Votive
Somehow I had made my way there
to the point and height of my aunt's elbow,
witness to the quiet precision
of her understated ceremony,
the drop of coins and one long match
and the docile flock of that white wax,
chubby geese gathered in the suggestion of night
that lay off the altar to the right.
Where they went I cannot name—
those liquefying emissaries
or my aunt's wishes, whatever it was
that she held tight that morning—but I saw the light,
and then was swallowed by its heat, great
as the molten sea that rushed beneath my feet.
from Votive by Annick MacAskill, Gaspereau Press, 2024
About Votive:
Votive considers various forms of devotion and our often fraught attempts to respond to “our confusion, our curiosity.” These are poems concerned with the way we use stories, old and new, to connect our experiences, and the way we persist in our quest for love, hope, and meaning when language falters —“What we couldn’t say we found in the skies.” MacAskill’s great gift resides in her facility for coaxing things evasive and intuitive into crisp form and language, in voicing what “so quickly I /knew and knew and knew.”
About Annick MacAskill:
Annick MacAskill was the winner of a 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for her poetry collection Shadow Blight. Her previous collections include Murmurations, No Meeting Without Body, and two chapbooks—Brotherly Love: Poems of Sappho and Charaxos and five from hem. MacAskill is a member of Room Magazine’s Growing Room Collective and publisher of micropress Opaat Press. She lives in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, NS.