Upon losing my gold star & being confronted by Diana, I, Callisto, tell my story
Annick MacAskill’s second full-length collection, Murmurations, was published by Gaspereau Press in the spring of 2020. Her debut collection, No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau, 2018), was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Award. She is a member of the Room Magazine editorial collective. Originally from Southwestern Ontario, she now lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq People. Visit her website at annickmacaskill.com.
nymphae sensisse feruntur *
—Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book II, l. 452)
blazing in my marrow
laid down the quiver to
greet the god in long fa-
miliar grasses wet
before his carbon-grey
likeness where later’d hate
the trees that know my damp
secrets & later’d be
hated by you o god
-dess who once cooed over
my mother-of-pearl shine
[guarded by the fluttering
arms of yr thick forests]
prized not quite w/ need [say
the poets] but more some-
thing like yr throat stuffed up
w/ lilies banish me
my brow downcast & my
silence deep & reddening
[all the nymphs can feel it]
hemmed in by heavenly
wrath & this my spoiled body
● “It is said that the nymphs could feel it.” (My translation.)
Annick MacAskill’s second full-length collection, Murmurations, was published by Gaspereau Press in the spring of 2020. Her debut collection, No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau, 2018), was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Award. She is a member of the Room Magazine editorial collective. Originally from Southwestern Ontario, she now lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq People. Visit her website at annickmacaskill.com.