I Know It’s the Economy

I know, it’s the economy,
but I want
what everybody else wants:
enough money
to stop worrying about money
and a beautiful man
on his knees.

Naive and wire-stripped, I wanted
to fuck you in those fields
but you’ve already
commodified your experience
of fucking someone else
in a field and though
the fields are different
the marketplace treats them
as the same, has taught
me to flatten every time
I’m not first like the
camera crew trampling
their way out of the long grasses
just after sunset and who is
art-directing this?

There are a lot of details
I can’t remember
from being trained
to spy on myself, like
the first time
I pulled back from
my reflection in my own
experience, sickened
and embarrassed
and what use would
a second field be
anyway, all those ticks
when I’m already only handled
by medical professionals
and shared office chairs.

If you charged by the hour
to look at your face
I’d be broke
with all my blood pink
in the surfaces
of my body, a highlighter
that’s flagged every place
I’m ready to be touched.

Is that a compliment
or a business opportunity?

You never pay rent
in my dreams but
I understand the zoning
is a grey area and there’s
the vanishing furniture,
the shifts in prevailing
disasters until I feel guiltier
than a real landlord.

Maybe it’s more like
broadcast traffic: a woman
with an asymmetrical bob
who packed a lunch
working to make sure
you appear to me at
regular intervals.

Or the expected regional
distribution of rainfall
in a season, a natural rhythm or
an adaptive hitch in its gait,
the way I startle rabbits
along the sides of the railpath
after midnight into leaping
across the pavement.

The pastoral
is a construction site,
the late-shift workers’ radios
burr the air with
the staticked purring
of someone else’s money.

I’m trying not to imagine
the suffering of whoever
made the clothes that
I’m imagining us
taking off, I know
they understand what I want
to feel but it changes
the lighting until we’re in
an unbearable lifestyle
pornography. Luxury
spoiling around us,
the captive audience choking
on off-gassing plastics.

There’s so much
I want to send you
if I can find a vessel
marked private
and non-commercial.
Does this entertain
the government
or is it just chewed
by an algorithm
that never flosses?
I’m trying to peel
the label from a bottle
so I can promise
I’ll never sell you out
but send myself downriver
first, floating on my back
trailing iridescent garbage
until my hair catches
in the reeds and turns
my head to the hydro fields
reeling back to the horizon
with the memory of
bruising your hipbones
and now we’re back
where we started and
not close to even –

what, you didn’t think
I was counting? I can’t
keep my hands
out of the till.
 
 

Dead Celebrity Horse Message Board

A room with a crossbreeze and long white curtains
somewhere deep and quiet in the Internet where it’s
impossible to tell whether the bluegrass outside
the window has pixelated. From here, we assign
updates to the registries. We are in the business
of purely professional tragedies – mainly racing
and film – but flickers of undomesticated
misfortunes in one another’s eyes have been
reported. Some of us spook easily. Laminitis –
Euthanized. Pulled Up – Fatally Injured. Unrelated
personal accounts radiate freely from the building,
undocumented. The hallways are floored with dirt,
packed faultless against immaculate baseboards.
You may hear the rumour of trumpets. My favourite
maintenance task is the single-column annual list
of celebrity deaths, every bullet point a hoofprint,
the human names riding the backs of legendary speed
down to the footer where forgetfulness begins work
on the shore. The same force that propelled history,
turned in a direction we deserve. As the tour groups
shuffle through, nametags bearing strings of numbers,
sometimes I hear them say, “I’ve never seen
anything like it.” That makes you like us: stewards
of a wildness that will only deteriorate no matter how
carefully handled, the screenlight dissolving.
 
 
 
Meghan Harrison lives in Toronto. Her poetry has appeared in venues including Matrix, The Puritan, The Antigonish Review, and The Mackinac.