In a previous post I wrote briefly about the fierce book of poems by Miyó Vestrini translated by Anne Boyer and Cassandra Gillig released by Kenning Editions.

Lately I can’t stop thinking about how the politics in the US has changed so much. How one thing leads to another. How it has emboldened all sorts of unsavouriness, unkindness, divisiveness. Maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe it’s not, but I see this happening in families (mine, for example), in cohorts, communities. This was all predicted, of course, and in retrospect, I wish I’d kept a list. I suppose I’d hoped Canada would be more immune from it all, which was naive. Things have been subtly changing, personally and politically. And what do we do with that?

So, when I read the following poem by Vestrini, it got me thinking that it would be a good writing prompt.

What To Do With Them

by Miyó Vestrini

The man who loves zoos.
The witness of the Beatitudes of the meat.
The woman beat down by exhaustion.
The genuine count who fools the false court.
The beloved – oh how beloved! – of the lunatics.
The passenger who lies to avoid their destination.
The know-it-all teens with their cracking voices.
The one who shelters havens with abuse.
The stranger of March who passes through my house and beckons me to ruin.
The disenchantment of the assassins when there is no breeze.
The melancholy of El Chino, the restlessness of Orlando, the sweetness of Luis Camilo.
The dismemberment of St. Augustine, still hoping for a unanimous decision.
The loneliness of foreign countries.
The epistolary put-downs.
The fallacies of the spiteful.
The pulp novels with happy endings.
The painters enraged when nobody sees.
The possessed cinematographers.
The morning of jasmine and waves when you sleep and love me.
The day all the furies unite.
What to do with them?

What do we do with the things we don’t know what to do with?

Listing them, I think, is a start.