Two Poems: No Credit River by Zoe Whittall

I Don’t Know Where I’m Flying Until I Get to the Airport

I hand the agent my ticket, expecting to go to Regina but it’s for Saskatoon. It’s the most Toronto moment of my life and I’m ashamed with my red purse full of ChapStick and downers and breath mints. In Moose Jaw I have a spider bite on my arm that grows, glowing pink into red, and the pharmacist says it’s nothing to worry about but I do. I give readings and think about my arm the whole time. The redness gets hot to the touch and reaches my elbow, which the internet says isn’t good. I’m worried it’s going to start speaking to me. I always choose to worry, especially about dying of sepsis in a Moose Jaw hotel room before I’ve had a chance to have a baby. That’s not my third act! A reporter asks me to hold my book so that he can take a photo, and the next day it’s on the front page of the newspaper. There is a hot pool on the roof of the hotel. I talk to a writer about her toddler at home. I talk to another single woman about how she wants to have a kid soon too. I look around at the afterparty and I think, Perhaps this is my chance. I’m only allowed to look for a fling but I’m subconsciously looking for a co-parent. But my worry beams from me. No one is attracted to the anxious. And mostly writers aren’t attractive to other writers, it’s like two tops or two solipsists. When I meet straight married writers I can always tell which one has had their dreams crushed while doing the dishes for a partner with a literary prize on a shelf in a basement once. I go back to my room to read. If I always choose to read, my memoir will be mundane, I realize, running a finger down the room service menu after cracking another spine. Ten years later, before editing this old poem, I am sitting in the green chair by the window on Yarmouth Road during the second lockdown. I find out the woman with the toddler, now a tween, has a dire cancer diagnosis. The other woman is out on bail for trying to protect her child from an abusive father. I bring home a kitten born the month I was supposed to give birth. At the Moose Jaw airport all the writers pull out their notebooks when the flight is delayed and say, I can’t wait to read your new book, to each other like the peace be with you mumble in church.

Tell Me How You Know What You Know

You didn’t realize the apology plant was plastic; I watered it for two weeks before I noticed. On Halloween you said, Let’s watch scary movies about snakes, or zombies, or intimacy. Eight years old, playing hide-and-seek: while your friend counted to ten, you just walked home. West of Winnipeg, the rain was within sight, so you drove for forty-five minutes to catch it. South of Big Sur, we are thirty-nine in a rented guest suite with a pool. You are almost a doctor. We are a swarm of secrets in good salt. Your two fears: being smothered, being abandoned. San Luis Obispo, an infinity pool: you’re the teacher, the no-boundaries boss, the skater with two criminals for friends. My fears: open spaces, literal powerlessness.

Your sons don’t like surprises. The river rises, the youngest grabs my hand. I’m the shoreline’s soft shoulder, tolerating uncertainty. We are suddenly the adults now? I tattoo his tiny arm with a pink pony, feel my hips and mouth sharpen, ready to fight off any danger.

Thirty-nine, without a baby, a female body becomes indecipherable, to the waitress at Montana’s, our extended family, and now even the other queers. When we walk the tender red landscape in Arizona, I stand at the altar for dead husbands and children at the base of the mountain. I count to ten. I think you are hiding, but you rise behind the saguaro, alone.

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ZOE WHITTALL is the author of the short story collection Wild Failure, and five bestselling novels including The Fake, The Spectacular, The Best Kind of People, Holding Still for as Long as Possible, and Bottle Rocket Hearts. Her previous poetry collections include Pre-cordial Thump, The Emily Valentine Poems, and The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life. Her work has won a Lambda Literary Award, the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Award, and been shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She has worked as a TV writer on the Emmy-Award winning comedy show Schitt’s Creek and The Baroness Von Sketch Show for which she won a 2018 Canadian Screen Award. She was born in the Eastern Townships of Quebec and now lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

Photo of Zoe by N Maxwell Lander.

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