Coining a Wishing Tower by Ayesha Raees
Platypus Press, 2022
Winner of the 2022 Broken River Prize
In the strange and knowing prose poems of Ayesha Raees’s prize-winning collection Coining a Wishing Tower, a House Mouse performs rituals and a Cat and the moon are both in love with a goldfish named Godfish. Through allegory and imagery, these poems ask, how is the deepest knowledge acquired? Can it be?
There are many paths to knowledge in Coining a Wishing Tower. Search engines figure prominently: the speaker uses them to acquire facts—the population of New London, CT (26,984 in 2010), its weather in December (cold)—but also to define Islamic heaven. “Some [search results] say that Islamic heaven has one thousand levels, each as far from each other as the stars from our eyes, seeable yet unreachable” Raees writes, immediately complicating this by adding “other results say there are only seven.” Raees understands that our paths to knowledge are beset by contradictions and limits.
Raees turns to parable to overcome these limits. Here the path to understanding is one of ascent: House Mouse climbs a series of mountains where “[e]very peak held another peak, and every reach held another reach” (suggesting that the path to knowledge has no end) and finally a tower, partly illuminated by the sun (suggesting the limits of perception), where House Mouse “begins to perform rituals and chants in wish.” These culminate in the ritual of death, during which “House Mouse realised that, just like in sleep, there was no concept of time or space, and anything could lead to anything alarming, charming or calming.”
In a parallel parable, Godfish too dies, but Godfish’s death is a very different from House Mouse’s. Whereas House Mouse participated ritually in its own death, Godfish is acted upon: “The water in the aquarium gets hot. Godfish’s blood gets warm. There is stress in Godfish’s swim.” The strange parable of Godfish stranges further when the moon tries to rescue—or kidnap?—Godfish. The moon “lifts the water, rounds Godfish into a dripping ball and pulls it through the opened window only to bring it to a flat and a hover in the storming snow of New London, Connecticut. In the howling wind, Godfish squirms, and the water ball drops and spills.” Godfish’s death is violent and unexpected. Raees does not look away: “Against the stark white snow, against the black tar of the road, a spot of orange, red, and gold, once full of life, now just an estranged mark on the road.”
What happens now to House Mouse and Godfish, to all of us after crossing that barrier? “When the soul transcends from one exist to the next, will the cat see Godfish after its own death? Or will death cleanse the cat so truly it will not even remember Godfish?” This is where Coining a Wishing Tower takes its readers fearlessly: to the brink of unknowing where no search engine can take us, on the pilgrimage from which no pilgrim can return.
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Jennifer Saunders is the author of Self-Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019) and a Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Orison Anthology nominee. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Grist, Ninth Letter, Twyckenham Notes, and elsewhere. Jennifer holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in German-speaking Switzerland.