Belated Bris of the Brainsick by Lucas Crawford

Author:Lucas Crawford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Canadiana, poetry, mental illness, queer, transgender, disabled
ISBN: 9780889713673
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Published: 2019-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

The Midnight Lunch Whistle Blows at the Holy Communion Factory

Sister Mary Iris, a former nun-cum-outcast, came one time too many within the convent walls, was excommunicated and became the night manager of the wafer line at Human Communion Incorporated where she watches machines punch crisp panels of wafer into tiny would-be Christ bites.

The delivery dude flicks some lint off his grey corduroy pants, tries to look debonair leaning on the wall, and asks Mary Iris to scribble her Jane Han… cock on the form for he’s just placed a box of flour at her feet. After surveying her cropped, russet-grey coif, he almost writes her off when he notices the tapered pants that must reach her areolas. (Has he seen her before? At a womyn-space dance, maybe?) The phrase “wardrobe malfunction” ought to have been reserved for such fashion anarchy, though perhaps fashion agnosticism is more the phrase. Mary Iris’s right hand is already thrust deep enough into her pocket to make strangers with children suspicious, but it’s only her fifth month in civvies and, while pockets are no baggy habit, they’re her only cover. When asked for her signature, she jams her hand in further, starts to sweat and wonders if her attempts to become ambidextrous have been successful.

Harold, the regular delivery man, knows all about Mary Iris’s accident and the way she prefers him to look away as she signs the form with the four and a half fingers on her right hand. Harold also makes his deliveries during the daytime like a regular adult. But this fellow (she thinks it’s a fellow but those mellow hazel eyes, honeyed hair, that pair of breasts—or are they pecs?—confuse her, and how did he get that bruise on his fleecy neck?) knows nothing and tries to small-talk: Bread as far as the eye can see and not a bite to eat, eh? (It is an affront to “Truth” that Christians call this “bread,” this matter so dry it once pasted itself to Mary Iris’s tonsils for the entire closing prayer until she ran to the back seat of her old Chevette to soak Jesus off with holy water.)

Uh, ha ha… yeah. She laughs like kids do when their parents are in the room and a sex scene comes on tv, takes out her hands, strips them of the latex gloves the workers all wear, and, groping the air for the pen, drops it. Let me grab that for you, the delivery guy says, swaggering over and kneeling. Sister Mary Iris wonders if he is one of those people she has seen on Oprah. There were no televisions in the convent, but the break room at Human Communion Incorporated has a small black-and-white set. Yes, she thinks, perhaps he is one of those curiouser youth who transubstantiate flesh. The need for politesse ruptures her wonderings and she replies humbly, Thanks. Down there, he’s inches from her interrupted finger.

On her first day as shift manager, there was an accident. The wafer line

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