My brother lost his body bit by bit—a foot, a finger, a shin. The doctors strapped it to a bed, and the mouth screamed on its behalf: Help! Help! With the eyes, my brother spied me, standing in the body of someone who looked like his sister; and the mouth said Health!...
The honourable mention in our 2012 poetry contest, judged by Miranda Pearson. There is the crosscutting of twigs, the bulge of red buds carving sky into fragments of grey waiting, molecules of paint melded by winter’s cold on a window frame that won’t open to spring’s...
Fat flies line the bait box, brush and cling like scraps of cellophane, ragged magnets in the heat. You shuffle to band a lobster. In a heartbeat it’s caught your thumb with a crusher claw, the grip of an angry baby multiplied tenfold. Stupid for a moment, you can’t...
I. Vows A hardscrabble climb up the hillside, I. Vows A hardscrabble climb up the hillside, the thin chorus of marmots raised by my footsteps. If your small brow rested on my back the good weight could hold me here, until the sun hangs just below the mountains, casts...
The man who loves you is nothing but a ghost. He walks through walls, his name on your mouth like prayer. —for my mothers The man who loves you is nothing but a ghost. He walks through walls, his name on your mouth like prayer. His name is what you tell yourself...
The poem I am not going to write excuses herself daily, needs to wash her hair, roust the dust bunnies from under the bed, empty the worn-out clothes that malinger in her closet. The poem I am not going to write excuses herself daily, needs to wash her hair, roust the...
I thought we were dead when Dave spread his maps across the wheel and took off his glasses to consult them while his semi careened unchecked down the interstate. I thought we were dead when Dave spread his maps across the wheel and took off his glasses to consult them...
The honourable mention in Room's 2011 poetry contest, judged by Elizabeth Bachinsky. There were so many errors in the newspaper obituary that no one knew it was my mother who had died. Momma, who had lived off the river, off the sand and rust-tainted water that fed...
Spools of odd and even numbers knot tightly around my fingers. Fractions like hieroglyphs people the tethered pages of my grade school days. At the hub of our long-winded kitchen, turquoise table on a checkerboard floor. Mother slices red apples on a pine wood board:...
this metropolis is hurly-burly— you’re striving with deadlines crosstown, half-drowned in long lists—consume that, buy this chase what’s brash and new— your strained schedule bursting with some added task always left to do while nearby, along cool paths sun sips...