Dear Badger,
A fox axes red through the forest. An ox foxes the plough. Badger, you bade me bide time till spring when the buds burst, small fists punching pollen, knocking bees into honeyed senselessness. Spring like a butterfly, spring like a bee, the woods are a horse with a thousand sap-filled legs, and some galoot with a nightshade eye hunched in the corner, waiting to rope-a-dope the understory with a green fuse rumble. And felled by some Peter Rabbit felon, the fallen corpse of the farmer’s wife wears a copse-copulating coat of rabbits—ears, thumping legs, velvet dicks and vulvas mad like dulcimers, furious vibrating whiskered noses and you, Badger, placid, metaphysical, playing clavichord on a log. Bach’s Partita No. 1 in B-flat major, movements 1 to 4, Allemanda, Corrente, Sarabande, Tempo di Borea and I’ve set up a chess set, waiting for a friend who will never come because of the dictator. Badger, you and me have this hide-out, this wait-out, this blind. When the new world hatches, we’ll be ready for eggs.
Dear Badger,
My dear, gentle, bantam Druid, call in the light, call in the fire of waxing badgers. Call to your great grand badgers, forget your marrow bones and walk with me through the snowdrops.
I’ve been seeing you out of the corner of all my eyes. Unfurl yourself from yourself, badger, and schlepp with me though the glistening thicket.
It’s Imbolc, the milking, the feast of purification. See, the old badger woman has thrown off her rabbit ears. She’s breaking her bones collecting firewood.
Brushing against the understory of this place with sapling-thin thighs. Sighing, blood to blood and bone to bone and every sinew in its own place, to every branch broken.
I’m sorry dear Buddy, I thought you and I were on the far side of winter. I’ve baked you a bread made of the velvety teats of a swan
Lift your frowsy paws towards the skyline, call in the glim. Never mind this false spring, come feast with me.
Later there’ll be hell to pay - a big bad hunchback of a snow. But for now, my darling dwarfish druid, there are rowan berries and persimmons and nightshades and these woods, hoarse with laughter.
Dear Badger,
O dulcimer blood of thirteen strokes at midnight, a velvet grimoire of the blue skin lining of the cadaver’s casket. Badger uterus. Badger rapture. Badger mirror divination. Badger knee fracture. Knife of badger, badger hatchback. O ash of swan where swoons snowmen made of badger semen. The legible ledger of long life. The ineligible mandible of the minotaur. Leather hewn from badger organs—gallstones and duodenum—Badger we magic time into bodies, give berths to life, cross section the possible to house the boundaryless, make from impossible Schrodinger souls a meaning: to be human, friend, badger. To be born, give birth, to break the bones of the potential only to heal as phenomenon. The snowdrop bones, the blizzard bones, the sleet of bones in the fishes of the actual, the milk gills and swan copulation of the moon-eyed written in sinew. A human sliced in two by guitar string is a song on the left, a song on the right, the severed melody nothing a badger could sing.
Dear Badger,
Four fathoms past midnight. I’ve been reading The Soul of an Octopus, a kind of compendium of enchantments, untamed and full of wild magic. A twisted, gelatinous, devil-fish grimoire. Badger, I learned that some creatures taste with their skin, their entire body. O to be other, to be slug or mollusk, to be free from this gulag of bones.
Badger, I dream I shake hands with an octopus named Stella. Can I call you Stella? Each arm, each sucker is a brain, Stella. What you think, I think, what I see you feel. How can this be, Stella? Each inkling you ponder, oozing, leaking, flooding into me like a renaissance.
Stella, I am no more than the sum of my badgers. All these letters I’ve been writing you, I write from the left-hemisphere. I imagine you reading them, Stella, in a bottomless house made of tentacles. O Stella, can you see the edge of the rest of my life? Can you, with your astral eye?
O to be other, to be born a guitar, a stick, to be free from the big house of cognizance. Thank you, Stella, you’ve cast your sortilege, worked your magic. Thank you, I know now that the mind is both Sisyphus and the rock.
Lillian Nećakov is the author many chapbooks, including, The Lake Contains and Emergency Room (Apt. 9 Press; shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award), as well as the full-length collections il virus (Anvil Press; shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award), Hooligans (Mansfield Press), The Bone Broker (Mansfield Press), Hat Trick (Exile Editions), Polaroids (Coach House Books) and The Sickbed of Dogs (Wolsak and Wynn). Her book, Midnight Glossolalia, a collaborative poetry collection with Scott Ferry and Lauren Scharhag was published in 2023 (Meat for Tea Press). Her book, Duck Eats Yeast, Quacks, Explodes; Man Loses eye, a collaborative poem with Gary Barwin was published in May 2023 by Guernica Editions. She has also published in many print and online journals in Canada and the U.S. Lillian lives in Toronto.
