The white ceiling above my bed is swirling Into flowers and faces. I should probably look away But looking away means acknowledging the swelling Of my abdomen and that means acknowledging The advice I’ve ignored—to go for brisk walks To eat a tablespoon of hot sauce To pray for the faith to be restored, As if I haven’t already prayed till I cried as if That isn’t why I’m too drained to do much else To roll over, to press my feet into the stirrups, To push. Who am I if not pregnant With stagnancy and rot? Is there anything else? This burning like nausea, this deep squeezing Instinct to escape flooding my dirty sheets— God it’s stuck Like a seed in my teeth An eyelash in my eye A tumor on my abdominal wall, God Cut me open.…
Daniel Cowper’s debut poetry collection, Grotesque Tenderness, was recently published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. The book is divided into five parts, three of which are discrete poem sequences and two of which are collections of poems on regret and relationships. Beyond that, he’s the Poetry Editor of PULP Literature and he’s married to poet Emily Osborne.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Cowper about Grotesque Tenderness, the pros and cons of workshopping creative writing, combining personal, historical, geographical, and mythical inspirations, and more!
I’ve been noticing a trend in
movies: the inciting incident of the story is usually the murder of a female
character. The more I thought about how many stories depend on a dead woman,
the more disturbed I became. This story-starting device shows up over and over
in pop culture, in films as diverse as Bambi,The Fugitive, Jaws,The Shawshank Redemption, Gladiator, The Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo, and in every detective, police procedural, and true crime series,
from Sherlock to Criminal Minds to 48 Hours.
Cathy Ulrich has also noticed this trend, and she wrote a book about it. Ghosts of You is a collection of thirty-one flash pieces from her Murdered Ladies Series.…
Driving down the Interstate 27 from Phoenix to the Grand Canyon in the middle of July, cacti along the road flashing the finger. Passing by Montezuma Castle – the ruin that never saw the Indian chief around. It’s time-honored tradition to name places after men we killed. The land we inhabited was too unforgiving to bury our dead in it. Skies hung so alarmingly low that ancestors weren’t able to walk upright – we lifted the skies, gradually, generation after generation, until they ceased to be a factor. On the plateau gravity, water, and wind joined forces curving castles out of rocks, chiseling images that make you believe it couldn’t happen at random. So please follow a few simple rules: Do not talk loudly. Do not make eye contact with a rock.…
Yes, I too was
supposed to die like the rest of them. By all means I should have been
incinerated in that hellfire; vaporized in the blink of an eye. But no, nothing
of the sort happened to me. Only, the life I had lived till then turned, in one
screaming flash, into a memory of something that had perhaps never existed. That
was thirty-three years before. Or was it thirty-three hundred? I stopped
counting time long ago.
Everything changed
that day. For one, I stopped chronicling my life on the Internet – yes, it was
destroyed too, contrary to the designs of the smart-asses at DARPA who had
invented it – and started scribbling in this tattered notebook I found
somewhere afterwards, my handwriting growing smaller and smaller as days and
decades crawled away and its pages started filling up like nothing on earth has
filled up ever since.…
The ink came in an opaque plastic bottle, the size of an adult fist, and difficult to pop open which made one think the lid would hold similarly tight when screwed back on. One was wrong about that. Ink was a possession that marked a very clear line between little kids and school. For the basic kindergarten penmanship exercises — the squiggles and circles that were not really expected to coalesce into letters — ink was provided; it was there, in the pen, when it was time to practice. In first grade, ink and the filling of one’s fountain pen became one’s own responsibility. Only fountain pens were approved for use in elementary school, ostensibly because writing with a fountain pen established proper penmanship and the ink was deemed to be a proper color to minimize eye strain.…
I wrapped Mummy, Daddy, and my sister Jenny up in blankets so that
they’d keep warm and left them in my parents’ bedroom. I was the only one who
hadn’t been sick. They’d been really bad, but at least they were sleeping it
off now. There was a really nasty smell coming from the bedroom, it’d been
getting worse with each day, but I didn’t go in there because I didn’t want to
wake them.
A lot of people round the estate were sick. I hadn’t seen anybody else since it all started. It had never been so quiet. There were no cars driving down the roads, they were all sat on the driveways and at the sides of the pavements as though they were just resting too.…
