HONORABLE MENTION
SMALL ORANGE EMERGING WOMAN POET HONOR 2022

Confessions at the End of the Holocene

Like light, I walk naked through corridors

and I name back the animals.

Mammoth, Steller’s sea cow, Black rhino, or Girl.

When I shower, I also sing their lost bodies against the surface of water

because I know it will not lie to me, my tongue

unearthed completely, errant with love

for what was almost the sea.

Like blackcurrants, lemon foam, the crab apples

my mother once let wild in the yard.

There is so much of what’s dead that I cannot recapture.

In childhood, I used to gut the apples’ small bellies with a small metal spoon

and now I don’t eat

with anyone. I order milkshakes to our door and drink the cold down

in immaculate solace. Like light

I don’t want someone to know me. I only want your inattention

for an afternoon. Your eyelids burnished like whistling kettles or like koi

beneath inanimate pools. My mind tipping towards rust

by proximity.

It is our egos which leave more to desire. We’re sentimental with rugburns

and plastic bottles. We housebreak grief as a pet. How like a dog

I don’t think so much about the ways we might die as the day you threatened to kill me.

You were weeping cry violets on the bathroom tiles, a flower

that is not real. You said how you love me

while holding a knife. Did not say I will not love you. Did not say I cannot love. You say

                                 (                                            ) like light. Like light.

And I don’t want to make jokes about the end of the world but I am rapping at doors

in mistranslation. What are you who am I how are you what’s there?

The Dodo, the Bluebuck, a Sea wolf at the threshold of my scavenging heart

gone to sleep in the night.

I can be very honest this time. I am only pretending not to be desperate.

Before using the phone I used to practice my vowels: /eɪ/, /i:/, /oʊ—I wanted them round
or as soft as a starlet’s—as though my tongue were monied or drugged.

I used to dream of a high-wired man who’d beam through my second-floor window

to sleep with me. I liked him because he meant that I could be wanted

without choosing to touch. The way light simmers inside of a pupil, I’m not there

I’m not there. I can’t name you back, or our animals,

but I can catalogue our extinctions.

We are both in a room as our bodies dissolve. We are both in this room

each greeting the dawn through its overbite. Our room is the jaw.

Our house, containing everything we’ve owned, has caught to flame. I cannot, will not, do not

protect you.

But will you text me back? Say you made it home safely? How will you feed yourself

when the birds die? Our oceans unbloom?

Remember not all fruit are self-fertile. Take the apple. You need two varieties of a similar kind

to cross-pollinate, to hold them as closely        as bordering suns.

Originally from Vancouver, Canada, Alyson Kissner is completing her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. Both her creative and critical practices centre themes of abuse, trauma, and tenderness. Alyson has published in The Rumpus, Gutter, The Toast, and elsewhere. She may be reached on twitter @alykissner for both questions and community.