Poetry by Anna Swanson
Let’s Build a Theme Park For All Our Bad Ideas
Let’s strap them to fireworks
& let them make out
with anyone they want.
Cheer as they step into the machine
& spin themselves into cotton
candy. Let’s feed them matches
& tell them about every time
we stayed alive by accident.
Fill condom machines with
mini donuts. Pour gasoline
high-balls & make introductions.
Build them a two-story tire fire
& a jump at the end
of the roller coaster. Let them
have it all. Leave them their chorus
of glass bottles & collar bones.
Brick walls to break against. Whatever
they need of pain & consequence.
Let them keep even the morning after
& the hole in the sky. When they sleep
at last, remove from their grasp
the remainder of our precious lives
so they do not have so much to carry
in their beautiful burning hands.
I Have Spent All Day Trying to Have a Voice
that is mine. I walk into the cold lake
in underwear I pretend is a bathing suit
& my body stalls, inelegantly up to the thighs.
Why am I like this with everything
I care about, gathering my weak will
around me in shreds? Wound is the word
of the year. All those muscle poems rolling up
their sleeves like sports cars. Hiding vulnerability
behind the lip gloss of vulnerability.
Irony introduces its earnest shadow-self
with all the feels. Same aesthetic distance,
only this one means what it says. So why can’t I
say what I mean? I who have lain down beside
other people’s wounds, the blank faces
& flat voices. I who have explained
what kind of ruined I would be if those wounds
won. I have broken my own emergency glass
& uncoiled into the abyss without requirements.
I have offered my body like a stepladder.
I feel something again, he’d say, always just
at the moment I no longer did. You’re the only
place I’m safe, she’d say, no longer needing
to threaten what she’d do by morning
if I left. You love me unconditionally, you said,
that night, in small-voiced wonderment, as I sank
below the surface of asking. Or knowing. Or no.
Anna Swanson (she/her) is a queer writer and librarian living in St. John’s, NL/Ktaqmkuk. Her writing is interested in themes of chronic illness, concussion, embodiment, Jewish ritual, queerness, and survival joy. Her first book of poetry, The Nights Also, won the Gerald Lampert Award and a Lambda Literary Award. She also works with Riddle Fence as a poetry editor, and loves wild swimming in all seasons.
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