Two blocks from the house I grew up in sit the remains of the Sarnia General Hospital. I still miss it. After all, I was born there on October 15, 1993; and my father was born there on February 17, 1947; and his father died at a hospital nearby on January 13, 2000. And that’s not even the end of it: the family name came back when his father died at the Sarnia General Hospital on May 29, 1951. My great-grandfather’s son also died there on July 30, 1992; and so did his daughter on September 13, 1996. Runs in the family, I suppose.
We used to play hide-and-seek around the remains of the hospital late at night. Some of the windows on the fourth floor were still in place; others were boarded up with beat-up sheets of plywood, which let drafts of air and animals inside, amongst other things.…
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A methane gas explosion has ripped through the mine, collapsing the shaft where I’ve been working and rendering me unconscious. When I come to, I find that I am bleeding profusely and the stabbing pain in my extremities tells me that I have suffered multiple fractures. Light still shines from the headlamp on my mining helmet, though, and searching the darkness, I see that my shift mates have not been as lucky: they are buried deep beneath the rubble of the decimated shaft. Had I not gone back to grab a pick from the coal car, I would have surely suffered the same fate. My only hope is to survive long enough for the brave men of the mine rescue team to find and evacuate me safely out of this hell hole.…
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Endless autumn train tracks – all these great abandoned houses and their fallow fields.
You get used to it. The endless hours. The blur of yellowing
Trees, and time, and bridges. Every two-exit town looks the same,
Toothpick diorama of a farm. What am I supposed to learn about life
Here, amid all the loneliness? Perhaps the elegance of a withering
Willow by the bridge. To be alone but not hollow, solitary but not lost.
You’re a hard friend to make and harder to keep, and I’m starting to think
That maybe you’re not worth keeping. In the grass, the implication
Of a body. In the car, the ghost of a great-
Aunt’s mediocre love. I’m not sorry for wanting
You to kiss me in the bathroom hallway but I’m sorry
That it didn’t happen before our friends came through the door.…
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Take Up
Meeting, kissing, thinking, not thinking, talking, not talking. No need to think and talk. No need to wonder why anything is. It just is. This is what love is. It’s about passion. It’s about the sex. The sex is passionate. It is brilliant. Yes.
Shake Up
So much so all my past experiences are thrown into the air. I am questioning everything that went for sex before. How could I have lived the years I’ve lived and never seen sex could be like this? All my ideas and former awarenesses break up; go bitty. Rattle around.
Fake Up
I am happy in the bedroom but…..
What about sometimes when we are out together? What about when we are sitting at the table, say? Or sitting down together somewhere not at the table?…
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She always had to run to school. Run fast. If she didn’t wake by 4 am, it meant that she got behind on her chores, of which there were many for a girl of thirteen, and then she had to run. She would get up and put on a pot of water for the tea and porridge. Then she would run a short bath for herself—this was her favourite part of the morning routine because the cold water woke her up – and then she would get her mother out of bed and into her wheelchair.
The girl would take her mother to the bathroom and help her to relieve herself, bathe, and dress. They would finally return to the kitchen where the huge pot was now boiling, making the window above the stove steam up, obscuring the brightening world outside.…
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to get to the waterfall
you must go straight up
to go beyond you must
take the trail beside it
there is canopy everywhere
and a rush of noise
to guide you
south are trails
to the interstate
and to the abandoned
bridges that cross them
beyond that the trail
flattens out i hear. i do not know.
i’ve never been
and no one who goes that way returns
the things we miss
we will miss forever
– J.E. O’Leary…
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In the weeks following the B-cell, non-Hodgkins Lymphoma diagnosis, Mom sat up in the adjustable hospital bed, lucid, and chipper. Except on shower days. She was distraught about contending with her freshly permed hair. Beside herself on how unnatural kinks following a shower and shampoo would spoil her look.
“I should have my hair straight like yours. It would be much easier to take care of.” You did not just say that. After all those humiliating home perms you inflicted on me? After a lifetime of imitating your burden of having splendidly coiffed hair? Obsessing over split-ends, cowlicks, curl flattening humidity, chemically over-processed frizz, butchered cuts, and mismatched dyes from color blind stylists?
I dried her hair and shaped it with the curling iron, watching out so I didn’t brand her neck or singe my fingers.…
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