Sideshow Concessions

Lucas Crawford

Description

Sideshow Concessions is the first book from queer performer and scholar Lucas Crawford. A collection populated by the circus-like bodies and experiences of a narrator navigating rural pasts and urban presents, Sideshow Concessions is the unofficial story of someone who is both a bearded lady and the fattest man in the world.

"Sideshow Confessions is an accessible glimpse at the absurd — a clever look at a trans narrative which explores its challenges without drowning in them... Crawford’s sense of humour is a breath of fresh air."—Broken Pencil

“Sideshow Concessions is fresh, honest, heartbreaking, and funny, with turns of phrase equally intelligent and moving.”—Karen Solie

Sujets

• Nueva Escocia
• Rural Canada
• Transgender
• Rita MacNeil
• Identity politics
• Nova Scotia
• Nouvelle-Écosse

Informations

• Publié par: Invisible Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781926743639
• Langue: English

Extrait

Text copyright © Lucas Crawford, 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Crawford, Lucas, 1983-, author
Sideshow concessions / Lucas Crawford.
(Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry)
Poems.
ISBN 978-1-926743-63-9 (epub)

I. Title.
PS8605.R43S54 2015 C811’.6 C2015-905244-0
C2015-905245-9

Edited by Leigh Nash
Cover and interior design by Megan Fildes | Typeset in Laurentian and Slate

Invisible Publishing | Halifax & Toronto
www.invisiblepublishing.com

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
Invisible Publishing recognizes the support of the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Communities, Culture & Heritage. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Culture Division to develop and promote our cultural resources for all Nova Scotians.
I.
Fattest Man in the World
YOUR FAT DAUGHTER REMEMBERS WHAT YOU SAID
HOW FAMILIES MOURN WHEN THEY HAVE MONEY AND DON’T KNOW EACH OTHER
MEMORANDUM FOR THE FELLOWS AT THE GYM
Recurring Questions from the Summer I Didn’t Leave the House
STOP ALL THE CLOCKS ON PANCAKE TUESDAY
EATING CHINESE IN KINGSTON, NOVA SCOTIA (POPULATION: 5174)
MY FATTEST AUNT
PLEASE DON’T BURY ME DOWN IN THAT COLD, COLD GROUND
ONE OF MY THIN FRIENDS
CHAIRS AND STAGES CAN’T CONTAIN ME
MY LAST MEAL
FAILED SEANCES FOR RITA MACNEIL (1944–2013)

II.
Bearded Lady
LONG TWISTED THINGS
INTRODUCING THE LETTER EX (1)
SCAR TISSUE LOOKS GOOD ON POMQUET BEACH
AIRPLANE LAVATORY ALGEBRA
INTRODUCING THE LETTER EX (2)
O, ADULTHOOD
THE FORCE REQUIRED TO OCCUPY MY
SHIRT IS STRONGER THAN GRAVITY
INTRODUCING THE LETTER EX (3)
MONOGAMY (A LOST LETTER FOR READING ALOUD)

III.
Sword Swallower
ROAD RULES
CANADIAN LITERATURE PREMISES
HOMETOWN
INTRODUCING THE LETTER EX (4)
I GOT AN A+ ON THE TEST BECAUSE I COULDN’T STOP REREADING
INFOMERCIALS
MUZZLED
DEPRESSION
LETTERS, IN ANY CASE
INTRODUCING THE LETTER EX (5)
THE HAND UNLEARNS TO TOUCH
CRUISING UTOPIA
DEAR MRS. LUBERTO
I.
Fattest Man in the World
YOUR FAT DAUGHTER REMEMBERS WHAT YOU SAID

My dad was in the hospital cafeteria eating lasagna when I was born.
I was making lasagna at home when he flat-lined.

Symmetry.

My mom has low blood pressure. My dad’s was high. And I
am a gymnastics school dropout
with an inherited need to redefine balance.
(I sat immovable on the seesaw,
a whole pubescent pack
trying to dethrone me.)

I’m fifteen, telling my parents I’m gay. Dad says:

I know you think you are
’ cause you’re a bigger girl
and boys don’t like you.

I start a list of his remarks like this.

When his heart stopped for the first time,
I was making lasagna with my first girlfriend.
She was closeted and was supposed to be elsewhere,
maybe on an elephant eating cardamom marshmallows and
counting every lucky constellation that she and her father
can’t find in the light-drowned night sky of Mumbai.

There you were when you were skinny as a rail!
Dad says this when we all watch an old video.
I am four in the video.
Lighten up, he’s just trying to encourage you!

