all
night I stare at death.
Pressing
my ear to the locked
door
that she is, I hear the crystal
vial
splinter of temporal bone.
One
clear crack and her mind
whelms
the room in a cologne of
wormwood
and lavender.
Notes
seep across the threshold
to
find me kneeling in the hotel hall
among
some thousand thwarted
witnesses
to her life, who pass
through
this corridor each day,
waiting
for the sonic boom that
recurs
with the circling of the earth.
After
the gunshot, she is a vignette
for
fourteen minutes before the living
rush
in to bear her unrecognizable
body
away. They come with their rubber
gloves,
turn up with their scrub brushes
and
lye. They tear out the blood-spotted
carpet,
trash the mattress and duvet.
They
cannot take her from this room;
its
contents have been resignified.
The
number on the door is now
shorthand
for her quondam name.
She
need not respond when echoes from
a
farther room dismiss her, felo de se—their
own
hearsay forfends this easy resolve.
Outside,
we overlingerers whisper among
ourselves,
amateur attorneys defending
our
silk-stockinged pseudo-suicide in her
blue-nosed
leather heels. For instance,
some
argue that she would never wilfully
collapse
as she did, haphazard,
on
a corner of the bed.
Regardless,
the scant light that transfuses
the
drawn curtains of her face is an
afterimage
I cannot close my
eyes
against. Overcome, I cling to
my
chosen rumours, my stray
inklings,
the fiction that
she
can still be solved.
Our
own illuminous endings
are
tantamount to hers:
Death
will be the moment
that
we become unknowable.
See?
I understand this.
So
I cannot accept that she
is
gone to the myriad,
another latent enigma.
“All night I stare at the TV screen—” does not appear in The Work Is Done When We Are Dead (Guernica Editions, 2026).
Jade Wallace [photo credit: Mark Laliberte] is a queer and chronically ill poet, novelist, and literary critic. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in venues internationally, including Best Canadian Poetry, Channel, Geist, Salamander, Seventh Wave, and The Malahat Review. Wallace is the author of two poetry collections, Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There and The Work Is Done When We Are Dead (Guernica Editions, 2023 and October 2026) and a genderless novel, ANOMIA (Palimpsest Press, 2024). As co-founder of the writing partnership MA|DE, Wallace has also co-authored two collaborative poetry collections, ZZOO and Detourism (Palimpsest Press, 2025 and 2028). Keep in touch: jadewallace.ca + ma-de.ca
