folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets
Red-Beaked Merganser Ducks
In
the mirror, I watch my arm extend: vertically: above my head;
—I
marvel
at
its length, the sheath of skin & tissue
spearing
upward—
It
could be a swimmer’s arm. I could be a swimmer—
a
real one, an athlete, a body
cutting
water, shearing as scissors
cut
cloth.
My
hand seems
so
small
compared
to the astonishing length
belonging
to my extended, climbing,
reaching
arm.
I
didn’t know “merganser”
meant
a type of duck: it evokes, in me, lexically,
a
horse. Silly little act of misrememberance
which
grew long knobbly legs: a mane: whipping
tail.
The
duck transmigrated
into the horse’s body—
a
semiaquatic miracle; something
like
Jesus’s foray into breadmaking—
its slim, letter-cutter beak
replaced
by a long rifle snout: two cavernous
gunpowder
noses—
hooves
which presage cavalry squadrons,
or
riding gunmen hunting
—in rainy countryside.
The
body, beautiful, despite its clumsy
applications.
I Must Also
After Macbeth, seen in Stratford, Ontario, May 2025
I have now left the close-handedness
of the theatre and re-entered the
sprawling
nation-made countryside.
I am watching the slow funereal passage
of ware-house
stores: walmart super centre, home
depot,
the Revenant Costco, these landlocked,
unbodied whales
with their concrete floors, white
lights. The stage, its blinding
reflections: the hands and bloodless
skin.
The microscopism of a big white
light on the retail floor: the
perception of self
among tall stacked shelves,
crates that can only be reached by
machines.
The machine bears me while I consider
the architectural,
metaphorical integrity of child-bearing
as a concept and as a thing that I hope
will never visit my one uncontained
body.
I think of the conversion of petrol
into fumes,
gas station pumps transformed to
barbecues, flesh into
ghost. The exhaust of words falling
like bodies
from the second floor. The sound of
summer replicated, in tinned
recording, onstage: night-sounds,
crickets and blinking wings, the
shuttering fluorescence of insect
body parts, nocturnal life.
I have been in empty places on summer
nights before.
I have stood on balconies and rooftops
and contemplated
the moving landscape.
*
The set pieces create houses of mirrors
and dark.
Doorknobs and faucets populate this
interior model of an outside
place. The machine is an animal
creature: it purrs and breathes as
it performs, wheeled, on a smooth
stagnant stage.
The wheeled mechanisms of an insectoid creature,
its bulging light-bugged eyes,
the fragile instrumentalia of gears and
side-mirrors,
pipes and engine,
the long sloping carcass of its seat,
the gloss-shaped undaunted circumstance
of its two hulking muscular
wheels, flesh pulled into a circle,
rubber flesh
sinking into asphalt. The chained
machine, a long throat
edged with teeth, the supple firmity,
the infirm
trunk of a man’s neck, the actor on the
floor, the body on the floor,
post-crisis, pre-crisis, still whole,
not embodied, entirely embodied,
utterly true, a lie on a good, kind
tongue.
The hitch of the breath
when I am made to cry.
*
Subaru
Volvo
Kia Mercedes-
Benz
Toyota
Chevrolet
Cadillac
Ford
*
I will miss you, as I will miss
tonight, even though I will
have it again, both this and you, but
not like this, not ever
just like this again.
Currently, I’m working on poems that think through concepts of enclosure: bodily enclosures, physical enclosures, enclosed spaces, and the boundaries between them. I’m experimenting with poems about animals (especially interested in horses right now) and games like Sudoku. I’m also working on a science fiction novel about ballet dancers in a futuristic space opera setting, considering what makes the body human and how art informs the body’s relationship with its surroundings. In my academic life, I study Renaissance plays and their connections to science: these research interests lead to a lot of fun, weird, and contemplative poems.
Vera Hadzic is a writer based on the unceded territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation in Ottawa, Ontario. Her poetry chapbook, Fossils You Can Swallow, was published by Proper Tales Press in 2023. She has an Honours BA in English and history from the University of Ottawa, and an MA in English Literature from Queen’s University. Her first full-length book of poems, Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery, was published by Anvil Press in 2025.