Olivia Wood

Montreal-based publishing entity Metatron is guest editing Everyday Genius this month. We'll be featuring excerpts from our new fall catalog as well as Canadian writers we like. Today's author is honorary Canadian (and Portland, Maine's finest) Olivia Wood.

Perdu

We enter the city from the body.
Does it map so easily onto sex?
We over-perform if we need to.

City sprinting on alone in Jarry—
The beam opens and I lose you.
She shifts. I lose you. There is

a splitting and I lose you.
Black currant, hot ash in the brown river.
Slip against the firmament and cut out on this

entirely. There is an ambulance that
will not wait for me, there are strangers touching
our lover and we want to kill them, we want

to lay down with their families.
I wanted to say this happened
without my consent, but the throat of this is impossible.

Blessing that in death her cock is burned along with the rest of it.

At night the backyard swells.
And I call you from New Castle.
From Ellsworth, MDI, Arlington, Mobile

And I eject the complete pain of movement.
And I am driving through Oklahoma City at night
Flanked by dead and gone, dead and not gone, gone but not dead, gone not,

dead and
if I were a better researcher—
Can we locate the pain of separation? I am tethered to this stupor.

There are women straining to listen.
To the mysterious knot of muscle sunk.
Behind the heart, plucked and stuffed full of itself.

Swelling dangerously with rot.
The absence of sensation
in the arms at panic. 

Olivia Wood lives in Montreal and is the poetry editor of The Void Magazine. A Work No One Told You About (Metatron, 2014) is her first collection of poems.