Encourage me to what ?

Choose a photograph from your hard drive. Invert the colours.
Stare at it for thirty seconds. Close your eyes,
then open them in front of a flat white wall.
Now, each time you blink, you will see the photograph
as if it’s been branded on your insides.
I’m sure that somewhere a nun is doing this
with a digitized painting of white hippie Jesus.
She’s shrieking with vengeful glee, “ That is the power of the holy spirit!”
The image is everywhere and nowhere, but it’s no spirit.
It is a matter of light and the physics of memory.
It is the way in which bad memories might reappear
each night and blink.

Even if trauma is so last season.

You are going to trim your chin hairs
for your grandmother’s funeral.
Oh yes, you can see them.
I was noticing them in the light the other day
and it would mean a lot to us.
Get your sister to help you do it.
Girls don’t have chin hair.

My dad had coarse curls, salt-and-pepper ’stache, and a neck beard.
My mother’s family has coifs that go Brillo Pad in Atlantic air.
I have it all, from chin to chubby toes.
How was I to know
that I ought to be ashamed
to be the heir apparent
to my parents’ hair?

You thought holy communion was a snack ?
You would think that.

Months before he died,
my dad carried a small portable cabin
through the woods with a buddy and said,
If that doesn’t kill me, nothing will.
Irony is the new black, Dad,
and you know it’s slimming.

You’ll be 200 pounds
by the time you’re in Grade Eight.
(CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.)

I was eating smoked meat yesterday on the boulevard
and noticed that the goods are measured on a silver scale
emblazoned with the slogan: “We Weigh the World.”
The same company produces a tool called a “strain gauge,”
which indicates how much pressure is being put upon an object.
I saw a picture of a strain gauge
glued across a crack in a brick house.

Am I the house or the gauge or am I the picketer with a placard that says
“ The possibility of collapse
cannot be determined by formula—”

I’m sorry I’ve been so hard on ya.
Don’t want you to end up like me.

Lose weight was the last thing my dad ever said to me
but I don’t think it was the first.

The sea that crashes in my stomach is percussive:
dozens of Captain Morgan mickeys
clink as they bob atop the waves;
voices recite the messages stuffed in those bottles;
heavy ambient ocean air drowns them out.

His last words echoed
with the empty-theatre hollowness of his own gut,
with the hum of capsizing winds passing over the beer bottles that sat in his stomach.
They were jammed with
his mother’s own abusive misspellings
and with fortunes that didn’t come true.

Is it possible to hate a ghost
who has always already
haunted himself
through you?

I’m doing just fine.

I rub my stomach when it gets choppy.

I still check my vital signs when I microwave lasagna.

I eat lots of berries.

I dip my mozzarella sticks in ranch.

I’ve known since age four how to tell a lightning rod from a switch from an olive branch.

I have these dreams where I’m floating.
Where I wave down to my chiropractor,
my old music teacher, and my dad.
All I know is that I’m going really far away
and when I wake up, I can’t remember if
the dreaming-I was sad.
HOW FAMILIES MOURN WHEN THEY HAVE
MONEY AND DON’T KNOW EACH OTHER

I.
You ransacked his rumpus room
and sold his collection of kaleidoscopes.
The family got along while you tripped over bonds
and stocks in his stowaway cellar.
You wore a periwinkle skirt
and weed-green shirt for the funeral.
I didn’t want anyone to think
that I had dressed for convention’s sake.

II.
As a young seaman, your father watched a ship explode.
Men became lava, then steam, and settled as ash on water.
He never talked about it. Maybe it’s all he could see with his naked eyes.

III.
There’s no home for atheists in that town,
so you stood at a church lectern to blazon him.
You were so angry about it that you kicked the side of a car,
the owner of which was hidden in the back of the annex,
counting that week’s collection plate
with a coinage tool made for casinos and couch-surfers.
I have never been surprised enough to manage indignation when my will isn’t done.

IV.
He made you repeat the mental map you’d need
to find the rare coins buried out back.
Now you step slowly, shovel on shoulder
and feel like a sad new-age pirate.
You all lent a hand digging up the backyard’s
brick path laid with gold Krugerrands.
You wore red shoes to the funeral
and received many compliments.

V.
Every Halloween, he handed out the state’s best loot bags.
(The local paper covered it.)
His was oil money and I wonder if he was slick.
You asked him to stop giving you
so many Christmas presents, but he refused.
As Beckett said: