Precordial Thump

by Zoe Whittall

Overview

Insightfully showcasing the inner divide, this poetic memoir aims to break down the larger lies of poetic form and the smaller dishonesties within the self. A fixation on medical language and the crucial aspects of what it means to be human, to love, and to be loved are woven throughout this collection. Featuring compelling lesbian themes, this is a humorous book of self-discovery that conjures up all the joy, toughness, and melancholy of being a girl, both elegant and scruffy at once.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781550967579
Publisher:	Exile Editions
Publication date:	08/24/2018
Sold by:	INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	103
File size:	514 KB

About the Author

Zoe Whittall is the author of the poetry collections The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life and The Emily Valentine Poems and the novel Bottle Rocket Hearts, which was named one of the Best Books of 2007 by both the Globe and Mail and Quill & Quire. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Precordial Thump

red rimmed reading glasses, fern green flats someone torched The Good Will

a plastic bag hung around a door handle filled with scarves and beads, ready to go

burnt coffee, pepper clumped, upturned lip of a Sealtest cup, your open hand

when does history start, how do you start a heart, with a fist and a caustic order?

while we play at rape, calling in (so) sick —
the doorbell rings, a hollow bird call

we clutch our chests, crack our backs, ignore the tinny ring, tell travel and suicide stories

last spring Abigail hung, by a necklace in the attic What was she thinking, not leaving a note?

there was a pig in Goa behind the hut who ate our shit before it hit the ground.

conjure a single, carefully aimed blow.
I could put my coat on, I could just

walk out of work. No one dies from unprocessed grant applications. you tattoo my ankle

with your first initial, take oral inventory the ways we've almost died

meningitis, collision, hanging,
cause and effect, the precordial thump

is illegal now. I practice it on bread dough, draw X's.
I name you Scout, I learn CPR, hold paradox

hone my compulsions, terrible and incantatory.
the things I have to do to get by.

we watch bombings on TV, put our terror into context, lucky shame, press nine

before you dial out, archive hospital bracelets.
This is my birth name. This is real.


Stoop Smoke

On my front stoop, I am narrowing my world view.
Brains of condensation bead the bottle, I clutch the urge to be expansive. I look up when the bus passes too fast. The kids rubberneck from the recycling bins

where they poke at a dead bird with a badminton racquet,
cheeks puffed with gum. I look down and then ahead. I fix a stare like a broken toaster. I keep simple momentum:
glass to lip, trainer toe to stair. The colour of evaporation,

the grey smell of wet city, panting. On my front stoop,
you have stopped to smoke and tell me about transformation.
I ask, Are you wiser for the breakdown? Why is it that suddenly all we can talk about is meditation? We understand the wet

city is a smell, and the air pants against our garden grade faces.
Purple basil grows beside the thrown shards and the city is the sound of hundreds heaving.


Dear Liary

At the Hollywood! Stars! Laundromart! the bitten kid picks some choice scabs. The woman with awkward highlights flips

harshly through pages of Canadian Living. I press my back against the window before noting it is crawling with tiny insects,

cradle a mass killing field between shoulder blades, and text
I Hate You. Truth is not part of universal grammar, you can be

taught to sound out anything but you can't instruct empathy,
you assume it's innate if you've been lucky before. I watch

an ant drag the body of a fallen friend down cracked tributaries of double-double coloured linoleum, across the face of a dead

soldier on the cover of the Toronto Sun. My best friend from high school goes to Afghanistan and I make her mixed tapes

with no mention of our political schisms, cover-art features
1992's best matching hickeys. Slip notes in the track list,

the wedding is off, detail drastic dishonesties, sleep fitfully without touching your side of the bed, still full with absence.

You spoke in sentimental lines extracted from City TV movies,
rehearsed and two steps removed. Lies only exist if someone

is present to believe them. You text: Then leave me. My mother offers furniture sent by mail. I buy steak dinners for a friend

and realize only later the absence of taste, the things you get used to not having, the sensory organs.


Law of Reciprocal Actions

Particle A,
sleeps in until the dry skin afternoon.
Particle B,
face in kettle steam, pores open dawn

The night before, stare pressed by stare: an equal and opposite reaction; the truth and lie cancelled each other out

In the dark hallway with the light-bulb too high for A or B to change without risking fracture

they passed each other shoulders brushed with identical force and the sun set without incident


The truth is

a) soft and streamlined b) circling itself c) difficult to determine d) pushed and prodded e) a sonnet asserting itself f) the truth is right on! The truth is hell yeah!

