The Lie

Her body was part-whale, part-mouse—behold the lie!  
It lives in your belly. Like an unborn baby you mould the lie. 
   
Slice my ears with the jagged stars. What did you ever do  
with the gift of music? I buried the violin and told the lie. 
   
This lamp in the ocean. A wolf with feathers for fangs. The woman who bares   
her wrist like a rumour. Nothing will change. Try it—kiss, kill, scold the lie. 
   
I fear I will turn to maggots swelling in the rain. I run from clouds  
caging your form. I have lost, though once I thought I controlled, the lie. 
   
“No one can see us.”—“The sun is smoke in my city.”  
You do not need eyes for (there is no blindfold!) the lie. 
   
Most of the time I laugh at misfortune. I am mad, you are mad—come,   
are we both not too old for the leash? For once, with me, uphold the lie. 
   
Day breaks, night falls, time eats itself like a cannibal in heat. You will burn to black  
in the Universe’s marriage with Nothing. What ever remains but the cold, the lie? 
   
Am I forgiven, my Lord? Place the gun on my cheek like a mother’s hand.   
I begged at your feet for the fortune of faith. You, Dear One, sold the lie. 
   
It writhes in my gut, a worm in my blood, a bird in my groins.   
No, no! A song, a scarf, a horse, milk, the sea, a marigold—the lie. 
   
Tonight, I will leave for the mountains, I will leave for the river. I will leave,  
Shannan. Stay a while in the thirteenth hour of memory, please—hold the lie. 

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Note on Art

Joyce Lee’s artwork1 felt like the perfect visual companion to this ghazal2. The skeleton draped in ribbon, bursting with pearls, caught mid-laugh or mid-scream, crowned with golden teeth—it’s got that same energy of ornamentation over emptiness, beauty as a kind of defiant costume we wear over the truth of our bones.

There’s also something in particular about that pink bow—so delicate, so deliberately placed—that echoes for me the form of the traditional ghazal itself as an obsession with transformation and disguise. We’re all chimeras, all impossible composites, are we not? The skeleton knows it. The speaker knows it. God, too, must be aware. As well as Death, and the devil, and all that is dark and holy.

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Can I tell you a secret, I ask him, and he turns around. In the darkness, his head appears to float midair, the slivers of his half-open eyes searching for me. I find his hand under the sheets and squeeze. I think I’ve known for a long time, I say, my words a register above whisper. He leans closer.

You know, I go on, like the way you always knew you were an artist, and that’s what you were made to do. I know it’s not the same thing, not even close probably, but I just know it in the same way. All it took was coming here, and meeting that crazy neighbor, who, as it turns out, isn’t that crazy after all. I wish I’d thanked you sooner, for moving us, I mean to say, for moving here, like for moving, oh God, my words are coming out wrong, I’m too excited. Feel!

I bring his hand to my chest, and a tremor goes up his fingers, so quick I don’t think even he’s noticed, but I have, I’m noticing it right now, every drop of blood in his veins is a singing bird. I wipe sweat from the back of my neck and try to just focus on his hand on my chest, so cold and rough. I can still feel the blue acrylic paint that splashed the space between his forefinger and thumb that morning after we had another fight, this time because there weren’t any eggs despite my having asked him to bring them. But that was before I knew.

I mean, I always knew, like I’m trying to explain to him now, but I mean knowing in the way of conscious knowing, I guess. I consciously only knew after I got back home from next door with the one blue what I thought was a duck egg like a perfectly polished sea stone in my palms. I went to the kitchen sink and set it inside, letting the water wash over its speckled, oval body. I stared at it for so long I didn’t realize when the sun went down and everything was dark.

He’s moved his hands to my left breast now, squeezing over my t-shirt and trying to wriggle inside through the neckline. I wonder if he’s even been awake this whole time. I really need you to hear this, I tell him, and curl my shoulders inside to nudge him away. His hand flops between us like a dead fish. His breathing grows lighter, and his eyes are almost fully open.

Outside, night is giving up. I turn over on my back, dragging his arm with me to rest on my stomach. I’m going to tell you now, but you need to promise you won’t run away. He raises himself on his elbow and I look through the triangle created by his arm at the egg I kept next to the bed after he’d already fallen asleep.

I think about the egg as an another planet, with waves inside it, the yolk a bloody sun, and inside the yolk a yellow sea filled with boats made of leaves, of the women that inhabit that world, long twisting hair braided down their back shimmering like eels below the water, and the water around us, in the room, bursting from the egg, but also the walls, the oak floors, the earth outside, with the worms and the bones buried underground long ago. What have you done, he says, clutching my body like a child. Above us, the ceiling begins to crack and I feel my body fill with light and float.

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Notes on Art

I paired this story with Kremena Chipilova’s “Caged”1 because it captures that strange, heavy tension between being held and being trapped.

In the painting, the hand can be viewed as the cage, yes, but you see that it’s also adorned with rings and fine nails, suggesting a kind of “beautiful” or “domesticated” restraint. I love the surreal touch of what appears as the bird having a human finger for one leg.

