by andrebabyn

If I’m going to be irresponsible I might as well be that way with writing. I make lots of room for interruption—not only because I am burnt out, as I tell myself daily, but because I am cultivating feeling interrupted, something I’ve worked on for a long while. 

Would it be possible to go back to who I was before the pandemic? Sure, I still felt lost in things from time to time, but I was never very far from me. Or at least that’s how it often feels, looking back now. I must remind myself that I have felt this numerous times in my life, and even then. Thinking that there was something I could go back to, when I was more thoughtful and intelligent. It is dangerous to feel so consumed by nostalgia for something that never really was.

Remember Sam Lipsyte’s words: writing is a competition, not a race. Was writing here for one reason: to scrape out the inside of my brain. To turn it out, read my own insides for clues.

If I’m going to put anything off, it should be to read. Even if I don’t do it carefully. Why am I alive if not to read, and write, and love?

Reading is its own end. Reading brings me closer. Last night I approached the agitation necessary for writing. The agitation and passion that is the beginning of anything and which I have not felt in a long time, not like that.

Like a boil rising on my skin but something impossible comes out, a horn perhaps, or music. Like I’m firing a gun into the night without a target. Scattershot—like in high school, watching a TV or reading science fiction or going outside and looking at the trees, feeling a vague buzzing that I want to capture but don’t quite know how. 

by andrebabyn

rich white people don’t give a fuck 
my sweater brings you joy

I am at the cafe crushing on death
you invite me to a movie screening

I am sending your unborn child emails 
they are an extension of me

on the balcony I risk a $2000 fine
amnesia and impulsivity, decaf flat white

I can withhold this info
I say yes even though it’s inadvisable 

if Vicky is working turn espresso machine on
go to work and make the rounds

linger and love getting dressed
to walk home in snow

when the laser hits me 
you are still there

by andrebabyn

The body in pain. The pain of the body and its torture. Distending, distorting, rending, and tearing. In the thirteenth century The Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Margarete, Olibrius the wicked demands that Saint Margaret’s living body be torn to pieces so thoroughly that he might count all her sinews, producing a bloody stream that disgusts onlookers, so horrible that even the governor himself can’t make himself look at it. This text isn’t for undergraduates, or at least not without context, as it has been placed here, thrown in between Beowulf and Bisclavret on the syllabus and uncommented on in lecture. An evil little piece of pornography, meant to stimulate faith in God by overwhelming the senses, The Passion of the Christ as produced by the director of Hostel, the opposite of Augustine’s friend Alypius being excited by the sound of the Roman games and opening his shut eyes to revel in the carnage taking place in the stadium below. 

Olibrius orders his executioners to cast her in prison “on the pain of death,” as if there would be resistance on any grounds to halting her mutilation (it could only conceivably be compassion, or a desire to end her suffering). The pain of death is the pain of the body, the pain of want and need unsatisfied on earth. No body is ever fully satisfied, no body ever gets what it wants, even if what it wants is right there in front of it, food or love or anything else entering into its emptiness but never passing behind that final veil. Two earthly lovers entertwined still peer out at each other from windows in locked towers, taking in as much as can be taken in but left wanting more. A teeter-totter tipping back and forth. Hell is the body personified: fleshy, corrupted, demanding, stinking, and violent—everything awful about the body is exaggerated and magnified, like in the kingdom of Brobdignag, the suppurating cancer in the giant breast of a beggar that Gulliver cannot tear his eyes away from. What’s Olibrius after? He wants Saint Margaret to be his wife, and when she says no he enacts the pain that somewhere his body must feel: his empty, stinking, rotting body, the desire of flesh that will, one way or another, itself lose its sinews, a loss and a violence that through Margaret he enacts on himself, putrefying any hope of ever entering into its absence. 

by andrebabyn

I’LL NEVER KNOW HOW TO HIDE

we both own bathrobes now
the long walk to the breakfast table
standing at the counter while the water boils
light searing through the patio doors

I’m naked under mine
a minor thrill—he’s fully dressed. my legs cross beneath
the newspaper. silk against my open flesh
it never quite keeps me out

he’ll never know the static jolt
homes stacked on homes looking into ours
like Arctic terns—we are just birds in holes
and he, wrapped inside his nest

by andrebabyn

Signs of a stroke. Slurring speech, dizziness, eyes blurring. I keep repeating myself but I have not had a stroke. For a long time this summer I would stand up and feel dizzy and my vision would blur for a few moments, but this is not sign of a stroke although it can be an indication of susceptibility to one. In the car coming back from Pontypool I could not remember the name of something I thought I should remember. I can’t remember it now, but that might be because I spent so long concentrating driving through rains and mist. I couldn’t remember the name of a famous Canadian Literary scholar who had knowingly brought an abuser to the university and placed him in a position where he would be working with vulnerable people. I couldn’t remember the name of a friend we had both seen on Zoom. And now I am reading your book, a book about a man in decline, who is losing his memory. I haven’t had a stroke. 

There are things we all regret. One thing I always regret bringing up, but I do, I think because there is a part of it I am still figuring out and I would like to understand it. Only because for so long I only saw one side, where I was the problem, the only problem (we both agreed on this), and I wanted to be gentle, and generous, and to give more of myself than I should have ever given, and that made things worse. And for the record no one was particularly bad on either side, even though I had every right to be angry and even to be suspicious. But the bad feelings have lingered because I’m just starting to figure that out now, the dynamic, from a position of distance and safety, and because a childhood into which I was forced to rationalize injustice means I feels it more acutely even when it no longer matters. It is a sort of deflection of injustice that is long past. 

