Read these Excerpted Poems from LOCKERS ARE FOR BEARCATS ONLY by Mallory Tater

Celebrated author Mallory Tater is back this month with Lockers Are for Bearcats Only (Palimpsest Press/Anstruther Books), a collection shaped by the steady rhythm of swimming laps. After the death of a close friend, Tater turns to the public pool as a place to move, to think, and to get through the day. The water becomes both refuge and pressure point, a space where memory keeps surfacing.

As she swims, questions of girlhood, Catholicism, addiction, and the body itself swell and recede. These poems balance the tension between control and surrender, between fitness and fatigue, between what is remembered and what cannot be recovered. The pool is ordinary, even fluorescent, yet it holds the weight of what has been lost.

Direct and unguarded, Lockers Are for Bearcats Only traces how grief lives in the body and how motion can carry a person forward, even when the past refuses to stay submerged.

We're very excited to share a selection of poems from this fantastic new collection, right here on OB!

Excerpted Poems from LOCKERS ARE FOR BEARCATS ONLY by Mallory Tater

BIBLE SCHOOL HEAT DREAM

“Keep the barns dry and the birds warm.” — Global News Headline during BC floods, 2021.

Keep that end of August air
bloated with smoke, brine and morning,
one I know infinitely well from decades
of being in the pacific northwest.

So why does my scent memory reject
plunging me toward the family cabin,
grandpa’s hand-shark fin behind sand bars,
grilled corn, garlic salads tossed by hand,

my sister’s salt-licked hair under my chin?
Instead, August air pushes my memory
ditch-side, puking cheerios and apologies
toward Canadian megachurches

and a pastor’s matching daughters
megaphoned and chicken-dancing.
I’m brought back to being weighed down
by a Christ I don’t believe in, prayer

chains and tears for places outside of us.
We bibled parts of ourselves away
and the na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na
of it all makes me feel filthy.

August air brings me back to vacation bible school.
I see the latex gloves of women passing out
one o'clock oreos, how I twist the top wafer off,
easy in the heat, lick the white host of frosting

and pray for absolutely nothing, except
for everyone here to stop being so afraid
and yet so loudly, loudly sure.
It’s August again. The barns will not stay dry.

The birds will all be flu-borne. Those pastor’s
daughter’s names still crested in my mouth.
I might spit them into the heat.
I will never learn how forgiveness works.

I WALK BY MY OLD PARISH

The church is embalmed with a wind-swept crust—
peeled paint, puffs of dead wheat, gravel ground
by the teeth of the odd tractor. You can taste the roof,
the steeple of the church once shellacked and polished
regularly by settlers seeking god, its shingles now
loosened and dampened by warm summer rain.
It’s abhorrent, the taste in the air, like if lightning
was poured in a glass of bleach and warm rust.
I haven’t seen this place in years. I imagine
its soon-future where tornados will be impossibly
often and everywhere. The breath of them will smash in
the doves, kill them all in one foul swoop. I do not
mean real doves. I mean the the glass flocks
in the centre of each stained-glass window.
When I was young, me and my sisters trying not to sleep
through the Monsignor’s homilies, we’d name the birds
in our heads. On the drive home, stale donuts in our laps,
we’d share our lists, vote on whose name won that Sunday—
Daffy Duck, Ballsack, Darth Vader, Puddles.
And we can now confirm that there will be a world where
these named doves are dead, their bodies shattered,
a world where there is no second chance and no second coming.
There will be nothing to win, as real birds take flight,
their gray and white bodies in air, nothing to tell
them apart from debris in our sorry mind’s eyes.

FIRST COMMUNION

You have a big tongue
is what the priest who gives me
my first communion says to me
as he shakes my grandfather’s hand
by the white statue of Mary,
her head bent in shame or prayer.

I feel my words on the roof
of my mouth, my breath still glutinous
with my first taste of Christ
and hungry because it did not feel
like anything. My white surplus
blows in the wind and I stand

in front of the virgin, bow
my head like she does. The priest
and my grandfather watch
as my mother snaps a photo of me,
alone, the wooden cross snaked
around my neck, tucked into my shirt.

We do a retake with the cross
on the outside of my gown
at my mother’s request.
Christ is on top of your heart now,
you’ll want to remember it like that.
When I look at this photograph

wrinkled from living in a box
of memories my parents gave to me
when they downsized, I do not see Christ—
I see a girl with so much love to give,
a bad haircut, a headband with cold
hard teeth digging into my crown.

I see my hands clasped in prayer,
closed off, pointing toward the men
who are not in the frame,
who are no longer alive,
and whose words should have never
meant everything.

FASTING GIRLS

On farms with sheep,
their fleece moldy with winter, and bruised
barn cats with the blood of
mice in their guts, lived tons of Victorian girls
who did not eat. They said the Lord had taken over
their bodies, that he would feed them
his word and his heart. The girls’ mothers and farmhands,
at first, would spoon their daughters and sisters porridge
at night, trick them into eating in dream.
The girls would spew and scream awake,
their bellies filled to the brim
with the roars of God, they’d claim.
Blue-lipped mothers would come to believe
their Nelly’s and Anna’s and Daisy’s
so firmly, a divine light would enter
the home as the girls’ wrists and ankles, barbed
with vein, unfleshed and rotted.
The girls’ throats would become
scorched by prayer and no broth
as their mothers sat by fires
sipping smoke, rosary beads
leaving marks in their palms.
Priests from villages miles away
would visit the girls before they died,
bless them in their white nightgowns
that clouded what was left.
I learn of Fasting Girls on wikipedia
when I am in my thirties
and no longer spending days, mouth watering
for chicken wings and toast, mana
from my own sense of heaven. I am well
when I learn of these girls who ingested psalms
about the wicked, baked and oiled

into the stoves of their mother’s eyes.
Were we once Fasting Girls,
falsely saint-like for locking
ourselves in our rooms during meals?
Canonized for thigh gaps,
sanctified with anemia.
I once did not eat for two days,
and fell into a snowbank
on a walk home from a sleepover
with other Fasting Girls. Truly
I tell you, that night
I was so hungry,
I sat there, and almost
licked dirt from the ice.

___________________________________

Mallory Tater is the author of This Will Be Good: Poems (Book*Hug Press, 2018), The Birth Yard: A Novel (HarperCollins, 2020), and Soft Tissue: A Novel (forthcoming, ECW Press, 2027). She was the publisher of Rahila’s Ghost Press, a now-retired chapbook press. Mallory currently lives in Vancouver, where she teaches at the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing. This is her second poetry collection.