This chapbook is a companion piece to my 2023 poetry book No Town Called We (Talon Books).
Birds. Migraine. Salt. The prairie. Coterie poetics. Mental isolation. Buzzing and barking and baking.
In 2019, Alberta elected United Conservative Party leader Jason Kenney as their/our premier. Election night had coincidentally been called after my book launch had already been planned in my hometown / current town. A small but lovely crowd joined us at Shelf Life Books for the launch. I was grateful for those who’d chosen to come; I’m not sure that I would have picked a book launch over an election that could mark the turning point between the small progressive gains the NDP had managed to make from 2015-2019, and the same-old same-old union busting petrostate that has governed over most of Alberta’s history. Spoiler alert: We love the petrostate. A smaller crowd convened at The Rose and Crown Pub (RIP) to drown our sorrows when Jason Kenney was declared successful. His government would go on to fight with health care workers during a global pandemic, cutting up to 1,100 jobs from Alberta Health Services. They created a $30-million War Room as an oil and gas industry PR machine. They made it harder for gay-straight alliances to operate in schools. They cut operational spending to postsecondary institutions by $3.573 billion (accounting for inflation), an act that led to the abolishment of the jobs of 43 of my colleagues. This amongst other harms perpetuated on the most marginalised in our communities, including, heinously, the de-indexing of AISH (Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped). It has often seemed that each new day brought a new harm, a new offence, a new cut.
“The cruelty is the point,” we reminded each other in an attempt to not get caught up in arguing for moral good or rationality or compassion. “The cruelty is the point.”
As if that knowledge would make it easier to bear.
Electoral politics won’t save us.
I want to be clear that I don’t think the official opposition NDP are any ‘better,’ less neoliberal or colonial or harmful, but that is a different essay.
Mushrooms.
The day after the 2019 election, my parents stopped by my downtown apartment to let me know that my mother was going for some testing, as a spot had been found on her lung. The shape was not the shape of cancer, but it was still a spot where no spot should be. While the spot was eventually deemed to be a hopefully non-harmful mushroom spore picked up in Arizona that should be checked every year or so, the timing – disappointing election results, parental health scare – was but one single verse in a litany of stressors that had kept me in fight-or-flight for most of the decade that began with the death of my brother all the way back in 2012, a year that occurred either one month or two centuries ago, as far as my inner temporality had become entirely FUBAR. A new fear or risk or loss occurred at regular cadence, regular as the beat of a metronome. A constantly upregulated nervous system tipped my body into a chronic pain state: Chronic sciatica. Chronic migraine. Chronic pelvic pain. Full body nerve tingling. The money I’ve spent on physiotherapy alone could buy a significant portion of the world an avocado toast.
Health spending accounts won’t save us.
Against the backdrop of climate crisis and political stressors, my father-in-law’s cancer returned, and a global pandemic started. While some friends and colleagues were learning to bake sourdough bread and host Zoom concerts, my spouse and I were driving the #2 highway south and north back and forth to the town of Claresholm, where my father-in-law had been heartrendingly briefly living his best life since the death of his wife in 2018.
The older I get and the longer she’s gone the more I sympathise with the ways in which the facts of her hard life turned her hard, but in life she was mean, and her meanness made it hard to sympathise.
Allen had been volunteering at the library, delighting in and carefully tending to his garden with its rhubarb bushes, rhododenrons, cherry and apple trees. He made friends with local neighbours, and local farmers he met as he biked around from town to town. The week we were all sent to work from home was the last time he went into hospital.
My spouse spent all of April seated outside Claresholm’s single-story hospital with a tarp tacked up to block the rain and sun, gazing in at their dad through the window while they talked or merely listened to each other breathing for hours on the phone. A breath a breath a sigil a vigil. He chose to end his life on May 2 via assisted dying.
(I was so grateful that the option was available to him, rather than having to continue to linger in increasing pain and confusion towards an inevitable end. And I then witnessed in horror as the Canadian government continued to expand the limits under which MAID became available, targeting the poor and mentally ill).
Anyone here read that Sinclair Ross novel?
As for Me and My House.
And then we were alone with our cats in a custom-built prairie bungalow in a small windy town amongst all the inheritances of my in-laws lives. Because of the pandemic’s physical distancing restrictions, there was no wake. No serving tea to the neighbours. No communal witnessing to the end of a life. No garage sales to efficiently get rid of what we could not carry or did not want.
Double vision. Nausea. Dizziness. Cold hands. Visual aura. Weakness. Confusion. Light sensitivity.
Scotoma is a type of visual disturbance that can present in migraine as an aura symptom, a wavy blurry spot over the field of vision, though it can occur for other medical reasons, from hypertension to MS. I’m more prone to double vision with my migraine attacks than scotoma, though I suffered some particularly acute visual aura in my teens, triggered by the estrogen in the birth control pill. I once tried to ring in a customer in at the hair salon I worked at, while the mechanical number keys were jumping up and down like a poorly rendered 3D movie, my fingers punching helplessly towards buttons that rippled and danced out of reach.
The word scintillating, so sybillant and sensual, means to sparkle or shine brightly, as the sun, or a beautiful wit. Scintillating scotoma refers to the abnormal electrical activity moving through the brain to create a blind spot in the eye that flickers and wavers from light to dark.
In the prairie, the scintillating scotoma might erupt spontaneously from the sky in the moment before the wind blows us all to dust from whence we came.
If we could curl inside the scotoma in the compound eye of a fly could we stare into the sun for one thousand years and never go blind?
Falcons. Foxes. Horses. Cats. Crows. Ravens. Swallows. Bees. Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus battling to the death in a dumpster.
Way back in 2016, poet Shannon Maguire was working at my university on a two year limited-term-appointment, and we briefly toyed with the idea of making a podcast together. It was going to have a multidisciplinary bent. We planned to talk to feminist scientists, engineers, artists, writers. In defiance against the entrenched patriarchy running the province of Alberta, the podcast was going to be called Goodbye, Dinosaurs.
We never managed to make the podcast before Shannon returned to Ontario, but sometimes, to soothe myself, I repeat the phrase in my head like a mantra. Goodbye Dinosaurs. Goodbye Dinosaurs.
“back door blown open / yellow flannel sheets / we sit in this house till it’s safe to deconstruct home / what if it’s never safe to deconstruct home” (Reimer p. 4)
Claresholm’s winds can blast at speeds up to 60 to 90 km/hr. The locks to my in-law’s house often wouldn’t latch properly, and a sudden gust would blow the front or back door wide open.
If I didn’t know better I’d have thought their spirits were still moving in and out of their house.
If I didn’t know better, what more could I know?
In the week after my father-in-law died, my spouse saw a fox three times, first sauntering casually down the sidewalk, and later trotting at a fast clip with an entire stolen Subway sandwich in his mouth.
A thought I plan to further explore is the facts of how grief is incommensurate with capitalism.
Because sometimes grieving is resistance.
Resistance, too, might take the form of art practice, a deliberative contemplative act that refuses to be yoked to the wheel of capitalism. Not product, but practice. Listening to the bees while turning your pain into art. And together these methods of resistance might become a kind of agnostic prayer.
~ Nikki Reimer, October 2023
Nikki Reimer is the author of four books of poetry, most recently No Town Called We (Talon Books). They make art, write non-fiction, and are currently studying towards an MA in Communication. Reimer is a carbon-based chronically ill neurodivergent prairie settler of Ukrainian and Russian Mennonite descent who resides on the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta. They are very tired.