Pilgrimage by Rami Schandall
“Pilgrimage” was an honourable mention for the 2022 Priscila Uppal Memorial Award for Poetry.
i)
True, not true —
by magical reasoning of accident
I remember that I have stolen
what was once mine
and in the banality of my death
a door
and in every baby a ruin.
ii)
Some wrote into the fire
but it was delusion —
partial data
vicissitudes of conquest
crashing toward a train of thought.
iii)
No feeling of doom despite her lost job
and then a sparkle into jazz and cooking school
her head pulls and it ought to hurt
like slabs of silence
being dragged through the dark
loops of doubt droop in the hallway
like melancholy TV people
stealing into the gloom of their anointed time
not so small but reduced enough
to recognize fragile openness
sits between listening and thinking
when will she learn
to thrive up and down the worn blade of the wave
that crests when a kind man smiles
some of us, hung-over and pregnant
at the bay window, bay leaves
thrown down to protect us
and Charlotte had a fire that singed my wings
on a sudden gust of wind
unexpected
the flash and everybody died
maybe sixteen piling the bones
until just now I thought
this only happened to me.
iv)
Without hesitation the air fragments like pepper and sparks bloom like ice under aurora like a lustre utterly brittle and frozen in cracks of deep space and mute moons spin in thrall and the fixed full east is open like the eyes of olive continents blinking cold and focused, no warmth in those mirrors and I thought involuntarily that moonbeams burn cities like a vision sometimes painful, a site impassive and still, in memory a tragedy only because the perfecta etcetera are arrayed as mantis praying like the mother country is not the world but like the mother country is a pain of pink significance like the crags and rocks like an assortment of nouns on a full-coloured tray, only dates and dust of months uncluttered, no frilly decorations but a bookcase of a girl, like the middle-aged girlfriend turning eyes in my direction beside the desk which tilted as I gazed upon us, really, not to stand on ceremony with an ash-tray and smoking a healthy body of inventoried behaviours but to take more numbers to compare and expand dimensions of perception, outside type, to work like I want to test the water so I climb and sit and drop in from a height that I love like I love her like the lake so silky I could salivate for miles ahead of a muddy blur wanting all the attention and I am just an ordinary swallow and an interjection though bitter and ruthless currents push us back like I await what will never arrive and my suffering reaches the bank and I break her apart and she dissolves like sugar, a walking stick tapping for an opal of relief.
v)
When men pit their strength against tricks of monstrous proportion one consonant waits longingly for my father to peer through the holes of kamakazi worlds, what hope of success when tubes of paint awaken in stone and sediment, when a small bird of paper makes a slow migration beyond language toward abandoned skepticism punted from friend to friend which I misrepresented in sage loyalty to jet-setting winners and losers – when a right to remain spirits over several dark thresholds, white space, grandmother rejects a passive moment humming under me in a direct line of instruction, balanced, listening, be prepared to materialize where there were complications when a handful of honey could persuade them to shake fists at the wall, when being waived raving she meets them halfway, warm and willing and free, where generations of chroniclers deluded their magical context, stubborn, stolen, much reduced – let us stare together at the extraordinarily unfrilly ashcans that catch my suffering, when a migration of swallows moves against the farther shore.
Rami Schandall is a writer and interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto, Canada. She lived on the east and west coasts of the US and Canada before arriving in Toronto, and her work is influenced by her coastal roots. Rami's first published poem, “Timepiece,” was the winner of The Malahat Review’s 2019 Open Season Award. Her prose work, “Fernando,” was shortlisted for the same prize in the creative non-fiction category in 2020. Additional poems were published in Hairstreak Butterfly Review, and Crosswinds Poetry Journal, in 2020. Judge Shane Book had this to say about Rami Schandall's winning poem: “To read ‘Timepiece’ is to experience both the tumbling feeling of Time’s non-linearity and the relentlessness of Time’s passage. This is a work of elegant images, linguistic feints, tonal filigree, and scraps of narration—all stitched together with a serious precision.”