“In Defense of My Roommate’s Dog” by Natalie Wee
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “In Defense of My Roommate’s Dog” by Natalie Wee.
In Defense of My Roommate’s Dog
By Natalie Wee
humping her stuffed bear all day, even when guests laugh & turn their eyes
to a ceiling that will never demand the ugliest lie they’ve practiced in the name
of survival. A decade ago, I watched my classmate open a doorway beneath the desk
because she wanted escape & thought to summon one with desolate, shaking fingers.
I don’t know if I’m real when I’m not being touched: the loneliest prayer
of any small god. Humiliate translated: 丢脸, to lose face. Once, I lost myself
& found an instrument of forgetting, let someone’s lover fashion from the ocean
of my solitude a shoreline for their sins to wash up on. Yes, I was an animal
crafting fables in the language of my body’s flood. It’s amazing what a little death
earns you. We imagine a funeral each time we peel back fresh need: wait for me,
it’s cold, I’m scared. Maybe the trade-off for resurrection is shame vast enough to kill
us & that becomes another execution to tongue our way out of. Look. Here are primal
& ungainly ways we tether ourselves to the Earth. Here is this dog fucking something
she imagines loves her, tiny heart thundering toward some vast & unknowable
glory, in the name of not vanishing just a little longer.
Copyright © Natalie Wee
Previously published in PRISM International.
Natalie Wee is a queer cultural worker, writer, and artist who believes in a future of collective liberation. Natalie is the author of two poetry collections,Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines (tehzi/San Press, 2021) and Beast at Every Threshold(Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022), with the latter being a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Born in Singapore to Malaysian parents, Natalie currently operates out of Tkarón:to, Dish with One Spoon territory.
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