Poetry by Noah Davis

Smeared

Through salt and potato smeared across ceramic, green,

I tried to encapsulate being a man

in a way that nobody wants you to be a man.

So I dragged my finger across the plate and licked the salt off of it

and sat in my mother’s kitchen, no demanded explanation for the first time in my life.

I crave salt just as much as I crave you,

but I like my potato smeared on a plate, more than smashed.

I like my body hashed, and my gender different

more than I like conventions and love.

Because I like reading and learning more than kissing boys or girls.

I’ve craved the fresh pavement,

I wonder if my skin will ever be smeared

across a highway from jumping the gun on conventions and love:

a scar across my finally flat chest and the act of loving instead of being loved

because I failed to read and learn about the way I should be smeared across the surface of a man or woman.

I wonder if my irises will fall out of an airplane window

if I make the wrong choice, on the wrong salt, and potatoes,

wonder if I’m scallop instead of mashed.

And I really swear that I wish I was a good shot of espresso, or a languid beat,

like they want me to be.

But I figured out that I am just the handfuls of salt and blood going down my throat

to make up for all the potato

as it drips from my neck in torment and I’m denied a handkerchief.

Sometimes I crave you maybe more than I crave to be smeared across ceramic, green,

in a way that might encapsulate what my peel doesn’t show

about my bodily experience with gender.

I crave to know what it’s like to be able to forgive a mother without giving in to maternal expectations to be the good daughter.

Debut

I said don’t you feel prehistoric passing those mountains

after the glow of the sinking of the sun

an orange burst in the darkness an orange or pink starburst

stained tongue in the mouth of the sky

and you said it's almost as if you feel you could scale the mountain instinctually.

I sent my transcripts to another university after my second heartbreak

and I slept on one side of my twin sized dorm room bed

for 2 weeks afterwards. Accepted

and unconsidered. The mouth of me starved

for the summer and most of the fall. You laugh at me

when I tell you how I felt back then.

I felt like my mother and had to get on a train I said I liked

the streetcars in Toronto. They would surely stop me from making

the same mistakes. I didn’t know I had to scale that feeling instinctually instead.

I said this is the downfall of the poet

and you stood in front of me and begged me to write something

from memory. I thought about the giant apple I ate at 6:00 am staring into my broken mirror—

my father dropped unloading from the rental vehicle—

and a line about loathing my father as he gets older. Taped to the wall

lines about driving by the Buddhist temple

printed on neon pink flashcards. Jurassic Park

I explained in a heated tangent after crying about being virtually an orphan

and after failing to brainstorm who’s name I’d put on the dedication page in my book of poetry.

You made a pigeon out of me (Therianthropic)

In the fall you figured out my weakness

it’s that spot behind my ear that drives me crazy.

You know because you used to graze your fingers there while I laid against a mattress with my throat arched.

Now I wonder if you

touched my body in the same way you caressed Leviticus 18:22,

if you were trying to crucify me.

I remind myself

I was raised just like you.

But I am not fit enough to dissect your biblical brain.

During the winter I figured out my weakness

it’s your hand on my throat, and your button up shirt I wore to sleep, and your tendency to call me a poet.

I was forced to become therianthropic, part human and part pigeon

trained to be used religiously then abandoned by you.

Made a nest out of your singular crucifix

turned white in the December air. I carried messages to you in my mouth

written on Roman collars.

When I should have been a crow feeding off the carcass of a prophet.

Now I wonder if I’ll ever

understand training a man like me to love for the first time then abandoning me

was as easy as blaming your fear on your faith,

if you were begging me to crucify you.

You could have pulled out my broken rib, I broke from my chest bound like Joan of Arc

and consumed what was left of me wrapped around it,

then tried to make a woman out of bone from your holy regurgitation.

But instead you made a pigeon out of me.

Noah Davis is currently a second-year undergraduate student at UBC Okanagan campus, which resides on the Territorial and Ancestral land of the Syilx Okanagan peoples. He is majoring in Creative Writing and Art History as a combined major in the faculty of Arts. He is an indigenous student, as he is Metis and comes originally from Calgary, which is known as Treaty 7 territories, and grew his passion for writing there. His focus is primarily on poetic forms or poetry with his writing, but he has experimented in writing nonfiction personal essays and autofiction in the past.