At a morning truck stop
the waitress calls out orders
over labouring engines,
bursts of retarder brakes,
exhaust,
Will that be to stay or to go?
Roughnecks and truckers
on their way to the north
climb down from diesel bodies,
pull off caps, wipe their heads,
as heat goes picking its way
across the parking lot
looking for leftovers—
A swollen bag of garbage
the busboy heaves into the […]
frost on the potato
in the upturned garden
light between haystacks
a hole in heaven
the rosy hardness of crabapples
as they drop ping onto the gravel
tracks of cattle leading down to a
drinking hole,
a green stone in the mud.
the sound of my father’s truck
returning from his night job as
morning stars begin to sing
the music of milking in the stable
by the […]
He buys used books
not thrillers or novels or the soft porn favoured by his ilk
but rather picture books
for a budding blonde
six years old and a thousand miles away
He reads to her on the phone
every second night
and tries to make his voice
into the bright illustrations
of lion’s paws
and thorns
and the plucky child who dares to help
They connect […]
That not-quite-autumn evening,
the day after she came to us,
we were called to a neighbour’s yard
to witness a rare and wondrous city sight,
a porcupine, dark shape in the branches of a crab-apple tree.
We saw the bristling spikes
the clinging toes
the silent gasping mouth and
the hopelessness of descent
of that poor beast
until the bright plastic toys of a summer-not-yet-packed […]
you’re still a newcomer
they told me
when I’d been here twenty years.
I hadn’t walked in on the trail
through muskeg, behind an oxcart
we drove in, the kids worn
I on the precipice
of panic
looking for water.
I could only see
land
sky
the new job
I was raised on the bay, the dock anchored
at the north end of Main where the grain elevators
curved in […]
