Isak stops me halfway through the brief history
of my electrocutions to tell me
that I mean shock. Electrocution is death by electricity.
What you mean is shock. Yes, what I mean is shock.
The first time: sparks on the basement carpet
like tiny blue insects. Brief deaths, brief verbs of light in the toes.
The second time: sixteen and bones full of vodka, my wrist
caught in a fence; snow whipping from neuron to neuron.
Later, puking pink in a bank.
The third time: a translation—my hand on Kate’s hand touching
the brass plate of a boiler, a weak ghost jumping into my body.
For her, a glove of velvet pain.
Electricity wants to stay home, Isak tells me.
It will only move from wire to vein, from fence to bones,
if it is forced to, and I know
now that we are not talking about electricity anymore,
but exile, which draws the same branching pattern:
cedar leaf, delta, coral. He tells me that in Icelandic,
the word for echo means mountain language.
He tells me that a human body
is generally not a good home for electricity, even though
our hearts and brains are full of it.
What he means is shock. What he means
is he misses home, where the mountains are full of language.
I tell him that wherever we walk, we carry electrons
on the bottom of our feet, we carry them
from room to room, all our lives,
a static potential. That at any moment, it could happen,
it could happen any day:
you grab a doorknob and feel alive again.
Danielle Richardson on “What I Mean Is Shock”
“What I Mean Is Shock” is a narrative poem that aches with a sting of unanticipated energy, a familiar longing embodied, rooted in the precision of language. With balance and care, Bernier-Cormier, recalls a tender exchange, inviting readers to explore the current within.
Bios
Dominique Bernier-Cormier
Dominique Bernier-Cormier’s poems have won The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Contest, The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award, and Arc’s Poem of the Year. His most recent book Entre Rive and Shore (icehouse, 2023) was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize and won the Fred Cogswell Award. He teaches Grade 9 English in Vancouver.