by Emily Nilsen
Meanwhile, in His Dreams
My grandfather swims through the arteries
of a blue whale. He heard its 400-pound heart
beating a mile away. I encourage my inconsequence
by choosing the longest checkout line in Safeway,
surrounded by expired discounts, twenty-eight types
of gum, and not one of those magazines
can explain where the whales breed.
We hide grief in secret pockets
of our trench coats. Magic!
It emerges like a bunch of gladiolas,
hops away a red-eyed rabbit.
My grandfather knew sleight of hand,
a glass of water disappearing
beneath his hat. Ten past midnight
he phones to ask where we have left him —
the sea, pale as a desert.
Meanwhile, I Have Started to Fold Things
A beet-stained dinner napkin.
The aluminum lining of chocolate bars.
Unwanted receipts. And sometimes
a square of two-ply as I sit
on the toilet looking at the mole
over my kneecap, a wonky planet
mooned by freckles, my zebra-print skirt
far away on the floor, washed up
against ankles. Nothing fancy,
no origami cranes or ninja
stars: just squares. While waiting
to board the Greyhound I shared my umbrella
with a one-legged boy who told me
a 1 mm thick
piece of paper folded in half
100 times is thicker
than the observable diameter
of the universe,
and would ascend
133,989,789,471
light years away.
My Lip Sits in a Petri Dish, Meanwhile
a city is being nailed onto the plains.
I hadn’t noticed that quiet hammering,
the drill-drill-drilling of plywood taming shadows
to shade. It grows faster than a camp
of refugees. Well, says the city as it hangs
a hard hat over itself, the topography
makes it easy. Last night, it fit
under a garter snake, under the thumb
pad of a vole, really
it was just a scratch
in the silt, a friendly-like pssssssst!
how-de-do? Now it’s lumbering
whole, a droopy-eyed klutz falling
drunk into the gold, wind-whispered
foothills only fireflies and coyotes
called home. The light out there
is reckless. It’s eaten too many
blue whales and neon dinosaurs, cranky
hearts spin in a centrifuge, bloodshot
from over-sugaring. On a high-
rise patio tiny critters cloister and cauliflower
overgrows in clumped canopies, bursting out
a rooftop pot, my god —
all I see are lips, lips, perfect lips,
overripe unpicked strawberry
mouths, everywhere. They are
everywhere.
Intertidal
Pre-dawn Walk
In the season of creaking rivers
I am kept awake.
Pre-dawn Walk
Past the hardware store
and the on-sale hibachi. Past
the cat curled up in the used
bookstore window. Past the chain-link
fence draped in dried-up hops and past
a garden of rotting squash. Past the woman
who thinks she is Edith Piaf and past the brick
building outlined in ivy. Past the mannequin clad
in fishnet stockings and past the barbershop pole
and a floor of unswept hair. To the lake, I walk
down to the lake. Past the bakery
with its lights on and past
the hockey rink with its lights
off. Past the truck idling outside the diner
and past a raven pecking tatty crusts
from a brown bag. This is the past: the lake
was a river. I walk over pebbles
towards where sturgeon swim, caught
in their solitary, rugged routes.
Fragile Morning of the Landlady
She shovels the first snowfall
into five even piles. Hinging at the hips,
bending to sidewalk, her terrycloth robe
belted to keep
her heart in. Yesterday,
she raked a mulch of maple
over the curb. In a divisive November
the electric orange of street lamps keeps us
contained. Her bleak determination.
My silent immobility.
Fragile Mornings of the Couple Moored to the Dock Next Door
The argument long lost. She sits on the deck,
stubbornly slicing apples into crescent moons
with a dull pocket knife.
Fragile Morning of the Farmhand Who Longs to Leave
The cows surrounded her as she pushed
to the middle of the field through knee-deep snow,
tin bucket on her arm. Between the legs of cattle
and an oak she watched ocean shuffling stiff slabs
of water. Her neck craned to see it: a fishing boat
splitting the sea down its middle. Milk froth.
Fragile Evenings of the Man in His Trawler
Slumped at the table nook
that is kitchen, living and dining room,
he unbuttons his jeans and winces pulling
suspenders from his shoulders. Northwest Passage clicks
off, and as he leans to flip the well-worn cassette
notices three piles of sawdust on the floor.
He remembers this detail while writing
a letter he will never send to his daughter.
How good it felt
to hold one hand in the other, bound
only to the boat, its gentle lullaby,
and the clink of mugs in sync with rain.
