
Excerpts from Ceive by B.K. Fischer
Author’s note: A novel-in-verse that retells the Noah’s Ark story on a container ship in the near future, Ceive traffics in dystopian grammars. After a catastrophic collapse of civilization, a woman named Val is found in the wreckage of her flooding house by Roy, the former UPS man, and they join a group that is escaping on a freighter bound for a new settlement in now-temperate Greenland. Riffing on ceive, the Latin root meaning take, get, catch that gives us the words deceive, receive, perceive, and many others, the poems sift through the conditions that got us where we are—imperiled, vulnerable as individuals and communities, facing environmental reckoning. In these spaces of loss and survival, the Old English poem The Seafarer, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 34, and Genesis chapter five leave behind textual shrapnel. This excerpt spans the ocean-going journey from Val’s embarkation to the glimpse of shore that offers hope of arrival and renewal.
N 41° 3´ / W 73° 53´
When you push the plastic back from your face, you see a gravel ramp into green water, then a bulkhead, then the massive red hull of a container ship. The dock is too small for it, and ladders have been improvised. Never seen the river this high. Roy nudges you to climb up ahead of him, past the words CC Figaro, each C as big as you. On the deck a young man is shoveling highway salt into a taller pile, his feet crunching around the edges. Two other men who look like him come around and cover the pile with a tarp, weighting it down with tires. A man and woman walk across the deck and greet you. Roy steps back, waves low, almost a gruff bow. This is Nolan, he says, and Nadia. It’s their ship. Roy turns to climb back down the ladder, lifting one leg then the other, and leaves you there. They stand with parallel shoulders, look you over.
FORCEPS
Pick a card any card, pinch
it from the pile and hide it.
An alternative to passive
constructions involving be
are those involving get—
get drunk, get laid, get
caught, get kicked off—
though passive get can’t
carry a state. You can get
creamed but you can’t get
understood. You can yank
the snag, unravel the row,
pull a fiber from the skin,
but a tapestry is not a net.
An earwig’s pincers, called
cerci or forceps, protrude
from its abdomen and serve
to intimidate and fend off
predators who would make a
meal of it. Jewelers, surgeons,
and obstetricians can extract
a gem from a bezel or a vein
from a tumor or a head from
a cunt. A hand with a tremor
chooses a single capsule
from a vial, leaves no print.
N 41° 3´ / W 73° 53´
One of the sons of Nolan takes you down zigzagging flights of metal stairs. Your bunk is in Roy’s container—bay 4, tier 2, row 17. Odds are starboard. The son counts off containers along the corridor. Chill its chains. The floor pitches, lifts and drops, but not enough to knock you down—you steady a hand on the wall. How much is on here, how much for how many: armaments, provisions, vice. You follow the son of Nolan with your eyes on the seam of his shirt, the piece that’s called the yoke. From somewhere, soprano voices, then an alarm sounds above—three sharp honks—and he looks up abruptly, says that someone will show you around when they are at sea, plenty of time at sea. He undoes a padlock and holds a broad door until you put out your own hand, then he turns back down the corridor. Where are we going? you call out. Farthest Greenland, he calls back, It’s the new North Carolina. What if there are already people there, you wonder—who is lost, who is left. You look in: this is your dark enclosure. Rises up in your throat, that dark does. With your foot you push a brick put there for the purpose to prop the door, lurch down the row past four more containers to the outer rail, retch. The ship slides into the dark mist, nudging past the abutments of the old Tappan Zee Bridge, straightening its course through the channel.
RECEIPT
Proof of purchase:
a pronoun cannot
take an adjective—
no pretty blond she,
no scrupulous you,
no formidable they.
Deed of sale, note
of debt, debt comes
due, dew comes.
A goat roams into
your rote notice
of gray gloaming,
nudges your knee,
chews your sleeve.
There it goes again—
day turning to night.
The hapless it brays.
The rudimentary we
prays. Foolish you.
That goat got paint
on its face. That goat
got pain on its face.
N 40° 59´ / W 73° 54´
You watch yourself at the door: go on, go in. Shine your light and take a look around—two mattresses across wooden pallets, a metal cabinet raised on four-by-fours. You and Roy share a 20-foot standard. A bicycle chain coils on the floor near a shoe. You turn over a crate to make a bedside table, take the Ziploc with the notepad and pen out of your shirt and put it under the crate, then take it back out and slip the photograph between two blank sheets. You have half a little dollhouse now. You could make a table from an empty spool of thread, an icebox from a sardine tin, a sink from a thimble. The other roommate’s gone, but he left his stuff behind: Jif, Ritz, DampRid, 24 wrapped rolls of toilet paper, an under-the-bed plastic bin, two paperbacks—Private Eyes, True Detectives—a tennis ball, a few perpetual candles—Sacred Heart, St. Cecilia. You know about night, and you can see it coming. You put away the little flashlight, its one spare bulb tucked inside, refuse to let your mind alight on corrosion or theft, then think the better of it and put the Ziploc in the plastic bin. In the corridor one of the sons calls out to brace for a stop. Commotion of chain on gunwales, hollering. Then the Lord shut the door.
