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    Little Wild
    Little Wild
    Little Wild
    Ebook82 pages32 minutes

    Little Wild

    By Curtis LeBlanc

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Little Wild explores the performance of masculinity in contemporary Canada, with a focus on how toxic masculinity relates to mental health, aggression, substance abuse and crises of identity. Through the reimagining of family histories and personal experiences, the poems in this collection exact a representation of a young man in conflict with outdated ideals of virility, struggling to redefine himself on his own terms. Little Wild is a provocative and revealing portrayal of masculinity as it is understood—and misunderstood—in a contemporary and ever-changing context. The poems are as powerful and unsettling as they are stark, combining unsentimental imagery of the natural world with first-person commentary, while exploring narratives of boyhood, adolescence and adulthood.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNightwood Editions
    Release dateApr 28, 2018
    ISBN9780889711303
    Little Wild

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      Book preview

      Little Wild - Curtis LeBlanc

      I

      Good for Nothing

      I had to fall off a ladder to the stars

      and break my right forearm and flunk calculus

      so as predicted at my initial birth

      I’d be good for nothing but to tell you this.

      —Philip Levine

      Narrowing

      I used to bathe in shallow water

      until it lost all warmth, ignore toy trolls

      and colour-changing plastic dolls

      to pick caulking from the corners

      where off-white tiles met porcelain tub.

      I would pull at the gummy seams,

      fingers sponged and wrinkled, until

      my father came to dry me off.

      His shoulders hunched, peppery curls

      combed always to the left, he’d beat his chest

      and howl like an ape, smack the walls

      with his hands and bounce on the balls

      of his feet, and I’d laugh and laugh

      and hold my own arms out for him

      to lift me, wrap me in an even heat.

      Now here we are, damp

      from our separate showers,

      and ready for sleep, or nearly.

      He asks me again, Who have you

      hurt today? Refuses to see

      that the answer is No one,

      that his eyes are mine and

      his shoulders have narrowed.

      Same ten-dollar strip mall haircut,

      little wild left in either of us.

      Steel-Cut Oats

      One small pot of steel-cut oats

      on the stove, glutenous, ladled

      into my bowl despite my contempt.

      Mom said they would be as good

      as the instant variety. Better even.

      But too little brown sugar, absence

      of additives—what they lacked in flavour,

      they made up for in mouth feel. I gagged

      with each spoonful, seated at the island

      in the kitchen where every day I sat eating

      one thing or another. But not this.

      Do what I say, she said. Never

      in her life had she seen a child

      so ungrateful, me on the kitchen stool,

      made to scoop the pale gruel

      through the crack of my lips

      until nothing was left in the blue

      plastic bowl. I had never been held

      to anything like she had been held to

      that afternoon behind the cashier’s counter

      at the bank in Londonderry Mall, a sawed-off

      shotgun pressed to her chest, told to fill

      a duffle bag with petty cash.

      Do what they say, was protocol

      back then. Get help

      after the threat has left.

      Blood in a Place I Could Not Yet Understand

      It was harder to say no back then,

      when Paul threatened to sue me

      after I told him I wouldn’t play

      GI Joe beneath the weevil-chewed spruce

      on the island of my cul-de-sac where he

      always came to visit his aunt. I liked him fine.

      He told stories as tall as that spruce, sometimes

      taller. But when he tracked

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