In September 2021, I moved from Los Angeles to Vancouver to Fredericton to start a PhD program at UNB. I went there alone. It was my first time in New Brunswick. I didn’t know anyone there yet. I just bought a one-way plane ticket and went for it.
I didn’t know where I was going to live yet. I was away from my partner James for the first time in a decade. I’d lived in California so long that I didn’t even own a winter coat.
Winter Coat
Everyone in Fredericton, New Brunswick keeps reminding me I’ll need a good warm winter coat. I wonder if I could buy a coat warm enough to make them stop reminding me. I wonder if that coat exists. I wonder about you. I imagine you eating, I imagine it raining. I imagine you hunting and pecking and calling the cat your secretary, and I can’t imagine that imagining is the same as remembering, but I imagine you that way. I remember myself destroying all the warm winter coats in the world, burning them altogether in a wholesale pyred-up massacre, or maybe I remember torturing them to death, one by cherished one, like I’m a monster and the winter coats try to flee like horror movie heroines who twist their ankles and I catch them in my loving bloody talons, me the monster who remembers, who imagines we’re in love.
Basically as soon as I landed, I started writing a series of short prose poems about being alone, and about being lonely in this new, unfamiliar place.
As you can probably tell from the title of the chapbook — and the title of the poems inside it — Things to Buy in New Brunswick started as a shopping list.
Part of what’s so rough about moving apartments, cities, and/or countries multiple times in a few months is you have to constantly jettison and re-assess and re-acquire all this physical stuff wherever you go. Bedsheets. An umbrella. Salt and pepper.
And then:
You cringe whenever you see a suitcase. Or you get superstitious about even unpacking your suitcase. Why bother, when you have to turn around and leave again every few weeks?
And then:
These little household items like ibuprofen, ice packs, and groceries take on this monumental, metaphoric quality. You start thinking about the fine differences between who you are and all this stuff you’re constantly losing, acquiring, and carrying around on your back.
Ice Packs
They are like hope. They are like saying, Here, freeze your troubles in place, in part, in a little room bursting into bloom, not quite but just enough, enough, like pain is just the room’s walls growing spines and singing, like pain is your weakness growing large in space, white blood cells piling up like cash in a vault in a bank set on fire like your bright nerves compressed by your strength’s heat, like salt water rushing into the joint like love.
A lot of these poems are love poems, about leaving your love behind, coming back or finding it again. But these are also poems about moving around, living mid-pandemic. I think there’s a lot of grief and guilt we’re all still carrying around — the actual human lives we’re all literally and figuratively leaving behind us.
Two Notebooks
I don’t know what sickness is, but I do know what it means to speak of your self, a thing that is sick or has sickness, suffers from, is plagued or afflicted by. (Plague is a good word, I write, but it’s rarely pluralized. The Plague, capital T capital P, is something people often say, and write. The Plague might come in waves or sevens, but The Plague doesn’t sound like something that happens twice. Plague also looks similar at a glance to the French word Plage, meaning beach but also coming from the Greek word Plagios, meaning sideways and/or oblique. That’s me, I think, I write. That’s it, or that’s more like it. What sickness does. I’m not plagued, I’m plage-d, I’m plagio-ed.) Anyway, I do know a thing or two about things that happen twice, how nothing happens only once. I know about writing, how it means things happen more than once, once written down, written up, written by, written in, spearmint, scripts, black vinegar, ritalin, sideways. (Scripts, from Proto-Indo-European root word skribh–, to cut, to separate, to sift.) That’s what sickness is, but that’s not what the self is like. (I once had a doctor in Los Angeles say this about disclosing disabilities to health insurance companies. He said to me, We have to be a little more careful what we write down.)
That’s how I reach this uneasy conclusion — or guilty confession. These prose poems are about “buying” physical things as a kind of substitute self. But I think they’re also, really, about leaving people behind. They’re about my long-distance marriage, and also about survivor’s guilt. I felt this immense promise and privilege about my shiny new life back in Canada. A fully-funded graduate program in creative writing, a community of wonderful artists to learn from in Fredericton, professional success… This stuff was a life I didn’t dare imagine for myself just a few years ago.
The longest poem in this chapbook, “Yoga Mat,” is explicitly about disability. That’s another particular kind of survivor’s guilt — the people I feel like I have to live for, because that’s how I can make them live forever..
Yoga Mat
Something I’ve never told you is I sometimes write letters to dead friends. I don’t mean the kind of letters where you say I love you, I’ll never forget you, I’ll never forgive you. I mean the kind where I speak in one voice. I tell the dead I can get drunk on anything, I am drunk on nothing at all. I can pull a muscle in my left eye, I can describe myself as mad in an application form. In my letters I speak in first-person plural, and I don’t speak of myself at all. I don’t say I’m older now than you ever would have been. I’m still alive instead of you because I know how to live in the real world where I can buy my way into being, I can buy a self that breathes. My self is a bought thing. That thing writes these letters, and in these letters to the dead I don’t say I’ll never forgive, and I don’t say I was luckier than you, I don’t ask why, I don’t say I’m still here. I don’t say I’ll live well for you, I’m mad at you for handing me the meaning of your dead life. I say good riddance, I love you, you didn’t belong here anyway. You were not made of this world. I don’t say it’s bad science fiction to say we belong to another world, not the past or the future, not a time that doesn’t exist, not an old world or a new world. When I say the word we, when I say the world, I say the world we’re making, I am talking about that time. I mean when we were rabid mice and midwives and world-dreaming songsters, when we knew how the sky worked, we made our beautiful names as wet-mouthed tricksters, as greatest warriors gone berserk. I mean the thing that is not our madness is beautiful. I mean we’ll be the threshold guardian who dangles the key to the world and whistles our shared breath through our small gray teeth. We live well, just apart from the others. They keep us well clothed. We tell a great story, don’t we? Other people take the short walk out to the woods where we live alone. They make out the shape of our faces like letters in the leaves. They come to us when they need something, a weird friend or well-told lie, a good meal. We don’t know what happiness is. We don’t write letters, we don’t suffer paperwork. We don’t cross out the words died or psychological or documented disability. We suffer like anyone suffers, we live in a real world. In that real world we’ve never heard of me and you. We’ve never heard that we’re not breathing together, looking sideways with one body. We don’t write letters, we breathe, we roll back our eyes.
When I first wrote it, I felt weird about the ending of that poem. Like, do I really want to end a poem about a terrible loss and responsibility I feel by literally “looking up”? I definitely don’t mean to put a positive spin on mental illness or grief, and honestly I’d feel embarrassed if it came across that way. But I think writing “Yoga Mat,” and writing all these poems, really helped me see the connection between “looking up” and “looking back.”
I’m trying to find new ways of looking at these things: things, people, selves, patterns. I won’t spoil it for you, but this chapbook has a twist ending. It’s not exactly happy or unhappy, but it is about looking back, and then returning to see what’s left.
The English word for “verse” comes from a Proto-Indo-European word meaning to turn, bend, or plow — i.e., imagine the way a farmer moves a plow back and forth across a field. I think repetition — turn and return — is one of the essential elements I see in virtually all the poetry I read and write. And even in shopping lists. And even in prose poems. (Turn, return, and see what’s left of all your stuff.)
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Meghan Kemp-Gee [photo credit: Wade Andrew] is the author of The Animal in the Room (Coach House Books, 2023), as well as the poetry chapbooks What I Meant to Ask and Things to Buy in New Brunswick. She also co-created the webcomic Contested Strip, recently adapted into a graphic novel, One More Year. She is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick and currently resides in North Vancouver BC.