K:

So much space and no space at all between us
Some days I am dogs howling alone in a pound
some days: yogurt speaking to itself across the planet

E:

Some days I am a machine, cortex a bright apple
(CAPSLOCK SHOUTING WATER FROM THE LONELY BEIGE SPOUT)
Freak, my heart a fresh tomato paste 
eager in scope
(command V needs C, backspace, backspace delete, delete)
I was this and now I’m what?

Tired of the act of translating, of talk
(press the home button hard to reset)

K:

Anyone else a deep sea crevice I can’t get into if I tried.
Please direct my mail to this fluid acre, where I’m cutting and glueing sonar read-outs.

K:

Occasional traffic. Chainsaw a few blocks over. My son’s tantrum on the porch over… what was it?
He echoes down the block, down the expanse of river.
Churchbells in Maine, trucks on the highway. So different from what you hear there. 

E:
Saw a Dildo on the ground of an empty amphitheater at Jean-Drapeau.
Also, a little white footbridge.

E:

I go on the Old Port Ferris wheel
alone where I binge watch
my mental health 
plan easily
in the social muscle
media pain:

https://santemontreal.qc.ca/en/public/

coronavirus-covid-19/testing-covid-19-in-montreal/#c41493 

                                  so how will things now? 

K:

timezones:our Oh no, your Oh no. 
There, when people returned to public 
like dandelions; here, where everyone stayed home anyways. 

Like Yesterday, but with questions.
Heard that snakes stay low for contact with vibration.
How the balance was balanced.
But I mean, nothing was balanced– as always 
there’s only how it is and what comes next

Montreal during this wild time.
How we compromise while also. 

My son cries and hides behind me in ‘crowds’ of more than 5.
Here it’s grown and strange and sad but so many ringers I don’t know.

So much. Anyways. Oh boy. In the end, I mostly feel 
repetition– habit.
Articulated to asleep and missed lives, layover. 

I have this time. 

People,-strange, visible and delicate. 

Able to pandemic. 

What of life do you want?
Open-hearted. Almost. 

Freakiness of crowds. 
Freakiness of damage, 

all that plus Life.  

You there?

You want?

  E:

Which is the lightbulb that most mirrors natural light?
There are so many copies of me. 

You ok? 

K:

Yup. Glad your face is feeling better.
My battery is about to die here FYI, in case you get no response from me.

E:

Oh yes yes yes. 
If you wanna talk about it, I’m here.
Mail you treats, teleport.
Beer.
How did the first day of grade 1 go?

K:

Everyone’s in to-do list land
doing dishes, weather.
All fine, long days.
Looking for openings.

E:

September energyyyy baby.
I am egg brain but it’s ok.
Desire to move, scramble, treadmill, foot. 

K:

how to turn the dial of me to catch the openings
sometimes it’s not there -
for a long time it’s not - 
the door 
that was there
before, 
the way we pass between lives
from mine into yours 

oh the waiting hurts
worse than birth 
because what opened sometimes never does again

but then, light as a finch on march branches, 
faces open

for a moment there oh
all this shifting lined up
just enough - 
sun prisms through it

_

more often it’s just a trip to the corner store of death and back.

E:

Love, a raft, or winter 2022 and there is 
a hole at Lafontaine next to the dog park. It is wide as your hand 
and deep as a takeout container. I put my black boot in the hole. 
You put your beige one on top. I whisper: “I am keeping. I am keeping.”

We do this because it’s funny. It’s good to laugh,
and we take the tattooed throat alleys back to our home.

It is winter but we are not dead.

first lockdown or Spring 2020 -I talked
back and forth
with my family
on a green landline and at night,
 I shoved my face into his armpit,
making myself into the smallest little cavewoman. 

The snow was keeping me up.

It was  thawing  in drips. 

Roseart was a small red briefcase we found in the garbage, and when I was 8 I promised to dedicate my short stories to Marielle. We would spend afternoons looking for clues in our neighbourhood.
They could be gum wrappers, pieces of women’s faces from torn up magazines, rocks or old grocery lists, labels. 

I drink beer in a park in the most infected city in Canada (I can’t believe Spring came) with the switched off fountain while she cues up end of life calls for work-priests on iPads.
 I just want this to be over and I don’t want them to be alone. 
So she runs and runs and runs
and runs.

Phone Conversation on our parents’ landlines when we were 8: 

We’d call each other (Hello? Hello?) and whisper (Roseart, Meet in the Streets!)
The fate of the world as we knew it depended on this game. On the rock down the street (Sammy), we’d
hold scraps in our too little hands, 
deciding.

K:

Hello? 

                                            Hello?

New province of the human condition, for me, this loneliness. A deficiency so normal.
Before this, back then, what I needed was quiet. 
To step from everything into the hallway of myself
where the shadowy, very real shape of me would re-congeal.

Waiting for a monk’s revelation (hallelu!) and it’s not coming
because what I really know, now,
is how we build each other, handfuls of lake mud slapped– self a pile.

(“Yahhh, jellybellies like yourself would say that. Us monks and real grown-ups
do change stuff all the time. Change for breakfast. Personal best by mid-morning.”)

Ah well.

Now I know that self, the pre-this 
shape I could bet on, 
was bicycle powered behind the scenes– 
One foot trying; the other, 

Other people.

 BOTH:

Something in the background
 hums, “Zumble On,” so you put

one kid foot carefully in front,
and in small shorts, you carry the plank

 thin as a dinner plate, across 
your shoulders. Failing-not even halfway 

up the dirt hill, your shirt is wrecked
But your naked head is clean.

K:
I went to eat some pasta 
out of the pot and now my Internet is cutting out. 

