“I turned my body into a pill and swallowed it” by Wren Jones
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “I turned my body into a pill and swallowed it” by Wren Jones.
I turned my body into a pill and swallowed it
By Wren Jones
It feathered me, it freed me, it made me well. Lifted
dread, frizz, stopped small pieces falling off. It floated
me, it rode on the back of a squid, it had no bones
to pick about anything. It washed up on the beach,
a green bottle with a message: consume me. It fell
onto driftwood, became a white and red rowboat
crashing waves, smashing into seawalls. Grand illusions
bobbed like dollhouse miniatures, clock hands
that measured worth spilled into the ocean, drugging time.
It was anti everything: histamine, racist, biotic, frantic.
Aches left, heartache hovered and drifted away. It twisted me
with seaweed, made me thirsty for salt, filled my cup
that overfloweth. It blossomed into red and white anemones,
a box of oysters, rose water. Mer-priests anointed me, flipped
tails, get your canons off me! it screamed underwater.
Propelled me into a new tide, hauling sea-ass, scraping coral,
singing with jellyfish, stinging me holy.
Copyright ยฉ Wren Jones
Previously published in emerge 23: The Writer’s Studio Anthology (SFU Publications, 2023).
Wren Jones is a writer, artist and outdoor enthusiast living on the shores of Lake Ontario. A graduate of The Writers Studio at Simon Fraser University, her poems have been published or are forthcoming in CV2, Queens Quarterly, Pinhole Poetry, Untethered, Pine Row Press and several anthologies, including Best Canadian Poetry 2027.
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