Anyway, you’re not coming and I can’t have you this evening I have to put the flowers around my own throat and buy myself a film the red seats will be the violets of my lap. I’m going to begin now anointing myself with the oil of your absence. That is this book. And I made the book of you in your absence and I’ll come into the house and in the hot oil of your absence, my anointment a rose-shaped burn at my crown. I'll buy me flowers and cover my chest protecting my health in our violets. I can’t stop but I can have this open and we might communion then right among the spaces : between my side and inner arm, our outer arms, your inner arm and your thick torso and behind that your tight heart and the space between that nut and some energy around which there is no space We dip dates into a good wine and have communion. Have we the same mouth? Sometimes.
excerpt
Foreign Exchange
Vincent walked to the back of the plane, to the very back where the seats didn’t properly recline, took his place by the window and hoped without much conviction that the two empty seats beside him would remain that way. Flight 966 left Toronto for Barbados every morning and it always seemed to be full. It was April 12th, the sky was overcast, but the airport crew working on the tarmac wore light jackets. Low season in the Caribbean would officially begin in three days time; winter had passed, summer would soon be here.
In the broadest of outlines, Vincent knew what he was doing here; he could trace his way back through a series of random events that inevitably led him to today’s seat assignment. It was harder for him to imagine why all the other passengers filing down the aisle had come to join him here today. There were couples on vacation, Barbadians going home, men and women on business.
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 6. Purchase the book to read the full piece.
Grace
Gracie stands at the window, arms akimbo, and looks through her reflection to the front lawn. In her transparent body, grass sprouts where her heart should be. It’s patchy. Choked with weeds. Shifting her gaze down closer to the house, she peers through her belly. The flowerbeds are parched and the perennials—which should be thriving, having had years to establish themselves—appear dead. She can offer them less help each year. She eyes their collective enemy: sturdy new weeds, waiting to spring up and strangle what little life remained in her beloved, struggling plants. She narrows her eyes—Just see what’s in store for you this morning, you little thugs. I don’t care how much pollen you shoot at me, I’ll get rid of you!—then glances up at the early morning sky. It hangs gloomy, defeated by the sixty-watt lamps in the living room behind her.
The huge pane of glass also reflects much of her home’s interior. This stretches from the house in ghostly array. The “new” sofa, bought a year ago when Errol retired, floats along the driveway to her left.
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 6. Purchase the book to read the full piece.
Metropolis Redux
The city sometimes forgets where she lives. The streets are confused. Air of cinders and flowers, the nerves of the boulevards on edge. Parks desert themselves. The address of her future uncertain.
She grabs for the world, tenants a coach house among restored Victorians, rose gardens and fountains. Brick walls dream of hay and horses, the scent of leather harnesses, ghosts tangled in their tethers. The soiled gloves of the coachman, carriage of sleep. A lost earring, a midnight slipper.
Outside her bedroom, graffiti across the road reads:
Tom Hendry is a rat
Testified against his older brother for murder
Full moon pinned between skyscrapers, the alley becomes a night-river of smashed beer bottles, obscenities screamed by crack dealers and drunks.
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 6. Purchase the book to read the full piece.
Toronto locations referenced in this piece
“In the path of resistance, the city doors are locked down. We ride the train to the edge, where the buildings meet the mouth of the harbour. The boxcars slice a path, leave a stiff suture. We hope the train will ease into Union Station, deliver a state . . . ” —Union Station
MS-13 in My Classroom
Blue pants, white stripes, trace portable tattoos into the fertile land of a teacher’s psyche: a place where crushed heads and dismembered limbs soak in liquid red. The colours you wear bear a statement of the world your ancestors were unfortunate to inherit. A place where war has turned Natives against Europeans, Europeans against Natives, Native Europeans against European Natives, you against yourself. Blue sky rushes alongside white clouds. White petals caress blue waves. Blue marbles roll over white sand. The colours you wear bear a statement of America’s aching past, and the dislocation of your culture today . . .
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 3. Purchase the book to read the full piece.
Mister Canada
One morning, a year after my family’s arrival in Canada, I stood in our basement, looking at my reflection in the mirror. The powder blue shirt I was wearing was part of my work uniform and it made me look sallow, a pallidness intensified by the neon light above. The mirror was a collection of reflecting squares stuck together on the basement wall, in an area that had once been the bar. Some of the squares were missing and I saw myself in fragments. I could see my head, but not my neck, my left arm but not my right; my left leg was missing too.
In that disjointed mirror was a view of my basement bedroom as well. The plastic wood-veneer panelling, which was supposed to create a warm cosiness, did not absorb light, like real wood, but reflected the neon tube above. The carpet was a worn lime green. My bed was a box spring mattress that was here when we bought the house, a rickety desk from Towers was shoved up against a wall.