by
the name of the bit.
It was like the way in which
your unpunished friends
hide something in your mouth
right before your punishment,
and tell you it will help.
It went by, the being together,
as cargo moves from bay to bay.
The celebration was a task
one of us called the “sidereal layout.”
One of us called it “the way we do it here,”
and one of us called it
“cinderblock formation.”
First in, last out.
And we bonded over it
at the back of it
through a sore jaw.
Permision
Here’s another
way of putting
it. A man, note man,
sees a pile of rope
in the corner of
the room he is staying in
during his brief
visit, or
sees a coiled snake in
the corner of the room
he is staying in during
his brief visit.
The room is pitch
black before and after his
brief visit.
The pile
says it wants what the man
wants, but the man has to
touch it to find out
which it is, snake or rope,
which he won’t do
because of the possibility
of danger.
In an attempt to
determine the identity of the
pile, the man goes outside
to snap a branch
off the quote-unquote magnificent
alder his grandfather, note grandfather,
brought to
the new country from the
old, back when he lived
and fought as an insurgent,
as debris,
in the mountains.
The grandfather
would tell this story to the man,
note man, when the man was a
boy, note boy, detailing
how the occupiers couldn’t
or didn’t want to
claw their way
up the switchback road
to where his family granary,
oil press and dried goods
store stood, where his home
stood,
because the journey there
would have
required more resources
than could be looted therein;
instead, a mortar
was aimed at the ancestral alder—
not at any building or wing
of the ample estate, but at the
tree— and their aim was good,
which, the grandfather always said,
eyes
welling with tears,
struck him as somehow
worse than the rest of the
occupation, since “their aim
was never good.”
Sometimes in the story the grandfather
took a charred
seed from that
ruined tree and planted it
when he emigrated;
sometimes in the
story it was
already
growing in the
field where
he built a new
home, and thus had
functioned as an omen
showing that his choice
to do so
was pure.
Anyway, the man needs
the branch to determine
the identity of
the pile that could
have been the rope or could
have been the snake or was
the snake or was the rope
in the corner
of his room
in his wing
of the great house, and he
has broken something off the tree, the new
tree or the remnant of the old tree, but he
drops it, and fumbles
in the dark through the dark
moss that grows
where the alder bars all light.
In the dark, with the snap
of dry wood still
echoing, the man
sees a
shape laying a foot
away that could be
the branch and the night fills
with what he feels in response
to the shape.
But to repeat, it is dark,
and the shape could therefore be a
snake, or could be a snake, or could
be a rope, or could be a rope, and the
pile
that is
still in the corner
of the room in the empty
house has been talking
about how it wants
what he wants.
Nora Fulton lives in Montreal, where she is currently pursuing a doctorate focused on philosophy, trans theory and poetics. She has published three books of poetry: Thee Display, from Anteism/CEP (2020), Presence Detection System, from Hiding Press (2019), and Life Experience Coolant, from Bookthug (2013). Nora's poems have been published in Social Text, Homintern, Some Magazine and elsewhere. Her critical and theoretical work can be found in Radical Philosophy, The Poetry Project, Music and Literature and more.