in parentheses

Alison McFarlane (she/they) is a poet from Ontario, Canada, with a passion for all things creative – currently completing a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Media Studies at Trent University. Their first published poem, “Fowl Hen Song,” can be found in Trent U’s Absynthe Magazine. Say hi @alisonhcpe on Instagram!

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Eve (n.)

Wet bundles of birch,
wedged below my nailbeds
I pick and peel wood perches
that belong to birds

I am hid in white bark and ash
a mask to craft privacy,
a chainmail grown and lashed
by this Eden mother

who wipes away my tear buds
with her flowers for fingers
and mends red into green bloods
pirating good sap and soil

cursing the heat and begging
to be set free like flames
devastating and wrecking
until rain cuts it down

like how I fall to my knees
inside church ghost towns
like revenge fantasies
softening the Earth

somewhere there is a lullaby
asking me to come on out
it is sung by the blue sky
and the wild willowherb

somewhere there is a girl
staring from a lake mirror
searching for a pearl
searching for a tree

so full of lurch
so covered in smoke
I need to borrow birch
to make myself feel

(whole).

1800 668 6868

The kids’ help phone number under the open wrapper
of my mini kit kat bar.
A raft of red, discarded driftwood, at the bottom of my bag
afloat-ing me. Relics of long-ago, forgotten like a pinecone
marking Hansel’s fickle way home.
And I fall in love with the acceptable hedonism of October. Twisted
life given from the growing death of these crooked spine-like trees
choosing which class of terror to sheet my leafless body in
then,
wear it like that well-known coming of age canine hood,
people-watching, from a swinging set of bones.

Ghost specialists who tell me to compromise, squeeze,
until my blood blooms like boyhood. Please, pass the holy water. I am droughted and fruitless
jealous of thunder that shook hells into being. Because nothing
can come out clean and I’ve been redlined out of an out-and-out Eden.
The exorcism does not lessen it even with pots of coffee crisp or cold
keeping me awake, keeps me listening through the wall
in this common uniform:
black dress, black hat, fingernails caked in soil and the fugitive future talks its shit
on the other side.
my mouth refuses to bite, afraid of sterile and fitting in with the ill
afraid to touch lips, afraid of swallowing, afraid of leaving home.
Take me back to eleven, or even half a year.

I feel the already-lived creeping like nobody there
see the orange candlelight, to ward off teething leeching ghouls
knock, knock, knock, splinter, the inauguration
of hungry twilight.
Blowing blue raspberry bubble-gum, I am sat in modern-day. Waiting
as a blur the man who answers his door airs the uncanny
of his mirror. Synthetic and slurred
I am still
made of childish things there in my grandmother days
fattened with faith and black forest cherry seeds. Optimistic 
suddenly. Young trees won’t send us up to sway
down in Massachusetts. I don’t belong there, I don’t belong, sorry
to my long-ago ancestors still oscillating in their flights.
I feel them still, sleeping twitchy inside me – like this leaving autumn
asking, trick, or treat? in farewell. I don’t know what to say,
all I know is breaking it off clean
like kit kat
may just be good,
for me.

Mama’s Magnum Opus

I’ve never been a lover
of making babies or cells
I am too useless and unmade like a silly urchin bunk bed
squeezed into a college hall.

I am too needy to care
for things needier than I
stay rightly scared of responsibility
I have the morals of a cuckoo bird
and cold delusions of crooks. You can’t have something
that is not yours. You must fashion a child
then let them be what they are:
a frightful embodiment of entropy
like crashing car heads– elusively sparkling shrill on your highway.
But then they are a picturesque, a steamrolling train
breaking up bodies, leftovers, and change
with only wobbly wet pennies, wishing and wishing
for all poor pockets to pool green. Like me, I can see
a head full of futuristic unapocalyptic dreams
fungating
on

probably parroting mama’s footsteps
into dawn. Birdie see Birdie do;
uncontrollable and certainly washed away
by the salivating oceans or hot scorching day…the earth is dying and so I keep my tiny promises
never-born snoozing still and private
inside this flesh of mine. Detailed with power, prejudice, and pride
barring me every time. I’ve never wanted to give
up a vulnerability to the steely arms of the man.
I’ve never sought to sentence an Other to be born
whole in a beasty Bethlehem stomach – forever troubled by threats of later comeuppance:
hunger or hunger; debt or debt; fire or fire
forced to live slow and skinny, atop death row
falling from tedious tightropes in the future,
a few decades
ago

I have never been interested in housing the uncanny
inside of me. Although,
I have cultivated many young things of my own, like poems
like cawing crows, and sundried tomatoes
never meant to be mellowed. I have let opulent opioid fictions shoot up
like heroin
into my closed eyes. Fantasying for me a different type of life
social services surely should cut me
down.

I am not Mama and yet I am still
Mother and momentous human
daughter and darling bard. An ugly doll cast out
to amuse trespassers, machismos, and the dogs. I have conscious raised myself
then hauled-in households, offshore,
I’ve mislaid my head – training the body for war
qualms and books and tears. The sound of midnight
crying in my ears so now I am bringing life
back into my existence.
Tell me again, how is childcaring supposed to feel?
Mothering must be tough if its anything like this! like an author’s job
living lonesome and go-getting, belonging to a paranormal cult
believing in horrors not yet seen.
Guarding unzipped baggage, and letting child’s play run unbarring
in your brain – sticky keys typing on

haunting empty pages, commonplace vacuums
hungry to organize grime. I babysit a lovechild of punishment and crime
I am godfathered by nothing, no safety net, except for ruthlessness
because I said so! An unborn opus of story
waking me in the darkness – pleading with her Mama
to be there. Cloud bursting for years and eternities and minutes
after she’s born. Mobile stars and I go like gravity, I go,
into word vomit, I go
into the storm.

Ophelia Street

A sharp and abysmal needle in the water of the world
I was an experience, to endure
like that Ophelia

who finds peace in foundations, of oceans, of realms and planets, of going –
in privacy, in ghostwriting
finds cosiness and delight in skipping stones,
bar graveling

drowning my sorrows. Well, without ordinary grassroot earths pulverize their hearts
into powder. Needles are nobody without bounteous threads,
to embroider.

Like how funerals make purple violets
more romantic. I assumed I was doomed to be Hamlet’s lover, until I was blue
in the face. I am now the pond. Jubilant, procuring tides of repair. Buoyant, wonted and now full
of soul. A girl, with beach for bone.

Hello, bighearted world – I am content for once, with no howling bloodhounds on my tail
existing homely, as peaceful as an amateur wallflower
like tapestry. A seamstress hems me
clean.

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