Fender

Last night in my dreams I revisited my unearthly city.

Things were getting active, a thin carnival air afloat like a banner between the college and the station.

Busy congregants, rainbow flags, milling and dispersing, froth drawn in lattes. 

Long-haired white boy with a battered Jag, southpaw girl in black, fingerpicking. Some unruffled breed of left coast mood.

A few blocks west, in the heart of the old city, place is older than the pope—leaden roofs, water spots on the ceilings, stone and brick facades begrimed, soot and mildew conspiracies lined up to dare to undermine us.

Forever betrayed by AWOL landlords.

Christ. We stopped in the road before we got here, stock still in a surge of brown sludge while we blinked and tuned our instruments. A cloud of wasps swirled overhead until they selected leniency. Moved on. We both did, all did. Found our niche, learned our secret selves, cried witless sidewinder love amid indica dreams, released livewire doves above a field of cranes, serial killers, statistical umbrellas, effluent, cupping in our stigmatic palms our entire reassembled DNA. 

"I love you, material girl."

"You total sap, ethereal boy."

Make a well with your hands and hold the liquid sun. Dispense its dewy gold in ways you see fit. I will swallow what you offer, nod when you make demands, bow to you. To it. You are my receptacle, and I am now your spout; clasp this sacrifice and erase all doubt. That which unfolds within is doubled without. It's lucid, doxxed, subservient, a shaky route running beside the oxen, battling chromosomes, rewriting countless pages, horns… flippant, ardent, genetic, recurrent. 

The library in Swift Current. Remember that? A late Saskatchewan afternoon in fall. The sun dipping low, no phone, no laptop, a need to communicate. Our poet of the prairies gone, will anyone remember this if I forget to draft it?

He killed the living fuck out of himself, didn't he? Long before discarding him, I envied him.

But yes. Things got tense, went south-southwest. We found a cabin deep in the trees, a dubious escape hatch. You laughed when I said I'd keep us warm, but I kept us warm, foraging for kindling, sparking a flint, building a fire from twig to branch to trunk. The bullet in your midriff worked its way inside, and however much you tried to laugh, I saw the panic in your eyes, the blunt and obtuse dimming of your light. 

Without you, I am nothing. Don't die. Please don't die.

You died.

Love and disappointment, fond planetary light and its chill shadow, will stalk us to our last reluctant breaths.

I swept the parchment monarchs and the fallen hummingbirds, built of them the driest pyre. Alone, I found the edges of my city once again. Staggered into an urban patch, a battalion of grime, a place where grunge once thrived that now approximated ruined, tearless hives. Designated merciless, a spice-bound nest. What and where are you? By whom are you condemned or damned or blessed? The place you lived has been abandoned, echoless, and always I must clarify your plans and glean your schemes, and come at last to rest. 

Headwaters

A story in a single sentence:

Shaky after two days' release from the psych ward, she wants to "put it all behind her," as the genial yet guarded advice had gone, so she takes the Skytrain to go ask about rental costs at a nearby Enterprise office whose bleak geometry squats in a grim patch of stilted highways, loose rubble, and territorial chain link somewhere near where Vancouver borders Burnaby, but she gets cold feet at Renfrew Station, turns around and scurries back to the library near her home on East Pender, where she searches Google Maps and decides Swift Current is the loveliest place name she's ever heard, especially in contrast to that of its province, which is all brittle stalks and wheat sheaf angles (Sask-atch-ew-an), and wants to visit for that reason alone—Swift Current, that is; a name that evokes homecoming sockeye vigorous and sleek as distance runners' quadriceps—although the furthest she's ever driven was Vancouver to Hope, ironically when she'd been at her least hopeful, and even then she'd had a tire blow somewhere near Yarrow, nearly killing her, and the towtruck and repair costs had been so high she'd had to turn back, out by many dollars and by even more self-worth, given all her struggles with what some might call mental health issues yet she chooses to term emotional difficulties, since the former still contains a tiny jab of stigma, and dammit, it's hardly her fault, given her early life with Uncle Giorgio and then those grey-stuccoed group homes and weary, spiteful foster parents, let alone the haunted jaundiced nightscape of the Downtown Eastside and her disaster-recipe life with Gunther, he of the one-part lavish confectionary largesse and two-parts savage fists, but she is free now, aside from the medication she needs to remember, while something about Swift Current calls and calls like babbling headwaters to a downstream eddy, urging her to spawn, to take this step that might mark a new chapter in a thus-far chiefly sorrowful tale, one charged with the possibility of something other than grim nights shivering with cold or dread and warmer nights sleepless with mosquitoes or regret, so she finds somewhere online that calculates the cost of gasoline, which comes to a little over a couple hundred bucks for the three thousand kilometre round trip, and she feels a heartsurge of joy until she sees the carbon footprint she'll be leaving—one thousand three hundred and fifty pounds, to be exact—which sounds so appalling she immediately scratches out this new life at its source—indeed, guilt and eroded morale have long perfected her inner Scratch 'n Lose—erasing the evocative names of Shuswap and Salmon Arm, Golden and Banff, Dead Man's Flats and Medicine Hat from a future that might have held something other than the pitiless tidal ebb of try then turn back, try then turn back, the balance of which has always seemed impossibly, monstrously weighted.