Invertebrate Poems

BY JIM JOHNSTONE
ILLUSTRATION BY TAKASHI IWASAKI

Born in Hokkaido, Japan, Takashi Iwasaki moved to Winnipeg in 2002 to do his undergraduate degree in fine arts at the University of Manitoba. He now calls the city home. His most major artistic endeavor has been the creation of a visual diary, which is the creative expression of joy and playfulness in his everyday life. takashiiwasaki.info 

Little Dipper

The new math ruined a generation.
– Karen Solie

At forty-five degrees, the night sky
contains everything you need to know –
an unseen ticker tape of asterisms,
atmospheric pressure and its metric
improbabilities. Any replicable method
is worth more than its outcome.
Take the angular distance to the moon
from a bright star. When Cook set out
to deconstruct the ocean, tear into
its vertical alignment of surf, his vessel
wailed and burst on Hawaiian shores,
a banshee trying to throw its voice
through land. Somewhere in the scrap
heap of flagstaff, the dead lay
down their instruments. Later
it was our fathers who assembled
the Little Dipper from spare rebar –
its rusty sums worn out, worn through.
They knew enough to keep the sun
at their backs, commit elemental grace
to memory – footprints unseen
from the wicker gondolas of balloons.
In the new world we discovered
what it was to look down, to name again –
rivers emptied of their fractured
smiles, our fists of coloured stone. 

Signs and Wonders

The last time he had tried to do it, his method had been, in the
doctor’s words, a masterpiece of inventiveness; he would have
succeeded, had not an envious fellow patient thought he was learning
to fly – and stopped him.
– Vladimir Nabokov

Cast from the incline
of a Dallas book depository,

even the smallest crabapple
can sound a warning.

Under an umbrella, you might
miss it – a blooded insect

learning to heft its meal
and fly, knowing to excuse

itself underfed. In another
place, at another time

I would have given you ten
different fruit jellies

in ten different jars. But here,
thrown from this height

while counting out quick
breaths, I have no idea

who will receive this gift,
or where the glass will leak.

The Wash of Flares

Not the window, but the pulse of bell-ringers,
the night beyond glass. Stepping from a postcard
of riveted sugar cane and painted marlins,
my brother and I sink to our ankles in sand.
Spit to stamp. Having slept through hurricanes,
dreamt the Demon with a Glass Hand,
we emerge and set our pliant fins to the ocean,
phosphorescence bubbling in the gulf weeds.
Exposed, all we have is the voice of the sea,
duplicitous tongues that erase our tracks,
the urgency of our gait. Reef a blush of pink,
we stretch the mechanics of our limbs,
discover mobility without love.
My brother brightens his remaining fingers
in the wash of flares, wades to the shore
like Gilgamesh in defeat. Stepping clean of salt,
feral cats scatter at the sight of our plain bodies,
overfed, too pale to belong in Holguín.
We are helpless in this country, know
movement, but not life. 

Frederick Banting and Charles Best Consider the Pancreas

An iron-collared hound, tied off, blue cheeks puffed to anger.

A sweet-toothed child, the cave of her fingers tacked with chocolate buttons.

An exocrine gazelle, 80 km/h.

A dorsal-finned Cadillac fuelled on agar, nose rubbed into life.

The rainbow husk of Jackson Pollock’s shoes.

An inferior stomach, hairpinned to the bowels of a rabbit hole.

A one-trick pony.

David Blaine, prop cuffs and marbled torso, drowned alive. 

Fisher Projection

Unable to pay the rent, we came
to Exhibition Stadium to win –
pennies rubbed black,
the Queen’s portrait etched
on our palms. Swapped
for ruddy metal, our tickets
burned clean through fabric,
demanded speed and height,
the unpinned cages of The Zipper.
Mounting the monolith’s steel
link by enantiomeric link,
swing no more big band
than Gus Arnheim, the carriages
rocked their way towards
pinwheel clouds, our feet
clothespins on the horizon.
Knit into sagging fibreglass,
we suspected our marooned
silo of limbs too porous
to fly, killed minutes
holding chiral hands
opposite the afternoon’s bright
shards. Of course, the stillness
didn’t last. Vomit rose
and burrowed in our throats
with each mechanized bend,
each volley of force
that bore our weight,
our fear that this was simply
a rehearsal for steps we would retrace,
padding towards something bona fide,
genuine – forever.