The truth is a) anti-rational b) a level tablespoon c) earnest, sentimental d) form and format e) a breathless, jagged fragment f) the truth is six drinks in, all lies

The truth is a) a mascot b) LANGUAGE c) poetic sincerity d) a band with five lead singers e) you suspect the confessional is a Girl Thing f) the truth is n 1. correspondence to fact or reality

The truth is a) you don't owe me anything b) associative freeverse c) I wish you were all bad d) an emerging limp e) blended, all fury f) the truth is solid


Found: How to Tell if Someone Is Lying, 1

The website how to tell if someone is lying says:

Gestures/expressions don't match the verbal statement, such as frowning when saying "I love you."

She said I love you after sixteen Lucky Lagers on the anniversary of her friend's death.
She was so drunk she was dancing,
legs a-tango under the snow of a summer bed sheet.
I giggled into the pillow, even as confusion emerged, began to fester,
and slowly became ordinary.
I learned to not expect accuracy, overcooked the meat,
stood stock still on the back porch monitoring the cats,
trying to make sense of their behaviour.

Sternal Rub

(A Series of Seven Poems)

1. Rebound

I run into you at a bar, in violet plaid, silver threading the hemline. We met years ago. We drink thimbles of gold flecks in deep green, the color of 80s drug store cologne, and discover one commonality: we both spent the last two years dating chronic liars. I take a photo of us to capture the wide-eyed. We glimpse each other mid-blink. Glare. Pupils in bloom.

You call first. Suggest rebounding on Ossington street. You tell me you've become a paramedic. We toast our amazing break-ups! at a closet-sized bar where the bartender proffers free drinks in exchange for blatant stares. We talk honest gore and thumb wrestle. We drink; pretend we are so over it.

2. High Stakes Deception

My liar claimed tumors. Pointed towards emergent IV scars, stories of chemotherapy nurses who baked her loaves of bread. I called hospitals to verify details. Watching CSI all day, or watching CSI all day after radiation therapy are two different forms of passivity with violence. I googled Pseudologia fantastica, the comforting hug of intensive research. I checked my neck for lumps.

I touch your sleeve, finger silver thread.

You: I can't believe you stayed with her for so long.

Me: She was really funny. I like to be entertained.

You : Sociopaths are not without their charms.

3. Stars

I am single for the first time in two years, and crack my head on the glass shower door. I think about knitting and the part of my brain that handles reading. Pray for the strength of elasticity, the stretch and retract of precious membrane. Do I call the old liar or you, head-wound connoisseur? I call dial-a-nurse who have me on file. I am forever hysterical, but this time blood is specific, viscous. The voice advises: G o to the hospital. Instead I watch TV, set my phone to ring every two hours. Swell with me. I can go it alone! I say, throwing up triumphantly for emphasis.

4. Sedation

You eat cereal and call in sick. In Rexdale your back seized. You were lifting a man who called 911 at 4 a.m. because his foot hurt. He just didn't feel like walking to the ambulance. I have a toothache and no insurance. The tooth is turning black. I ask you precisely how long it will take for blindness to set in, should the infection spread. We reduce us to probabilities, and I doodle indecipherable fake theorems on the cover of The Vegetarian Times; you talk about how math is the answer to all the world's problems. We think about smoking the chunk of three-year-old opium wrapped in foil, housed with the exacto knives and fine-tips in your high school pencil case.

5. Drive

The liar was not a dangerous driver. Even though she could describe dead friends who were never born, two surgeries fabricated with aplomb, I felt safe with her on the highway. She'd skirt soft around the guardrails, make no sudden stops. You drive like the rules don't apply to us. Flash your Emergency Services badge to cops when we get pulled over. Every flaw in you is a sign that things are as they should be. When you pump the brakes, discomfort is a sign of presence. The oils dabbed on wrists, seeping into winter jackets, a vital intoxicant. You save lives and I clip coupons, search online for our dream house in the country. You say I'm pretty and that you half expect me to peel my face off, like the aliens in V.

6. Deny

Your liar punched you in the face. Called you names. Your liar invented a dead sister, raped and murdered. She used it as currency, a way to evade responsibility. My liar was gentle, generous. Meant well. Didn't flinch when I told her I know you don't have cancer. I talked to your family. I expected an outburst: her fist / my eye. How the flowering of a bruise may have made things unambiguous. But while her body remained, arms propped against my radiator, everything inside her vanished. I handed her the baseball, coffee mug, apartment keys. I still loved her and she was calmly breathing. An outline of her body walked up the stairs, paused to light a cigarette and walked up Ossington like it was last Tuesday, next Thursday, whenever.