Fragile Night of the Hitchhiker from Up Island
Cougar full of deer
lugs a sagging second set
of lung, heart, liver up the slide path —
Pow!
Gunshot ripples the sea. He lowers
the rifle butt from his shoulder notch, leans
against the boat’s plywood windshield, ’70s hull
rotted like his back molar. Everything with a tender patch,
a fibreglass warble. Even the hard edge mildews. Smack the land, the land
smacks back. Driving that train, high on cocaine, whistling to keep busy
through the goddamn rain. Jean jacket soaked in trouble. No woman
to lean over. He can still smell her neck, hot in the sun.
Now he’s close, all up in his own face. He went out
like that, fast and loud —
with a bang.
Fragile Hour of Dementia
The man at the dock paints sailboats
the colour of a cloudless day reflected off seawater.
His back is bare, sun-chewed sinew. He is made of copper
coins and flecked in blue. He hides sculpins in the froth of his beard
and once outswam a pirate off the Polynesian Islands.
Listen, he walks, callused heels
sliverless in a hum of
la-laa la-laa la-laa
An Address to Dusk
He takes me to the creek
and as he whittles a fallen cottonwood branch,
I wash his shirt. He heads into the forest
and drapes the shirt over his back.
Still heavy with water
it drips like a dark fish
into the soil.
I leave you and follow.
An Address to Dusk
You are behind me
in the kitchen as I pack a suitcase fu
ll
of wares: wooden spoons, knives wrapped
in newspaper, a cast iron, the threadbare
dishcloth from Bulgaria.
At the sink, turning
on the tap, I catch his reflection
in the window. And through him, you:
an overturned canoe, lake simmering under
evening sun, a pile of half-stacked wood
bitten yellow with wolf lichen, laundry
hanging limply on the line.
An Address to Dusk
Alone in the alpine meadow
beneath a ridge. Moon rises bent
like the rib of a deer. Stars begin
to peck at the sky, cleaning
and drying bones
of the day.
Screef
By noon I had opened the ground a thousand times.
Fast terrain. Trenches. Shovel-
split the earth no wider than a pack of smokes.
Pine after pine slid in.
Boot stomp. Close the hole. Move on. Easy.
I’m singing — hell
yeah — I’m singing. Sun through
cloud cover leading my limbs
as we two-step over slash piles.
Black-capped chickadees call out
from a dog-haired stand of spruce:
Cheeese-burger! Cheeese-burger!
Fastened to my ears like a pair
of garnet clip-ons.
Every camp has a legend.
Breakfast, over scrambled eggs:
Did you hear? That old guy shot a bison.
Butchered strips dry over a snag.
Stink of death pushed up our noses.
Bears loiter, ping-pinging off
the electric fence. He was ancient: at least forty.
Kept to himself. A ruddy-faced Czech. — There he is
traipsing through thicket, shouldering
the muscle of dusk in his backlit mane
of briny hair. Tree-burl calves.
Humpback.
Kid, I was born brave.
Never had an apron to hide under.
I am not yet my older self. Everything is
intact, enclosed by spaciousness: I wash my face
in a trough of muddy water and sleep blindfolded
to fend off evening sun. I learn how to shotgun
beer and smoke when angry, bluff-charging
the future. I try on other animal hides
for size. My lungs, pink as a wolf
tongue, strong as a set of moose antlers
mounted to my spine. My skin not yet
chapped to rawhide nor baggy
as the cook’s muck-brown lab
and her wobbling sea of lipomas. But —
in certain light, maybe, maybe I notice
airborne pesticides. The list
of brands we inhale grows longer
than my arm. Fungicides, insect-
icides, herbicides. Clusters of alveoli
tweak out, a bad case of witch’s broom.
Hooked on antihistamines. Neck high
in fireweed. Wasps scramble out of land-mined
stumps with a low cello drone to protect
the busted city. You’ll hear ’em
before you see ’em. Keep your shovel in the ground
and for godssake stay still. Fat lips. Swollen eyelids.
Run —
to the marsh. Bites puckered
in swamp water. Piss on ’em. Cover yourself
in pennies. Under the glint of copper
my buck-naked heart jolts
upright, twitching.
There are stories underfoot:
balled-up, overturned, now pricked
by caulk boots as we stuff a forest
into the ground. Here in the once timbered
shade, three wolves circled a wobbling fawn
and a fleet of moosehide canoes glided
breathlessly by the oxbow…
Bundles of fifteen, swaddled
in Saran Wrap: spring-tipped, greener
than youth. Mudslide. Cattle. Snow.
