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.