Montreal hipsters;
I could not tell any of my old friends
what happened after that stinky summer.
It was spring and I spotted what I thought
were Instagrammable crocuses
but were, I was told, Siberian squills
or maybe Johnson’s blue geraniums.
Traditionally, blue geraniums
symbolize a gentle constancy,
where the Siberian squill represents
being murdered by Joseph Stalin.
I would have eaten them all, like a cow,
just to ease the pain of not knowing.
I returned to that corner cafe squinting,
having long run out of quelling lies.
(after Keats)
Lady’s Slipper
That poem was my career. It poured flop sweat
and begged grad students to stop hating me.
It punched at the famous and took cover
in weeks of Beyoncé-fed solitude.
That poem knew where it was and how much
it was worth compared to a blow job.
It knew the other poems by name: they
gave me panic attacks they struck so quick.
That poem was the great hope I wouldn’t work
for a living, the dream I could survive,
being admired as if an academic
John Stamos (or a telegenic Žižek).
That poem did what I told it to do.
Sort of. It snarled up on Asbestos Heights.
Now, of course, snarling is all it’s good for
as my hunchback moves to the left, to the left.
Saffron
When the Glooscap Trail in Nova Scotia
got too Glooscappy for me, I turned south.
All the buckeyes and all the baseball games
I’d need to score to prove I didn’t mind.
Not that I grew so blessed with freedom
I outlived personifying the wind
(it ‘murmured,’ it ‘howled,’ it even ‘bled’)
or outlived those who spoke for literature.
Wherever they were, every sentence began
‘Poetry is . . . ’ and zeroed in, like a hawk,
to how foolish it was I spent seven years
writing sonnets about orange soda pop.
My lungs were born to proof asbestos,
my teeth edged to tear open Doritos.
Poetry was bound to love Nova Scotia,
what with its winds singing Taylor Swift songs.
Pomegranate
There are two kinds of people in the world:
those who say they love to eat pomegranates
and those who tell the truth. But, yes, they’re red,
and healthy foods taste either red or red.
Steak, cherry popsicle, red velvet cake.
Full of such health, I stayed up all summer
sketching a fringe play called Dangling Apricocks
and collapsing somewhere near Jolicoeur.
When somebody looks over their glasses and says,
‘Look at it this way, m’sieur, you have a scar
but at least you still have most of your face,’
what can you say but ‘D’you like daiquiris?’
Healthy red medicines, or even those blushed
Pepto pink, die in the Canadian cold;
you can’t keep Diet Cokes at home for fear
the deliciousness will dull you to God.
Yarrow
There’s the country somewhere outside the car.
The country where the elm fucks the maple
and the elm broods as if auditioning
for a new PBS miniseries.
There’s a poetry where trees don’t have sex,
when the yarrow observed from a car seat
can stand in, plain image, plain symbol,
and not be you observing me as overweight.
Outside, as the yarrow whips by, are towns
where Canadians happily live their lives,
unperturbed by who was excluded
from the Can Lit? Can Do! anthology.
Inside, the steady beat of country songs,
coffee with diet hazelnut creamer.
Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything
about the maple who gets so leafy.
Queen Anne’s Lace
My therapist looked over her glasses.
‘I hate it when you say that nobody cares
if you live or die when I, for one, am
quite excited by the idea of you dying.’
I stared at her desk bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace,
wondering
