Poetry by Lillian Necakov

      David DeHetre CC




I Remember Galileo

Dearest Leonora,

There is news of wild turkey vultures wandering the streets, they might as well be hyenas or the sisters of perpetual mercy. This is not a political statement, this is hallucinating in the heat shimmer, the city as las mujeres obscured by the landscape, skyscrapers in place of witch-hazel and dogwood. I thought you’d like to know there is a new king who might as well be a squirrel or woodsia obtusa. A mirage, hot air, light speeding up curving back upwards, the sky, the surface everything as wave in the heat of May days. I thought you’d like to know. 

A woman was saved yesterday by a crow who was the spitting image of Erik Satie. When the reporter asked how/why, all she said was boys, fireworks. It turns out that the man-crow held a tuning fork in his beak, his wings as heavy as a library remained motionless. His song, tender and crooked against her flesh. In a small town, on rare occasions the parking lots are filled with feathers.    

I am writing to you as a sister searching for my own self in your orange soda gouache transfigurations, in the forest magic of your psychic spaces. I am writing to you in confidence, my heart, a zeppelin with a slow leak, he is not my king, but I once loved a man like that too, unreachable, mummering. 

Of course, your father was a glass-eyed monster weighed down by a belt made of gargantuan bells. Swaying like wheat heavy with grain, swaying to drive away the evil sickness and weird sisters. Still you sang and quaked and floated past the threshold of your darkness, the rooster-red rooms of the asylum. 

You once sat next to a pool of Cuban flowers with an old man’s hands resting across your breasts like sunburst. You whispered I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. He was the geography of imaginary places, the light rushing in and you, you were una boca, opening wide, wider, widest. 

I too dream of the hangman, but also, I breathe the kinetic ripples of my mother’s mother’s air and wake into endless time. Today I will read Gerald Stern’s poem called I Remember Galileo and I will watch paper leap through my city and fall into moonlight tarot. I will become like you, dearest Leonora, a dada-voodoo bird-girl, bearded witch-angel, leopard-skinned mantra. I will dress in masks, mirrors, sequins, fur and wool. I will brave the coming years, I will paint the sky into a tongue over my house. Umbrellaed in the underbelly of these quietest days I too will be capable of anything.  

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*Leonora Carrington quote





Dear January, 

Pig-fucker-shite-turd-wanker, hell-hugger son of a bitch!

Named after the Roman god of portals, doors and gates, beginnings and endings that exist in a circle of sadness. And mostly, I am sad, sad to have to begin again after so many beginnings. I’m sorry I called you those names. I’ve been having heavy dreams about waterways, strange ideas gathering in place of friends, dark detectives, old broken down houses where I leave all my wet clothes in a pile like exhausted children. 

How is this my one and only life?

Doc says bone on bone. Replacement parts. But I am stubborn, I learn a new word – zenographic. From now on everything will be in reference to the surface of the planet Jupiter. Yes, I say, it will be our secret, only I choose tendered things - antler, fiddlestick, soapstone (lemon-green), paper boats, in place of titanium. I think of the implications of life in retrograde and how either way, strangely, there is always music. 

Researchers in Dallas, Texas present findings about an enzyme that slows aging and cell death. 

Also in January, Galileo stumbles across the last moon. Liberations, births, deaths, assassinations. Black are my steps on silver sod. But the snow never comes this time around. My books, strewn around the house in the exact shape of small fishless ponds, refract the light of these longer days into such quiet places. Funny how the body can be at once whole and broken, how everything is between things, how 
if they open me up they will find a street I ran along, time and time again. 

But if they stitch me back up. 

Who will carry this pain? How will the night know which house to dig her teeth into? What remarkable places will be lost?


*Robert Louis Stevenson line

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Lillian Nećakov is the author many chapbooks, including, The Lake Contains and Emergency Room (Apt. 9 Press; shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award), as well as the full-length collections il virus (Anvil Press; shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award), Hooligans (Mansfield Press), The Bone Broker (Mansfield Press), Hat Trick (Exile Editions), Polaroids (Coach House Books) and The Sickbed of Dogs (Wolsak and Wynn). Her book, Midnight Glossolalia, a collaborative poetry collection with Scott Ferry and Lauren Scharhag was published in February, 2023 (Meat for Tea Press). Her book, Duck Eats Yeast, Quacks, Explodes; Man Loses eye, a collaborative poem with Gary Barwin was published in May 2023 by Guernica Editions. She has also published in many print and online journals in Canada and the U.S. Lillian lives in Toronto, Canada.