Poetry By Inuya D’Vorah Schultz

David Antis CC




In this Enclave 

July is still an ice storm away and we are all on animal                         in this enclave              
               where I stand before the threshold, smoking heavy.                            On either
side of the wrought iron Ponsonby manor signage are gargoyles. 

Wind and rain have smoothed their wrinkles    they are babies. But they are blind from
decades of huffing gasoline                                                       they can’t see who comes in,
who goes out, who creeps in, who stays. 

The cold is biting, and the highway traffic emits a red fume. I feel for the grotesques, 

                                                       what a hell it is, to spend eternity with a view of the A-15.
 
The janitor then emerges from the front entrance and     

he chucks brown water on an already slippery footpath

rushing water sounds like entropy

              everything the ice has been hiding is unearthed—​

I smell chlorine and mildew and I stop breathing
 
because when he sees me, he stares and it is too late to play dead. He looks like a
starved lion, the way he is, hunched over the mop bucket.
You are the light, his voice begins and is carried to me by stale winds, trapped and
circling in the courtyard. The janitor begins to stalk, treading lamely in grey slush
towards me.    

               (I am not the light, I’m just something with a pulse.)
 
I am the warmest thing in this enclave, where the radiators never turned on,

where hot water won’t run again until the geese return. But it’s only been a few nights
since they’ve flown – July is still an ice storm and a death away.
  
The janitor is wearing hiking boots. Heavy and waterlogged, they remind me of dead
birds, washed up on some secret shore. 
 

He says something when he approaches, first his voice is soft – so soft the sound falls
and, on the ground, I watch a crosshatch scrape grow red on the knee of his whisper:

 
                                                He tells me             

something about FOX news and America

                                                                                  He says to me we are just babes

                                                                                  in Jesus’ farmland of a palm

             okay, okay,                     and he is far too close to me

and his breath feels hot, stale and sweet

                           and the tone is                    too loud and / the tar teeth and / the smell of hair
oh, oh                                                                                                                                 god, why is the hair wet
                                            I am stuck in subzero bondage, no breathing,

I am scared of his coke bottle glasses and beaten moon eyes  

this hypoxic daze tells me that       if there is a fanatical bomb inside of me
                                                      his breath will cut the wrong wire / if I inhale him into the
wrong lung, I might soon find myself up there with the gargoyles, staring out at the A-15:

He tells me 
                                          something about transcendence

                                          He says to me there is mercy in the sky–

                                          Have you seen the Spring chicks drown?

                                          If you lick the blue horizon, life might

                                          keep you for a while–
 
Don’t breathe, I think             go blue go blue go blue –     

the way I go blue when the winds are strong, and I am

watching the crack in my bedroom wall

                                                                     stretch its bolt with every windstorm…
 
Go blue, go blue, go blue…

I peer over the janitor’s head – beyond the gargoyles with their backs to us I see the

oratory’s cross

a chimera for this enclave,

is it too late to play dead?

If I do, how long do I stay down?

Do I wait until the first thaw?

Do I wait until the weeds take over the court?


I won’t make it ‘til then


                                                                                                   July is still an ice storm and a death
                                                                                                   away.
 






N1 Visions – Brothers

surface in a lap pool
             teeth pockmarked &
             ragged & patterned green
             like cliff like oyster is this

what erosion looks like —​

             a spit-puddle, chlorine whirlpool
             licking the cheeks of a slack-jawed cave;
you tread that white water
             until they’re home safe, out of range
             from the hunger of the Rockies. 

Sounds like a storm growing,
             a truck coming up the gravel way,
             it’s coming for them, it’s coming
             for you, it’s gonna eat you all;
Too late for the language you need
to say,

please let them rest
they’re good boys, please
they’re good.

​
​

Inuya D’Vorah Schultz is a writer from Montreal/Tiohtià:ke.


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