1
I send this picture of my arms to you. I send this picture of my bones and shadows, my long fingers, my disappointing thumbs. The bones and shadows of my long fingers, the bones and shadows of my disappointing thumbs.
I am these thumbs, this disappointment in a wave, in a fist. When I raise my hands in anger or in greeting, in a fist or wave, I am invisible. I am invisible in a fist or wave, in anger or in greeting, my pale fur stretched before the fire, you reclining naked for a photoshoot, an infinitely subtle human smile on your infinitely human lips.
2
My body has become shadow and ink and the vultures of bone. If I were ever skin or flesh, I am now ink and shadow and a planet of bone, surrounded by neither cloud nor sky but circled by bone and shadow, by vultures of bone and shadow. I look at the night. At the unmarked stars. I open my hands, show my skinless palms. Above me, night and the hairtips of stars regard my bones and their shadows, a calligraphy of ink, my bones and their shadows, lantern light riven by the page. I send this picture to you because our lives are the snowblind glint of fish flashing before sinking beneath ice.
I send this picture to you for I imagine myself arms and the shadows of arms, long fingers and the disappointment of thumbs, my body lost beneath ice, glinting shards of hunger replacing the body with hairtip stars. I send this picture for I am a ghost in a tundra of ghosts, a shadow like an x-ray of a shadow, my bones a ghost clothed in shadow, my shadows themselves clothed in ghosts.
About the Writer
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, visual and multidisciplinary artist and the author of twenty-four books of poetry, fiction and books for children. His latest books includes A Cemetery for Holes, a poetry collaboration with Tom Prime (Gordon Hill, Fall 2019) and For It is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems, ed. Alessandro Porco (Wolsak and Wynn, Fall 2019.) His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates (Random House Canada) won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour as well as the Canadian Jewish Literary Award (Fiction) and the Hamilton Book Award (Fiction). It was also a finalist for both the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. A finalist for the National Magazine Awards (Poetry), he is a three-time recipient of Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year, has also received the Hamilton Arts Award for Literature and has co-won the bpNichol Chapbook Award and the K.M. Hunter Arts Award. A new novel, Don’t Fence Me In will appear from Random House in 2021. He has a PhD in music composition and is the publisher of serif of nottingham editions, an active literary organizer, and has been writer-in-residence at several libraries and universities. He lives in Hamilton and at garybarwin.com.
About the Artist
Lorraine Simms explores our relationship to material culture through paintings, sculptures and installations. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and in the United States in private and public galleries including the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (Québec), the Beaverbrook Art Gallery (Frederiction), the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery (Montreal), the Musée de Joliette (Joliette), the Tom Thomson Gallery (Owen Sound), the Centre d'exposition Expression (Sainte-Hyacinthe), A.R.C. Gallery (Chicago), Stride Gallery (Calgary) the McClure Gallery (Montréal), and the Anna Leonowens Gallery (Halifax).
Simms work has been reviewed in Canadian Art, Border Crossings, and Parachute and in national and regional newspapers. She has received numerous grants from the Conseil des arts et des letters du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts. Lorraine Simms has participated in a number of residencies, including one at MASS MoCA in the summer of 2017.
Lorraine Simms completed her graduate studies at Concordia University. She lives and works in Montreal.
