Forty-five Ottawa poets : Vera Hadzic : Two poems

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.

Katrina Wilcox : 2026 VERSeFest interviews: Vera Hadzic

 

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.

Vera Hadzic reads in Ottawa alongside Sneha Subramanian Kanta and Jennifer Baker at the Common House magazine event on Friday, March 27, 2026 as part of VERSeFest 2026.

Katrina

The speaker in these poems feels embodied and estranged from themselves at the same time. How do you construct poetic voice?

Vera

I've struggled with that a bit. Some of these poems are the first times that I've actively tried to write about my personal perspective. Almost always the “I” in my poems is not actually me, or it's maybe a removed version of me, but I never really like to be interpreted as being the “I” behind the poems. But in this book there's quite a few [poems] that really are drawing on personal experiences. So that was kind of fun to do, but I also, of course, still had the other problems. In one of my creative writing workshops at the University of Ottawa, I had a poem that we were workshopping and there was no “I” in the poem at all. If there's no perspective, it’s kind of like a third person type thing. There's ways to play around with voice in the sense that it doesn't necessarily need to be tied to a person.

Katrina

Many of your poems are inspired by other art forms. What are you looking for in the artwork? Is it surface level, or are you looking deeper into history, your own response to the art, or is it a collection of these things?

Vera

Often I'll see something or read something and have a certain impression of it, and then I chase that impression and see what comes out of it. Sometimes I can end up really removed from the original context and other times I need to go into the original context in order to pull more out of it. I'll spend a lot of time on the wikipedia page for a painting for example, because often that can give you different angles and everything's in one place. I see an artwork and I sit with it and I start by trying to describe it or trying to see what it's evoking for me. Then I usually get more abstract ideas that I can then pursue. I think actually what it is that I pursue textures or impressions. There's a poem in the book, Still Life with Fish, which was inspired by a painting that I saw at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, and I love paintings like that where everything feels so distinct, and like you could touch it and take it out of the painting and hold it. Then from there it kind of connected to other ideas I was thinking about at the time or other things I was ruminating in.

Katrina

When a poem engages directly with other art forms, how much context do you want the reader to have on the artwork itself?

Vera

That’s hard. On the one hand I feel like I have a clear idea of how I'm engaging with the artwork and I want the reader to know what my vision is. But at the same time, I'm really resistant to giving the reader too much context or explanation. I feel like sometimes, especially for my poetry, it'll make it a bit too clear cut and then you lose a lot of the interesting things that happen when you have little pockets that are unclear. So I try to be fairly minimal with context. If people are interested, they can find out [the context] and if they're not, then they don't need to. The poem can always stand on its own.

Sometimes I read a book of poetry where the writer or poet will have really extensive notes at the end, really explaining where everything came from, and I love reading these. You could give a really clear roadmap of where things came from.

Katrina

The body is constantly being constructed and deconstructed, both human and animal. When did you realize the body would be the central terrain of the work?

Vera

I would say really early. I had the title and then I wrote the title poem. This is where it gets into it being a slightly more personal book than my previous work had been because I was just starting to really reckon with the fact that I had a lot of anxiety that was registering in really physical ways. There's this line about keeping things inside yourself and that's genuinely how I was feeling at that time. And I still feel that way. Sometimes I feel like I say too much or I say the wrong thing or I'm paranoid about my bodily functions, like I feel like I can't control my body in terms of expressing myself and also in terms of the literal fluids of my body. It’s a constant worry. A lot of the poems were tackling that and at the same time I was thinking through this idea of the monastery as a space that's enclosed, and how that's both kind of liberating and comforting, but also constricting. It's actually getting really hard to write a poem that doesn't touch on [the body] in some way. It feels like I have this one theme that I'm really exploring right now and everything circles back to it. Actually, even when I'm not working on that theme, I think my poetry just does really gravitate towards descriptions of bodies, both human and animal. My poems always somehow end up there.

 

 

 

 

 

Katrina Wilcox is a Vietnamese-Canadian writer whose work explores identity, disconnection, and the deeply human truths found in the strange and the speculative. She writes from the intersections of queerness, cultural identity, and resistance, crafting stories that unsettle while offering connection. She is the co-founder and fiction editor of flo. Literary Magazine, President of VERSe Ottawa and currently serves as a poetry editor for the University of Ottawa’s Common House Magazine. Her work has been previously published in WA Magazine and Lived Magazine.