7. Rouse

I like to pretend the sternum is not there to be acknowledged. You eagerly demonstrate a sternal rub anyway. How to take a pulse. CPR. There is consolation in how well you understand the human body. You say This is how you can wake up an unconsciousperson. Your knuckles grind an invisible pill: mortar and pestle. If you perform a sternal rub correctly, you'll leave the imprint of your knuckles on the sternum and fingernail crescents in your palm. You woke up a drunk in Trinity-Bellwoods this morning, thumped the centre of his chest with your fist, like some spastic button pusher on The Price Is Right. You heard the contestants holler, One Dollar! Everyone wakes up eventually, unless they are too far gone.

Found: How to Tell if Someone Is Lying, 2

A liar might unconsciously place objects (book, coffee cup, etc.) between themselves and you.

Between us are 3 bottles of beer,
43 cents, a bank statement, and the red bible,
a thin New Testament I'm unable to discard,
that always ends up under my bed, is found again, whenever I move.


Improper Use of a an Ambulance Stretcher

The medic reaches up,
presses thumb to throat,
fingers curl around my neck like the right hook of a question mark. Pre-hypoxia,
just enough to cause

stars, no black-out. Places two fingers to my heart beat, produces a generous smirk,
kisses me with authority.
Wears a badge, speaks in definitive commands. Knows precisely how

blood is travelling through my body, can picture textbook diagrams of how rapid breathing potentiates certain brain chemicals, runs a soft highlighter over pathways, releasing

oxytocin and vasopressin, words I've never heard. The sterile repository (with obligatory We Support the Troops bumper sticker)
housed two mid-morning concussions,
three drunks, abdomen pain,
transforms into a make-shift date spot, an imperfect setting for innocuous mid-shift make-out. Her partner stands in line at Tim Hortons, ten feet away, ordering our purposely complicated bagels,

smoking an extra cigarette,
because he held the door for me and helped me up, and winked before he walked away. Does this happen a lot?
Well, we can't date each other, she says.

Her beeper goes off against my thigh, reads, "Delta Male 28 Fell approx 30 feet.
Unk inj. Unk if br" Still gives me ten seconds. A screen lights up between the front seats, a blinking path to victim, and we struggle to smooth our clothing after the click

of the driver's side door. I feel guilty about all ten seconds, walking home to their lights and sirens. At dawn she drives up my street, clicks the sirens on once to say, Hello, are you still awake?
Her partner sleeping in the back.

We sit on the front stoop, the sun rising,
phone batteries dead and tossed aside,
cigarettes lit. I can't help but want to know every detail. He was a roof-hopper,
post-tequila, double dare at a party, fell three stories, grabbed the scaffolding on

his way down. She'd arrived first, pressed her finger to his skull. The medics sat around him, as though he were a campfire.
Nothing we could've done, she shrugs. Lights a joint. Still wants to fuck.
I want to drink black coffee, think

about God, who he might have been before he fell; how I will eventually judge,
poorly, how far I can jump.


Exercise CADUCEUS MAJOR

for Infectious Diseases and Emergency Preparedness

Everyone thinks they're doctors,
and the doctors think they're Gods

you say, camped beside a simulated blast,
one in one thousand emergency medical personnel playing fake terrorist attack.
Afterwards, home and hypothermic, I offer comfrey salve and potato soup, rub the space between blades,
twirl a heartbreaker curl around stories of mass disaster training,
the shape of objects embedded in skin.

You check my lungs after a bong hit I hear an echo post-thaw, we arrange our assets on the table, I write
poet
I have cultural currency?
Will they count my 27
dollar royalty cheque?
Try to arrange our lives into a non-emergency.
Neat piles of numbers and synonyms for Sure, Fine.
We have different values:
translation, you have more money than I do.

We'll name the feral cat Artery.
Start letting him in the house.
You'll stick an IV in my arm on mornings when I'm too hungover to go to work.
Who says there are no easy answers?
You assure me the next time SARS hits,
it will be a hundred times worse.
I won't leave the house:
I'll watch you from a hole in the attic floor surrounded by reams of blank paper;
I'll replace friends with chipped teacups,
push the TV up to the top of the stairs so you can hear the news and wait it out.

You say,
that's not an echo —
that's what your lungs are supposed to sound like.
I press the silver circle to your chest.
You tell me what to listen for:
I only hear grade school pencils scratching Psalms 100
on foolscap:
Make a joyful noise.


Abell Street, End of Days

We are celebrating Eviction Notice Day.
Ice in palms, flipped into rock glasses. Lick along the beaded life-line. Switch to slow sips. The smoke of four. Light one off the other. She coats thin circles of sliced lemon with crushed espresso beans.

