Terese Mason Pierre is an award-winning writer and editor whose work has been published in The Walrus, Room, Brick, Fantasy, and elsewhere. She is the author of “Myth,” a poetry collection, and the editor of “As the Earth Dreams,” an anthology of Black Canadian SFF fiction. Terese lives in Toronto.

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Yearning Belongs in Poetry: An Unserious Rant and Excerpts

I have an annoyingly and unnecessarily complicated relationship with yearning. For me, the real fantasy is reading books about people communicating what they want and need, going after their desires and dreams, loving each other wholly and deeply, and not letting rejection define who they are or what they’re capable of. I’ve heard some say that this is boring, that there’s no development, but I don’t agree. I think it makes character development more precise, like writing a fixed-form poem. I think it means the writer has to work harder. I would consistently ask: why do characters yearn when they can just act, narratively? Why do they yearn for something they can reach out and take? Yearning for something you cannot realistically and safely have, I understand—I, too, have yearned to be rescued, yearned to fall into wealth and unconditional love. But, I feel like, most of the time, there really isn’t anything actually stopping these characters—unless you count the stories they’ve completely made up in their heads, the false beliefs they hold on to that interrupt their self-actualization (and make me roll my eyes). For many books, that’s the whole point of the narrative—the journey to understanding, to audacity, to self. It’s terribly real and messy and human and very powerful. Characters do this, and we think, ah, they’re just like us. I get this, truly. But I want something different. I think we can do more unique and innovative things with desire, frustration, and introspection. I wonder what would happen if aspects like self-love, self-trust, or confidence were present at the beginning of the journey and not the end. What then?

All of the aforementioned goes out the window when I think about poetry and its expansive capacity. I think yearning belongs in poetry. I want poets to go on and on about how it feels to be a soul in a body doomed to need and need and need. I want speakers to lie to me about how they feel and what they want, and I want to catch them in the lie. I want that moment in a poem, stripped of rich language and elevated imagery, where I am simply told the truth.

Anyway, here are three poems from Myth that I think are among the most “yearning”:

Tropic of Cancer

On this shore, the insects scheme, sing the hair on my body. Grasping stones,

I say I dream about strolling where the moonlight hits the water and disturbs it.

A resting coast here, mine, and yours on fire two oceans away. We both sleep

under mosquito nets, struggle to bask in the midnight humidity, write emails

shedding our skin into concept and vessel. Your false age allows honesty—you glimpse

a harder gait in my photos, my shadow too close to the sea, too full of longing. Once, in the heat,

you wrote you wanted to marry under a great dying tree, wipe sweet rot on your chest,

shackle your hands to any real life. I told you there are more convenient magic systems. You and I

have the same palms that sway in the between, the same catastrophic winds, the same grey arcs

in our eyes. All this talk, the sky whispers, yet we wait for a blessing, a pistol shooting blanks.

Twenty-seven years from now, after your wife births power, the world will spin us into a crackling

bay, named something quaint, like crescent or patience— overlooking a skirted trench, bitten arms and lips:

the slow burn swallowed,
a writhing fish released.

Long Weekend

This vacation spot itches. We are not really made for this kind of silver— where you lived, there was dust everywhere. Where I was born, deer intruded. A show,

we make a show. This long weekend needs attention. Our friends watch from false invitation. The blue is too much to either ignore or photograph.

I loathe rocky shores. In finer moods, I would track sand home, compare to beaches from another century. This frontier landlocked is a joke. Photos make for paltry competition,

saturated, unimpressive. You say we can eat at another body of water. I tell you I worked so fucking hard for this one.

On the beach, we are alone. My brother has thrown a party in my honour, which you will not attend, because you want to miss me, and because you are so indifferent to pain.

Here, I dream of you, robotic at the lake at night, ripping pages from some pastoral tome— stars distracted, waves ad infinitum.

I know when I would like to leave, when I should hold the evening open by its middle and dare damage the nest of water and sky, independent of us.

We hold what we have. We fill what we have with waste and families We want the best of all worlds.

Brink

The salt road encroaches on the river, or perhaps it’s the other way

around, short spray stealing sediment each year. Remarking this model mourns

me to you. When it is time for your own turning of earth, I should search

for you in the empty sky, in the fingerprints on the fabric of my skin and hair.

The river is deep and deadly. To swim is to make a statement, or rather,

to test a question. Who shall pull me out, who will call out to me to return

to pallid land, out of watery opportunity. In the blue dark, I hold your hand and don’t

let go. You have no family here and the work bleaches your bones—

the moon in your chest squeezing salt water down your untouched flesh.

After you tell me, I stare at the sun for several hours, ask a different kind

of question. The universe hears and sends rain, sends floods to satisfy me, but fails.