Apropos des mots

I grew up on words, discovering their play,
Their roll-off-my-tongue and their ring in my ear.
A baby girl sings herself to sleep behind her bedroom door,
And melts her dad’s heart into the shape of a daughter.

A bard named Ariel,
Humble garb and plucking strings — he, she, nor they.
A cherub face with lessons in epics and popular music — the way my parents saw me.
A cadence you’ve heard before but not been moved less by.

Crouched in a corner,
Written there by words,
Plath built a fortress and I’ve climbed her towers partway —
My name tasked to eternally exhume her pain.

The word is a truth of letters lined up,
I’ve never written a lie, only a fiction.
I’ve sent my disfigured children off to pageant,
Knowing well their fates — how their orifices leak without my hand to wipe them.

An ugliness that thrived in the dark belly of a pub,
An old man weeps for his youth and the love he never sought.
I catch his odd, reverent eye in a flicker and like that,
My unborn children breech in my womb.

My silence, my barb —
Words stacked in my throat like fish bones,
Choking that baby girl until
Her heart comes out through the fingernails.

Seven years before I feel movement,
Returning the horrors of birth, dried blood washed away by new.
Writing until I cringe and then starting again;
I place my wriggling wares on the damp earth before you.

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Apropos des mots was written as an exploratory piece for Common Measure. Referencing Plath’s collection Ariel, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and David Foster Wallace’s The Nature of Fun, it explores themes of writing, creative birth, and rebirth.

Ariel lives in downtown Toronto and writes for personal pleasure, with the hopes of one day returning to a dimly-lit stage at the back of a long and skinny bar.

Please read Ariel’s Substack at arielist.substack.com