Broom Broom. Brecken Hancock
BROOM
BROOM
Brecken Hancock
Coach House Books | Toronto, Ontario
Copyright © Brecken Hancock, 2014
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Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Hancock, Brecken
Broom Broom / Brecken Hancock – First edition.
Poems.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
eISBN 978-1-77056-379-7
I. Title.
PS8579.M359P74 2013 cC811′.54 C2013-907669-7
For The Moms
I will go back to the great sweet mother, Mother and lover of men, the sea. I will go down to her, I and none other, Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me. – Swinburne
Mommy, I’d rather have you dead than crazy. – Yoko Ono
PROLOGUE
BEFORETIMES. Uranus culls his gilded camels and bathes in the Baikal, the Zaysan, the Lanao. He wades in low-lying plains, spas in every rain-filled meteor crater. Sixty-fourth parallel, March. Sunlight fires a salvo off his lover’s collarbone. Gaia’s slums hoard water, Asmat mud and patches of pubic forest. Her valleys are aqueducts feeding antechambers of lakes: caravans of bathtubs clawing overland talon by talon according to deep time, glacial wake, geochemistry. Lake Agassiz Basin. Morass hollow, calderas. Gathering my hair off the pillow, I rise from the spill on our sheets to bathe. Oceanus – Titan of the brutish Atlantic, master of Ketos and Kraken, conductor of sky to land. Half-man, half-serpent; horizon marks the fix. Biceps of accumulated cloud ceiling the sea. He’ll rip your ship apart for a violin. His tail’s a woman’s braid dropped deep. And over its mucus and muscled carbuncles, legions of mollusc princes ascend, knot by knot by octopus tapas – crabs’ pincers and half-spumed clams – through bergs of cloying oil slick, plagues of dross, black-blooming purple and a drowned Cassiopeia of phosphor. Abyssss. Germs fermenting in the kegs of their slow-moving shells. Up through the punchholes of Poseidon’s belt, out through the tunnels of his prosthetic manifold, svelte pipelines, immaculate taps – an invertebrate army comes to kiss the slit where my tail splits, two legs.
BRECKEN
Booze tides me.
TV abides me.
My tits slung
astride me,
I noose quiet
to lie with me.
My other husband’s
a broom.
HUSHA
Some animals eat their young.
Animals sweet on their young.
Sh shh, sleep, little ones.
Carson says fetal sharks scarf
each other to abortion. Yum yum
in Mom’s womb. It’s on YouTube.
Lance says male dolphins will gang
rape a lady dolphin to death. Stuff her
blowhole, can’t take a breath.
Tucky whispers, Your cousin fucked
a bunny. But I can’t imagine
enough room in her tummy.
SANDY
Her bed gown brides her.
She’s dumb as a broom.
Her quiets swim inside her.
Daddy can’t shut-eye her
boggled doll peekaboo.
Her bed gown brides her.
We can’t identify her
as Sandy, per se. She’s make-do.
Her quiets swim inside her.
Ghouls queue to ride her.
Oozing like a fistula,
her bed gown brides her.
Mother’s meat’s in a wilder
chaos, but she got her due.
Her quiets swim inside her.
I’ll smother her if I find her
inside me. Monkey see? I do.
I do. Her bed gown brides her
toward quiet. I swim inside her.
LAKE EFFECT
Snow blinds the deer hearse.
Snow needles the blood purse.
Snow porridge in the hobo’s bowl.
Snow angels spread for ripper’s toll.
Dormers dripping toilet paper.
Castles of albino crows.
Amniotic impersonator.
Vomit stipples Mommy’s clothes.
Come snow, come sleep,
Bleach our red curtains
To surrender. O molester,
Put the animals to bed.
Bed the trees;
Rid us of forecast.
Calm the alabaster
Masts of dream.
Come dream, snow,
Bear in the cavern,
Rat in the cistern.
Every little chit in its hole.
Make us kid-glove clean again,
Intestines fresh from the fast.
Lay out your skin to swaddle our feet,
Snow madonnas maquillaged in ash.
WINTER, FRONTAL LOBE
Dark where Dad chops a hole.
Tunk. Dark hair blighted
by snow bees, his axe
trepanning the tarn’s top.
Beneath what’s frozen
slighted bodies blob up
from the