Category: Poetry

It started innocently enough.  Everyone stopped calling,  My cubicle was filled with a stranger’s things,  And someone new was tucked in my bed. I didn’t understand. So I melted into the background. I watched as the love of my life moved on,  My mother and father wilted and died. I humoured it.  I tried to

Pain is a funny language / and when you’re in it it is all you speak / and when you’re not / you forget it was once your native tongue / it’s a language no one wants to be fluent in / but many are / it makes your orbit small / and some feel

I was invited on a forest walk,  a slow, mindful walk,  pausing to look, really look,  at the canopies of pines, cedars and aspen, down at the low-lying milkweed,  leaves turned yellow, the variety of mushrooms growing in waves on the ground  beneath it all. I sat on the forest floor, eyes closed, breathing in

Run your hands through the thick, silken whole of it Once Twice Divide into three equal sections Right over middle, left over middle  Repeat Fold one strand in half Braid in end Braid in loop Pull remaining strands through  Divide into three Keep braiding Hold finished work pinched between your fingers  One breath Two breaths

Wear a mask The air is poison Choke on the ashes of Californian dreams on the ghosts of Okanagan homes As sick yellow skies melt into stifling nights we wake from sweating nightmares with Lytton on our lips Wear a mask Your breath is poison Cross the street away from your neighbours to show you

toddlers with their faces blurred out or covered by cowboy hat will the mother keep this up until the kid is a man using the initial for his name a short story collection about L. # She’s crushed by the faucet.  The charring of the hand.  The flooring peeling up after run, run, run, running

when you’re waiting for your check to go through – come on over to my house I have a prayer – I am working with a stutter come over, take an echo bath:  share with me come over – make it undone make it lush – make it future make my body a harp you

It’s quiet.  The hollow shake of a thermos.  Air resting, suspended, lukewarm.  My skull is full of mothballs.  My limbs, stone.  My glands  secreting  in secret.   Whisky dribbling.  Sink half full of muck.  She’s thinking of me,  I can feel it in a pit  knotting in my gut.  She’s wearing white  and she hates it.  It’s blotchy  with granules of  displeasing

Pluming smoke,   pupils like myrrh,  lavender eyes, sage skin, grenache lips,  a tongue of tannin with a gravel finish.  The record spins, the needle placed, it’s just now catching.   I’m laying on a beige carpet, bonded to it like velcro,  staring at the eggshell white, popcorn ceiling.  My body’s become a cauldron of amorphous fumes,  the future telling me its long withheld secrets,