I take you out of my pouch put you in my pipe
inhale you crush me snort me distill me in
the bath I have my metal fillings removed replace
them with you climb into you put two million
tons of thrust behind you spend three months getting
to Mars in you go back millions of years slip into
the bodies of Eocene mammals heading back out to
sea spend fifty million years becoming a whale for
you to fall in love with me to find me fascinating
enough to sketch endless drawings of my baleen my
flippers my blowhole too much of us is never
enough feels simple as God or grief this love just
as infinity as them indestructible as a black box at
the bottom of the sea with obscure squid covered in
flashing neon lights withstanding thousands of pounds
of pressure like the proverbial mother lifting a car off
her baby because I will always be your baby open
the flood gates let adrenaline wash me clean as
I fight off every villain from every fairytale bring them
to me I will eat their beating hearts with one foot
rocking your cradle when I say I want you back
inside my body or I want to be back inside your
body in a past life when you were the mother I
don’t mean a body back inside a body I mean your
sludge inside my goo or maybe resting on top of it
or maybe my haze spread over your dew like
a thin layer of algae or a line of cumulus cloud
on the horizon our ghosts intermingling one half-
dream breathing the other I mean motherness is close
to godliness I mean on the ninth day our Holy Mother
created life put it in her pipe and smoked it
Geneviève Paiement is a Montreal-born journalist turned poet. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Guardian (UK), Salon.com, Vice, Minola Review, The Southampton Review Online, The Malahat Review and elsewhere. She was a 2019 Antioch-Frontier Fellowship finalist and a top-three finalist for the 2019 Kurt Brown Poetry Prize. This September she will begin her poetry candidacy in the University of Guelph’s Creative Writing MFA program. She lives in Toronto with her husband and son.
