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Two Poems: Daddy
In their new collection of poems, Daddy (Brick Books), Jake Byrne mines patriarchy and trauma and turns it into a joyful exploration of queer desire, seeking to re-form the pain of the past. Read the poems “A poem about my pet canary I” and “edging” from Daddy below.
Two Poems from Daddy by Jake Byrne
A POEM ABOUT MY PET CANARY I
Some lessons are best learned the hard way.
All living things
Need food,
Water, a place to sleep
That isn’t covered in shit and
Feathers, takeout containers.
Even a bird
Gold as sun
On spring wind.
I wanted him to alight on my hand.
He never did.
I was seven, had no discipline,
Was permitted to choose my own pet
With a sworn promise I’d care for the bird alone.
If I wanted to cage
Warm-throated sunshine, I was
Going to have to work each day to keep it there.
Light, what it does is move.
It flies. It passes through things.
It doesn’t wait for you. It couldn’t
If it wanted to.
It sings, but in July
Will require water
Twice a day, at least.
At seven, I had difficulty
Grasping the magnitude
Of my commitment.
The Trojans were only
The first ones to learn
That a gift
Is often synonymous
With a trap
edging
on the precipice of a terrible moment in history
i turned toward a screen
i hated the derisory tone of the word screen
as i loved and hated the screens themselves
but like “being alive in the present”
i had no suitable alternatives
my worth was quantifiable: i reduced myself
into syrup
down to essences net worth
data biometrics
i texted him i’m too depressed to fuck
he said sorry to hear that but
i can’t wait to lick your hole again
dude read the room
i ghosted whatever joke’s on
me
the hole was my entire mind and body
two weeks later he followed me
into a convenience store and down my street
i thus resolved my fitness goals: to become unapproachable
to become
qualia ejecta corporate responsibility
a commitment to diversity
histamine-seared a ring in an ear
a broken cascade
of lysosomes a ring of shaggy inkcaps
the wisdom hid in mycelia we never learned
on the crank of widened gyre
DADDY didn’t love them
so they fell in love with tyrants
DADDY didn’t love me
so i fell on my knees
for his deputies, lieutenants
his acting subsidiaries
mother couldn’t hold me though she tried
so i sought her breasts in drugs and candy
and i liked it
i liked it like that
we all did we were living
in a narrative we did not understand
there were ICBMs suspended in the air
there were notifications pending
gleaming in the glass but there were also autumn leaves
glinting gold and rotting in the pass
there was a logic to it i couldn’t grasp
when i tore it up on the dance floor
in my lycra fetish wear
when i stomped my feet
when i shook my ass
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Jake Byrne is a poet and writer based in Toronto, Canada. Their work has been published in journals and anthologies in North America. Their poem “Parallel Volumes” won CV2’s Foster Poetry Prize for 2019, and their first two books of poetry are Celebrate Pride with Lougheed Martin (Wolsak & Wynn, 2023) and Daddy (Brick Books, 2024).
Photo of Jake credit Liam Ruehst.
* * *
To purchase a copy of Daddy from us or your favourite indie bookstore, click here.
For more from Two Poems, click here.
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