Fire will eventually take these trees.
Hot days in the bush get to your head.
Price-per-tree calculations mix with thoughts
of last night’s salty mashed potatoes, an empty
rum bottle in the ditch and one drunk-ass
faller-buncher. My brain’s on epinephrine
and Kelvin from the Ivory Coast swats deer flies
with a scythe of grass. I’ll drink any lake
under the table and scare bucks out the creek
with my dirty shins. Bushed. Hotheaded
blood back-eddies into a semi-stagnant
drip-drip-drip (as we bend
then rise
then bend) on slow drill. Pacing
to be let out. We just have to —
Storm on the griddle.
Clouds pinwheel, horizon
forked by lightning. Lick-pop
of a fast fire.
As for the hundreds
of undug holes that will one day
need filling, I can almost hear them:
their pitch, taut as tinnitus, aching
out of an open field, gaping like
un-mothered mouths thirsty for rain.
You are at the junction
where ground wasps nestled
in low-lying stumps and the mountain ash
dropped its berries, caking the floor with orange
and red. Now the forest is all jaw. Charred
moss on logs. You walk through what was once
an aspen grove and snag your sleeve on a black branch.
Cotton rips. You walk on. When your boots scuff
the ground, soot billows, sticks to the sweat
on your cheeks. Your teeth and tongue dried
with ash. The earth still warm with smouldering roots.
You kneel in search of pine cones, seed pods, the crest
of a bulb, something that promises life. Your hands,
thickened by work, feel nothing. The wind finally
reaches you. It runs through the vacant canopy
and then between the buttons and thread
of your shirt. It carries the call of an owl
pulling night forward. The ripped cloth
on your elbow is a pine white butterfly,
lifting as you turn to leave.
Meanwhile
On Day Eight We Cross the Arctic Circle
We appear on the other side scrubbed clean
by wind. It is an imaginary line, a coin pulled
from my ear, earth’s receding hairline, a cough
on the windowpane, a seasonal fen that hopes
to replenish itself, hardened yet marshy underfoot,
an ache and an itch. It kills birds in the morning
then brings them back to life. It’s the vocal cord
of caribou. Tied to its own demise. It has no texture
but that which it crosses. Walking backwards
will not undo what has been done.
Midnight Sun
The mother wanders the hallway
uncertain of time. She hides
in her nightgown. How pale her cheeks
since her stepson drowned at sea
two weeks ago. A jug of sheep milk
sloshes side to side on the table.
Her family drank 4 L a day.
The ship caught fire, there were
no survivors. In the kitchen
she told me. I looked at my hands,
they were far away on my lap,
and my lap was at the bottom
of a cliff, and the cliff was covered
in white roses, and the roses were falling
all over us.
Yesterday I was paid to scythe
the field. I tried to slice the day
in two. My work shirt and jeans stiff
as plywood in the unbroken gale
the farmer washes his car, buckets water
over the black hood under a V
of honking geese. His black dog
barking. Night keeps its distance
from the farm, cooling the pith
of caves, gnawing winter fleas
from its hind leg.
The village arrives in whispers.
Heads bowed, through the door.
The mother is frying cod in butter.
We ate five hundred kilograms of meat every year.
She speaks to keep death away.
Lamb and fish. Smoked dark
lamb, boiled fish. Darkness,
the smoke. The village fumbles
for wool blankets thick enough
to snuff out the bright, layers
them over windows. Stuffs
door frames. I never met the boy.
In the kitchen’s muffled light
four shapes feel around for cutlery
and plates. I cradle a stack
of blankets, a foreigner who
can’t find the word
for goodnight.
Little Stick Man with a Knife
Traplines are not lines,
but tracts of land bordered by ridges
and valleys, stitched together by river.
Harold sits at his living room table, crust of age
in the corners of his mouth. Coiled on a cabinet
of fine china, a cougar, shiny-eyed and stiller
than wood. Teacups rattle as Harold crosses
the broadloom. He walks like a mudslide,
pulls out a pile of papers, crayon lines
still bright as lipstick. His mother made him
trap muskrat in the ditch. Harold Age Eight
drew them strung on the fence and him,
little stick man with a knife. Using his palm
as a map, he traces the route, half a century walking
his own animal trail, in, out the pines, the light
of winter closing over his back. In the garage,
