DES MONSTERAS, excerpt
signal bars | wi-fi | time | headphones | battery
<DES MONSTERAS share | send
We came off the mountain and I
was still holding the stick I’d used to
prod at the fire and as a baton to
conduct us, singing; also to point at
our paths and the solstice moon,
which was up in a cupboard the
clouds kept sliding open and shut.
Down by her orange car, Caroline
asked about the man I was now
seeing indoors. Waving the branch,
still conducting something, I tried to
summon how I felt. I liked a lot
about him but wasn’t sure if he
reciprocated: he was not very
demonstrative. I hadn’t used this
word in a while, but having dredged
it up I kept repeating it, hearing how
it tapped on the core of the issue,
feeling how it kicked at the tires.
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Heather White lives in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke. Her writing on art and culture has appeared in Canadian Art, the Brooklyn Rail, Real Life, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her current practice experiments with hybrid forms and memoir, and she’s now at work on a collection about leaving.
Heather White is the Winner of the 2021 Vallum Chapbook Award for her chapbook DES MONSTERAS. It will be published as part of Vallum’s Chapbook Series.
DES MONSTERAS records the hopes and humiliations of arriving somewhere new. Composed by phone, torquing formal constraints into solace, its fifteen notes trace both an insular retreat and an impulse to connect during the Montreal winter of the pandemic. The chapbook is a poptimist’s account of moving and courtship that speaks to the thrill of beginnings, the threat of histories, the whims of grace, and the work of candour.
