I crossed the border from Niagara Falls to Buffalo by foot and knew just where it was. I set a glass of water on the porch at night and watched it freeze precisely. I knew when life left and you specifically lay dead. At the base of my chin, I can see the discrete line that marks the end of my neck end and the immediate start of the soft fleshy tiny coddled baby of my face skin, the sudden demand of a 10 step k-beauty routine.
If I can’t write anything today I’ll write it tomorrow. I’m in Toronto for the weekend: I walk into the LCBO and buy two cans of Old Style Pilsner. I go to a house party and Yes! The government weed works. Over there sits a forgotten fever. Over here is a pitcher full up of chocolate milk and a lick of salt to make it more itself. Laugh and untangled your dog’s leash from mine. I use the Gmail autocomplete “Yes, that works” function to respond to an acquaintance, an employer, and then to a friend. What if I told you I’m being the fool. I dressed up like Roy Orbison. I dressed up like a mime. The moon walked along all the while.
I sit on an airplane and learn from the bilingual packaging that pretzel in French is bretzel. I sit on an airplane and have a brand new invasive thought that because you can bring lighters on to a plane you could make a duty free molotov cocktail. Yes, that works.
| Erika Verhagen |
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levelheaded: I crossed the border from Niagara Falls to Buffalo by foot
At the heart of this week’s prose-poem by Erika Verhagen’s is the idea of borders, whether literal or figurative, how one place or action or emotional state can be a small step away from another, different one. In the poem’s opening sentence, the speaker reflects on crossing a literal border, presumably from Canada into Buffalo. Line two, they recall having witnessed a glass of water morph into ice, crossing a border from one state (of matter!) to another. The speaker then reflects on life leaving “you,” a change that causes you to “specifically lay dead.”
This idea of specificity feels essential to the poem. Proper nouns like “Toronto,” “LCBO,” “Old Syle Pilsner,” and “Roy Orbison” lend a sense of immediacy to the work. Similarly, specific, often comical actions and proclamations (“I go to a house party and Yes! The government weed works”) welcome us into the poem. The speaker takes the sweet (“a pitcher full up of chocolate milk”) and pairs it with “a lick of salt to make it more itself.” Here, and in the poem as whole, Verhagen seems to be making a statement about the way one thing is informed by, even brought into being by, by sits across from it.
For all the poem’s specificity, Verhagen doesn’t shy away from larger ideas, moving, as she does in the first sentence of the second stanza, from “today” to “tomorrow.” The big ideas aren’t always so obvious though. While stanza three starts with a silly contemplation of how “pretzel in French is bretzel,” that humorous moment crosses a border of sorts as it gives way to a “brand new invasive thought.” As the speaker contemplates how easy it would be for one to “make a duty free molotov cocktail” on a plane, we’re left to contemplate how thin, how easy-to-cross any border, be it physical or moral or other, is to cross, and, perhaps more importantly, how potentially dangerous the consequences of that crossing can be.
– The Editors