“The medieval home was the place of birth and death, and the scene of an unending struggle against squalor and confusion; women’s tasks of feeding, cleansing, and comforting demanded incessant labour and courage, demands from which men were shielded by the supposedly larger responsibilities of the public world. If God relinquished his transcendence to take on human flesh, it was not to step boldly on to the cross as a liberating warrior but to become a cloth hung up to dry, to undergo the ‘feminine’ squalor of blood and water, herring scales, and rain; and one effect of Julian’s writing is to confront the hidden but inescapable horrors of the body and the home.” —A.C. Spearing, introduction to Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love

by andrebabyn

Self-Portrait as the Moon

What does it mean to be so far off
to cycle between phases, to shift so dramatically
over the course of a month?
I am the moon, and the moon is somewhere else
and in that place where the moon is, there 
is nothing: footsteps and craters, visible impacts 
that disappear when it is new. 
To get to the moon would take a long time—it takes so long
to drive to. So long to get your car 
up into the air. So many little pit stops along the way.
Some say that what is lost on earth finds its home
out there. I have always believed this.
But what is there isn’t lost.
It is simply somewhere else.

by andrebabyn

On the back porch I saw first its long pale foot
Five grey fingers, two twisted into themselves 

I thought the raccoon was dead, on its back, 
head dangling over the fifteen foot drop

(a couple days since I’d last gone on the deck)
But it slowly blinked its eyes

Lay with his soft belly up to the sun, me
with legs crossed over the sunburnt table

Magic is when two things combine 
An excess that makes sense but defies 

understanding, like when you pick up the phone
and who you meant to call is on the other end:

It doesn’t matter what moved the planchette
what spelled such outrageous words

when the board was placed over our knees 
there was already something waiting

by andrebabyn

OBITUARY FOR MYSELF

after Victoria Chang

On August 25, 2021, at two in the afternoon. An overcast day, but still swollen with heat. While his parents were eating lunch. On the corner of Bathurst and Dundas a truck took a turn through a red, and he was crushed running for the streetcar parked on the south side of the intersection. Two men in blue oxfords watched as his body splished in several directions. One of the men had been on the point of shouting a warning, the other, thinking that he would stop, had been ready to say “Close call,” in an ironic or detached tone of voice. André had recently become very good at filling in holes between baseboards and floorboards, kneeling and letting the latex seal in the gaps as he pressed it at a forty-five degree angle. There were more still to fill. He had a dream in which he stood outside his own window, begging himself to be let in. “Don’t you recognize me?” he would ask. As a child he would stand out by the compost heap and listen to the coyotes howling in the trees. He was never really a child. Dreams where he ran from something but never quite escaped, dreams where he approached monuments forever distant, etc. Never slept on his back except when held in the “koala position,” a terminology he was ultimately unsure if he had invented. It will take years to vacuum out the weight of him from his apartment, leaning and heaving with his dead life. Survived by his parents, two or three provinces away, his three siblings, scattered in various directions, a niece, and the stains made on the two blue oxfords, which will never come out. 

by andrebabyn

Staying in a beaver’s studio—logs, half-chewed, piled up over the unused campsite. We didn’t leave until ten the next morning, and then were late that evening, scrambling in choppy water to find a place to stay, as the sun made its descent. But that first night was getting used to the sounds outside our thin nylon walls. Stefan said it sounded like something descended a tree right next to us after we had gone to bed, then paused, as if registering our presence for the first time. We saw the beaver do a sweep as we waited for our potatoes to cook, looking towards the campfire with disappointment, acknowledging that its worksite would be transformed. I woke up in the middle of the night to a loon calling in the night, from the little bay behind us which we would cross the next morning en route to the portage. For fifteen minutes it made one eerie call after another, sounding either like frantic grieving or harried madness. Only in the morning, after I asked and no one else had heard it, did I wonder if it was Tom Thomson’s ghost. We were on his lake and had passed his cairn the previous afternoon. In the choppy water early next evening we resolved finally to take shelter on the first open site—landed on the bald back face of an island, clinging to it as the wind rocked our boats. We brought them up the hill and then discovered that the campsite on the other end was empty and that there were trails running to either side. An ideal spot, except for two little plastic flutes that someone had left by the tents, one white, one blue. Superstitiously, we did not touch them. I had recently watched a movie where doing so brings bad luck. That night, after the bros across the way went to bed, I heard a wolf howling: first far away, then close to their campsite, directly across the water. And in the morning it was choppy again, but it didn’t matter—we were staying put. I had tore something in my shoulder the previous evening, so when we left the day after, when the water settled again, fire burned hot in my arm whenever I dipped in the oar.

by andrebabyn

BRANDON’S END

for Neil Surkan

Me and Steve crossed the water with our improvised line
using beer tabs as hooks, leftover sausage as bait—that salty shit
we couldn’t finish the first night, not even Doug 
who threw his into the fire before everyone else, something souring 
when I offered him the rest of mine.
I’m not your garbage disposal, he said
disappearing into the bush.
Someone said the box was about to go off
—it might have been me. Soon we heard its echo.
There he goes, I said, as it trumpeted, grinding it up.
As the water rocked us Steve told me about his engagement,
how Karly had posted the video on Facebook, how it had got 
two hundred and fifty likes. On the island next to ours 
a woman kicked in the water.
Throw her some sausage, I said—
Steve only laughed. I tried to get the canoe closer
to see if we couldn’t hook some part of her, but Steve steered us away.
Doug was standing out by the shore when we got closer
in one of his moods.
Catch anything? he asked us, over the lake.
Do you seriously still have room? I asked him, still pissed
that he had polished off the chips that morning.
How red his face got when he lifted the rock
crying that if we came any closer he’d sink us—
I just made a whirring noise
like a trash compactor choking on bone.
Steve laughed as Doug heaved the large grey stone towards us, slipping
through the air—it’s hard to dodge when you’re out on the water 
hard to miss the shale as it slaps into your side