TRANSCEIVER
A loon flew over their heads
and was entreated to dive
to find land and bring it up, but
it found only bottomless sea.
Try again. Send out something
else, watch it flap out confused
over the stern and pause perched
on the windsock, then pump its
wings once, twice, rising higher
and banking into the updraft as
the haze starts to thin, shrinking
into a speck against altostratus.
But the dove found no rest no
place for the sole of her foot.
Now lie down, ear to the deck,
feel the engine labor. Whose
footsteps are those, whose tap
on your crown. Get up, Val,
look: the dove brought back
a rowan branch, traces of mud
on its feet. On its leg, a blade
of grass. The raven never returns.
N 77° 8´ / W 71° 55´
Crispin shows you the place on the map—an inlet with two triangular islands at the mouth, then a strait between Qaanaaq and Narsaq, then an inner bay. There’s a cluster of tiny islands at the far end, unless they are underwater now, and cliffs in a cul-de-sac. The CC Figaro will run aground. The dinghies will be let down. The gantry cranes will be reassembled and the containers, one by one, in conditions of tilt or slosh or crash, lowered onto the sand. The ship itself will settle, serve up its material piece by piece to structure windbreak or seawall. The blade is layed low. You go out to read the sea. Nothing is white anymore, not even the helm, gray splattered. You hinge your belly over the rail, watch the gray sea rise and fall, a mammoth animal, an endless tarmac, a patternless array of short frequencies. The sky brightens a bit—a wisp, a prism, almost sun. It’s not enough that through the cloud you break to dry the rain on my storm-beaten face. You have no intention of going over and reach back slowly with your feet until your toes touch down. When you look over the side again, the glare has become uncomfortable. You don’t squint up at the sky—there’s a spectrum in a tendril of oil in the bilge.
CEIVE
Then the dove doesn’t come back either.
There it is, in the distance, starboard:
low line of riverine green, the dim green
of a limp one-dollar bill. Everyone looks.
The green of locker, dumpster, succulent,
manhole. None of those—green of moss.
Keep watch, Val, watch that dim green line,
don’t lose sight of it, don’t you dare dream:
grass, salmon, kitchen table, a stone to scuff
a shoe on. You want to see an earthworm and
light a candle. In your head you hear the sizzle
of a converter and you say out loud, Let it
burn thought. He found you in what was left
of the house, Roy did. You walk to the end
of the cargo bay. There’s a smear on the stair
where someone has stepped on a waterlogged
geranium, or a torn ketchup packet, or flesh.
You look out again, and it’s still there, the line:
a smudge the shade of wrestling mats, pocked
barracks-green board, standard issue, river
under overcast. Everyone hesitates. Llamas
remember the rain and stay on high ground.
Fish outgrow their clay jars. The girls are
anxious to get out. As for you, Val, maybe
it’s time to stand on your old cold I, but
what’s the use of that feeble stick with its
knobs and handles when you’ve got Y, your
divining rod, which you will need. You ceive,
Val, you ceive it all. That smudge of shore. It
isn’t raining. The boy tugs your arm. While this
earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and
heat, spring and fall, day and night won’t cease.
CEPT
Hey, Val, don’t go back in there,
don’t feel under the cot for lost
scraps of your scratchings nor
eat the sweet nor feel the sorry:
cove, covenant, coda intercepted
at the shoal, told in present tense.
B.K. Fischer is the author of Ceive, a novel-in-verse forthcoming from BOA Editions in September, and four previous collections of poetry—Radioapocrypha (2018), My Lover’s Discourse (2018), St. Rage’s Vault (2013), and Mutiny Gallery (2011). She is also the author of a critical study, Museum Mediations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry (2006). Her poems and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, Poetry Northwest, Boston Review, Jacket2, FIELD, WSQ, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, Los Angeles Review of Books, Modern Language Studies and elsewhere. She holds a BA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, an MFA in poetry from Columbia University, and a PhD in English and American Literature from New York University. A former poetry editor of Boston Review, she teaches in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. She lives in Sleepy Hollow, New York, with her husband and three children, and is currently the poet laureate of Westchester County.
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