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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