To me, it mirrored a moment in my story where the boundaries between the protagonist’s physical body and her internal world start to blur. I’d like to think that both the painting and the story are about that exact second when the “conscious knowing” finally breaks through or beyond the surface.

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Good morning (or evening, or ever-after),

Sometimes I send you poems I’ve written here, because they tell me that’s originally what Substack was for. Incidentally, creation too. Was/is for poetry, that is. Though, Capital-P poetry. Which is not limited to written poetry. The below, though, is just that: written poetry.

May you be uplifted and uplift others!

S

Little Blue Dot

by Shannan Mann

My favourite mountain is a volcano. The way   
it just blows up whenever it’s had enough.  
When asked my influences, I say Eyjafjalla.
Though I am not hiding from anyone, I am  
also not making myself any easier to find.  
Smog has made the stars obsolete. No one laments   
Orion or Andromeda. Rivers are frothing   
tar, but since we are looking at them through  
Instagram filters, they look pretty cool. Really,  
the planet is falling apart. As am I. Most likely  
you too. Isn’t it right, then, that our home mirrors  
our cracks? How cruel the gavel of time: I melt   
at the sight of hummingbirds and blue whales  
but they go on dissolving and unforming, faster  
than ever before. Yet sometimes I admit   
I’m seized by the guitar  strings of wind   
on an unnaturally snowless winter morning.   
Spying birds migrating away to warmer   
mountains, I can almost fool myself  
that there is such a place for me too. Not heaven,  
but the ladder to it. Not God, but a glimmer  
of the Self mustanging along pastures, wild,  
rough light of the unified theory of the multiverse.  
In other words, an impossibility, like earth.

First published in The Missouri Review as Poem of the Week (Nov 25, 2024)

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I wanted to share a poem of my own today (since this is a personal blog of sorts after all). “In Hell” was originally published in Strange Horizons, but it was written about two years before that, and rejected countless times from different literary magazines.

I’ve written about 40 ghazals so far, and have been lucky enough to get over half of them published, but honestly it’s been much harder to place poems that use a strict traditional form as opposed to my other, free-flowing work. I’m not sure if that’s everyone’s experience, but that’s what I’ve found over the last half decade of submitting seriously.

I also wanted to share this photo of mine that took when we were in Canada and I was wrapping up my undergrad at the University of Toronto. When he showed it to me, I kind of jumped because I thought it made me look like a witch, but then pretty soon I fell in love with the photo because, well, I guess I am some kinda witch. 🤷🏽‍♀️

It’s funny how you can go so long in your life hating the way you look in this or that angle, blaming the light, your own face, the pimples on your face, your clothes, how bad they fit, but then someone who loves you can make you love yourself too…sappy and weird, I know, but it’s true. Hopefully some of you can resonate!

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Alright, here’s the ghazal. I hope it brings you a modicum of the delight I felt in writing it. And for those of you who’d rather hear it…well, I did try to record something a few nights back. Enjoy (or be annoyed or despise it, whatever works, I’m happy for my art to evoke strong reactions either way!).

In Hell

Who conjured dreams for the devil when he fell in hell?
He slept well because he knew there is no hell in hell. 
 
I do not know how I am cold around your burning 
violin—a song is but fire for those who dwell in hell.  
 
You are glowing like an angel lit by a red-light district.
Beg, borrow, bribe, or steal—prayers do not sell in hell.
 
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Yell 
for California when there’s fire in heaven, call to book a hotel in hell.
 
Moon swells silver tides, a ventriloquist of the night. You aren’t able 
to recall slivers of our dream? Don’t worry, it will ring a bell in hell. 
 
Could you love a shell to death so it bombs in benedictions?
Kill the infidels if that helps you sleep, they will live well in hell.
 
An illusion is truth untouched of pain. Inside how many names can I lose
myself? Eventually all words waste magic—no one can spell in hell.
 
If I choose to be a prisoner it would be as the hum of your lungs.
Dying is not music nor god, the dead warn from their cell in hell.
 
I dried up your body’s water, so why are you compelled to forgive rivers?
“Your white womb, wet poems, it’s all here—including your smell—in hell.”
 
I live between sacrifice and shelter, come out when it’s dark enough
for sunrise. Convince me to leave. No, Shannan, there is no farewell in hell.

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NOTES: This poem was first published in Rattle Magazine in July 2022. The beautiful artwork above was made by .

Ummm… to anyone who’s still around.

This is a poem I wrote for K (my now-husband yay) when we were long (several oceans long) distant (distance?), when we weren’t sure when it would be short, and close and when almost everything felt like it was going wrong…well…except one thing.

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Phone Sex

I miss kissing you
I kiss missing you
I wish I had more
body parts to take
pictures for you
You who say apart
is the best part of
love because space
is where song rises
and what can sex
do that music can
not do a thousand
times better deeper
longer faster lighter
all at once all night 
I am mourning your 
spine holding vigil 
for your voice until
you glimmer sun-
cauled on the black
screen ask me to lie
back open uvula
wide and place a 
placeholder inside
my water will not
reach you reaching
for yourself — it is
empty of lyric it is
messier than Ana
it is a locked door
it is the wet floor
it is the more that 
more cannot fill

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