so first i feel like i should say hello and goodbye to everyone i failed to say hello and goodbye to last night. i think that after a couple years of knowing most of you, and a couple months of knowing some of you, you’ve come to realize that i’m not a bitch and that i just don’t like to strike up conversations. including the maybe-conversations that might arise if i approach you to say goodbye. or at least i hope you’ve come to realize this.
so…
hello and goodbye.
last night was incredible! michael blouin, the featured poet last night, blew my mind. sometimes, writing is like music for me. i hear a lot and care for none (well, some, obviously). i start to worry that i’m not … normal (?). i hide out and don’t go to most readings and events because i’m worried someone will be like, “i wrote that” and i’ll be like, “i didn’t give a fuck then and i care even less now”. i don’t want to have to be like that so i just don’t. you’d have to really know me on a personal level to know whose writing i truly enjoy, because i don’t just go around saying “oh yeah, they’re so talented. and awesome. and talented. and etc”.
but michael blouin blew my mind. i even bought a copy of his book “chase & haven”. i don’t exactly have money and i hate going to the ATM even when i do have money (connecting, processing, do you want your receipt — too intense, thanks though). but i went to the ATM and took out some cash to buy that damn book. it reminded me of being 15 and buying CDs at shows after the sets. but this was better than that.
he is easily a new favourite … of all time. i almost don’t understand it because it happens so rarely. and i’m mostly impressed that this could have happened at an in/words reading. in/words readings need to keep happening, people need to keep showing up. even when they have to bring a dollar. no one really wants to give up on it. i know i don’t — any of it. the lingering sense of magic. the poetry hangover that doesn’t come around often enough. the feeling that almost shouldn’t come from listening, but somehow does. something i don’t usually get, a glimpse into my future, reminding me that bean salads will, in all likelihood, forever be associated with the most (honestly) talented people i’ve ever met.
:)
branch off like
that, in the middle,
bend beneath
pressures from eras
of weight upon twig
shoulders, wrap
your limbs around me
and lift me to the crescent
sky, the sliver of the moon
there’s an eerie light
on over your
patio, reminding me
you’re home although i
never asked,
still pressing gently,
seeping for the street,
calling for mid
night, now sixty seven
minutes late
there’s something unsettling about my dad’s news that he’s leaving his apartment. the apartment he rented just so my sister and i could come and live with him when we had nowhere else to go. the winding staircase, the dark, narrow hallway and the small windowless corner of the apartment that was going to be my bedroom. my wide, hopeful eyes when my dad asked me what i thought. i didn’t have to say a word — he opened his wallet counted up the cash for the deposit then and there. everything was going to be okay, and it was.
eight and a half years in that little apartment above the optometrist. painting and re-painting, old boyfriends and movies, insomnia. writing outside on the fire escape in the dead of night, the dead of winter. first and new friendships and learning to open up to something unfamiliar. being with someone in a strange and different way, a pure way. green lamplight.
carnegie gallery rooftop parties and the heat in the kitchen. friends from what felt like every corner of the earth. sublime and snes. hanging a backwards clock in a windowless dining room just to find a way to forget the rest of the world exists — turning on all the lights and pretending 3am is noon. the sounds of the midway in the backyard, friends puking into buckets in our hallway. falling up the stairs. chelsea maglelsky. spacing out, sketching out, hangovers. high school.
the front stoop.
the walls.
the sound of the street-level door swinging, the sound that brought its share of hopes, excitement and anxieties. everything we all had when we first moved into our eight-year home. we couldn’t have known if it was going to work, or if we were going to work together, or if we’d be able to make it just the three of us. we had some real low points. real low points. but we made it. that little apartment, that narrow little apartment helped us make it. we wouldn’t have been the same without it.
king street apartment, you are the best.
staring down is
special on its own,
dead spiders tangled in
your lashes, the
need is not mine,
it is yours to blink against
the webs, against
the wind
five and six way back in the day
one of the agents in my office has a daughter who recently bought a home in waterdown, ontario, a few kilometers away from where my mom lives. actually, i more or less grew up in waterdown even though i never actually lived there. my mom was raised there and her father was one of the only two police officers the small village had while she was growing up, and her connections to the town never faded away. her high school was torn down to make room for condos and the fields where she used to lie down and watch fireworks became complex twists of tree-lined, suburban streets.yet she kept our family doctor there, we did our grocery shopping there, we got DQ there and we went to memorial park, without fail, every year to watch the victoria day sky magic.
i’ve lived in something like 15 houses and apartments throughout my life, and none of them have been in waterdown, but for some reason my most vivid childhood memories take me back there. my earliest experiences of teenage rebellion (think: 12, 13, 14) involved that safe little town in the middle of the night. i had to move on to the city for any real teenage fun, but waterdown held its own and was a good staging ground for what would later come to be :)
back in the day there weren’t any cement slab plants or industrial parks in our backyard. there were endless fields and flat miles of tan rock lying alongside the trickle of a creek that branched off from somewhere along the escarpment. there were tunnels under highways, and the roar of 18-wheelers overhead is one of the sounds that resonates in my memory. no one worried that we’d get lost out there, or hurt, or that we’d manage to kill ourselves walking along the highway into town. we just went.
hwy #6 southbound down the cut
i love ottawa, but there’s something to be said for the tangled industrial-countryside web that makes up hamilton. even when you’re out in the middle of nowhere out there, you’re still connected to what that city is. grit lit, doors in the core. people i’ve met in ottawa have told me they’ve driven through hamilton and never wanted to stay. i don’t know about that. there’s something about it. when i was there, i did want to get out. but that’s its charm, i think.
that’s what keeps us there and that’s what brings us back.
eventually, it
crumbles to the way
we were before,
slow, smooth
tones against back
yard fences,
old wind chimes
chasing out the
setting suns
and burning twilights,
century stars in
bloom
in addition to pretty much anything, i will do this:
to end up here:
tree climbing, park walking, tulip smelling, duck watching, sun burning, cloud gazing, grass laying, long walk taking, footprint leaving, super deals on sodas kind of day.
thanks for the boost and the good times, bronson friends.
a car starts on
the second
try, or goes
out as it comes
in a circle,
a perfect loop