I Have Itchy Hands. I've Had Them All Year.
You Get Itchy Hands From Syphilis.
Isn't That What You Get When You Don't Eat Vitamin C?
No. That's Scurvy.
What's Syphilis?
It's an STD. You'd Be Brain Damaged After a Year. You Don't Have It.

Instead of Hello we say Get Out.

Get Out! Would You Like Another Drink?

Get Out! I Like the New Drapes.

There is a field of wet dirt slated for development outside her window. In the muddy middle is a couch, a giant 70s-style television, an over-sized vase housing fake flowers. We didn't put it there. We wish we had.

Good-bye loft! Clink. Swallow. Bite.
Hello ambassadors from the 905! Throw rinds, chewed. Lemons launched across the polished hard wood, soggy skipped stones, glasses tipped.

We had a kiss-in outside the condo office. We held signs that said Queers Welcome You To the Neighbourhood. She says,
Isn't That What They Want? It's Called the Fucking Bohemian Embassy.

We Weren't Revolting Enough to Be Much Of a Deterrent.
Do You Still Want to Talk About the Socio Politics of Grand Theft Auto?
Is This One of Those Nights Where I Can Say No?
So, When Will You Move?
When It Gets So Loud We Can't Stand It Anymore.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Precordial Thump"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Zoe Whittall.
Excerpted by permission of Exile Editions Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents 1 ~ Precordial Thump 3 ~ Stoop Smoke 4 ~ Dear Liary 6 ~ Law of Reciprocal Actions 7 ~ The truth is 8 ~ Found: How to Tell if Someone Is Lying, 1 9 ~ Sternal Rub (A Series of Seven Poems) 1. Rebound 2. High Stakes Deception 3. Stars 4. Sedation 5. Drive 6. Deny 7. Rouse 16 ~ Found: How to Tell if Someone is Lying, 2 17 ~ Improper Use of an Ambulance Stretcher 20 ~ Exercise CADUCEUS MAJOR for Infectious Diseases and Emergency Preparedness 25 ~ Abell Street, End of Days 27 ~ Found: How to Tell If Someone is Lying, 3 28 ~ Abell Street, Hiding On 33 ~ Found: How to Tell If Someone is Lying, 4 34 ~ Given the Chance 35 ~ For Country Girls (Who Spent their Twenties in the City Trying to Find the Right Colour to Paint their Bachelor Apartments) 37 ~ The Botany of Fevers 39 ~ Take Me to the H 40 ~ When We Met 41 ~ Little Portugal in Threes 43 ~ Still Life with Ambulance Call Report 44 ~ Save Me, Saskatoon 45 ~ Yell 46 ~ Not Everyone Takes the Rope 47 ~ Begin With the End in Mind 49 ~ Halloween, With Pink Eye 51 ~ Hotel Series, 2008 1. Orillia Econo Lodge 2. Belvedere Inn, Kingston 3. Boutique Indigo, Ottawa 4. Columbus Avenue, North Beach 5. Holiday Inn, Santa Cruz 6. Fernwood Hotel, Big Sur 7. Driftwood Inn, Sechelt 62 ~ The Banality of Street Fighting 63 ~ The Way We Write Ourselves 64 ~ Santa Cruz Diner 65 ~ Agorahomic 66 ~ Offload Delay 67 ~ Capitola 1-2-3 68 ~ Cruiseline 70 ~ Lollipop – Pillow 71 ~ Phone Parsley 72 ~ Sheep 1 73 ~ Sheep 2 74 ~ Sheep 3 76 ~ Consider James Frey 79 ~ The Eternal San Francisco Two and a Half Minutes 80 ~ In Spite of All the Damage 82 ~ Abrasion 84 ~ Heyden Park Road 85 ~ Found: Reasons to Lie 87 ~ Premature 88 ~ Acceptance 89 ~ Forgiveness 91 ~ Acknowledgements

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Zoe Whittall might just be the cockiest, brashest, funniest, toughest, most life-affirming, elegant, scruffy, no-holds-barred writer to emerge from Montreal since Mordecai Richler."  —Globe and Mail

“Whittall's background as a poet shines—her voice hits hard and with beauty.”  —Ottawa Citizen

"Whittall is part pop psychologist and personal historian, artfully combining found material with Polaroid memory captures."  —Mariko Tamaki, author, Skim

"Whittall’s writing is eloquent . . . a book I devoured page after page . . . one I didn't want to end."  —Calgary Herald