E:
No worries!

K:

May I recommend a broken mic?
Then it’s just a nice face talking about something or other.
Geez, it’s nice to see strangers doing stuff, especially art.
I miss that. 

E:

I need that! Once a week at least or diamond gets stuck in my throat. 

Interested, interesting.

K:

Gotta keep trackin’
Watching videos of people flipping around.
Circus biz. 

E: 
Texts from my phone: 

INTERNET people
over the weekend
Can you help me set 
up the new I N TE R N E T 
thing and play games 
against people like Yahtzee
and Chess. Oh no our
I N T E R N E T is stopped, 
we gotta pay. Gobbledygook.
Someone will take a picture
and shame you.
Dicey cutting brain. 

Assembled from headlines in my inbox:

Feminist Culture as Pediatric Fall Programming
Fight, Flight and the Paradox of Desire Constellating
Rilke On Sex, Death and Existence, Dickinson on Botany and Nipple Pads
Call the MidWife Holiday Special, Woman of the Week: Kim Karsdashian
Nathaniel Hawthorne On What Fills the Interlude
New Music From Independent Woman Artist
No Black Women in The Senate At All
The Woman Searching for a New Universe: Impress Your Loved Ones
Love, Money and 10 Destinations Every Woman Should Travel To 

Woman of the Week: 

K:

Saw some trees that looked different yesterday.
Thought it was a species new to me,
turns out it was disease, little mouths gaping
all through the trunk, until the tree falls
from all that speech, too many mouths to feed.

hmm a giant stink flower I saw once in Malaysia comes to mind.
It was magnificent, 5ft diameter,
but now my heart rate is wobbling up, imagining a planet
covered in stink flowers, red freckles and oozing centers 
opening, opening, humans having to squeeze between overlapping 
purple petals,
underneath which giant snakes flow.

K:

“I don’t want a lawn, I want a meadow.” 

Dreamed I made a mistake at work.
A crowd swarmed, they were saying, ‘slash her face’.

Early spring birdsong 
bashing open buds

What pushes things, in the end, 
into what’s next 

Light encroaching.
Dodgeball line has been moved.

Yesterday, winter. This morning, flowers
and I don’t even care. Seen flowers before. 
I forget them in a pocket.

How the worst thing is sometimes or usually
what gets the party started. 

No right way to smash a retaining wall.

Yeah but the way it comes down
leaves scars
more to fix 
(desk is piling).

I do believe in fireweed and all that comes after
and I know volcanoes blow because they have to.

Thinking of nurses at war lines
as bodies fell, all just bodies in the end, not enough 
hands to fix.

Also how those nurses healed the hands that went back out to shoot.

Repair: is that childish? 
As in feminine? Yes sometimes the body has to be 
torn open,
but no stitches, no nursing -- just bodies left on tables....

Birds singing in the near dark
life propelling without reason
can’t help it.

Midday, a spruce grouse no bigger than a cantaloupe
chased me down a trail.
Feeling of her feathers between my ankles – 
she was so angry at my orange shoe laces
and I was desperate to get away, afraid of crushing her,
afraid of her tiny beak and all the life she’d sustained with it –
mostly afraid of the anger.

E:

“Am I cruel? And aren’t you? And what would happen if you looked at it?”
 

                   I hold my eye in place, edges, arches, about how I promised
to keep rocks in my shoes.“No more carnage, ok?” From this high chair I can’t hear anger.
Juice running down the bib, it’s not fair. “So what are the things that are good to do?”
There’s this trap door. Nurses, it’s all fell bodies. Mostly, in the end, there’s not enough hands.

Mostly.

Sometimes you need to say it cleanly and without birds. 

 BOTH: 

Sensis4ever in the logic, training for difference: start again. 
At the table tracking and who is buddy out here? 


Reaching properly, and How? The personal split and tracking. 
Scratches at something, it’s personal.


What if you are starving and you can’t wait in line or be polite?
The hose dripping.

K:

It’ll all be ok.
So much joy and weird.
Scooped out from the weekend,
failllingggg. 

E:

A rough patch and tunnel.
Like some fucked shit and some good.
Embodied memory and fear.

I just don’t want to be living in a way
where I’m a secretary and I don’t speak.

K:

Only doing positiiveeeeee and the uterus.

E: 

Troublesome equipment.

K:

Ugh, being woman. 

E:

Matrix glitch, it is never clean.
“I’ll have six wives and they will carry my six sons.”
A total drunk joke but still.
And I want to keep building in this certain way. 

Then on that scaffolding. 

E:

Dreams I:
In the dream I am not myself but an eleven-year-old girl in a white nightgown.
I drive a red car out of town and get older as I drive. 
I am 30 by the time I hit the highway.
Some reenactment of a true crime show.
I knew the death was coming.

II:

Standing in front of an art exhibit with a mosaic of corny black and white peace signs, I meet two stars I saw on the Internet. They have a lion with them. We go back to the Internet stars’ place with the lion who likes me and who I am not afraid of. We are hitting it off until I go to the bathroom and decide to wear the Internet girl’s too big bra which is wedged under the sink. Mine got sweaty from the walk over. The girl notices I’m wearing her big blue bra and thinks it’s weird. It is weird. You shouldn’t wear other people’s ill-fitting bras! I go back to the bathroom to change out of it and everything on the shelves falls over. I step on one million grapes and can’t clean them up in time.
I start panicking. The Internet famous couple knocks on the door. They ask if I’m alright.

Rubric, Rubric, Rubric. X does not equal pear. Does anyone know the answer to this question?
Pizza party for the gold star class. Congratulations 98% rubric rubric. Say perfect score but with your lips closed it's funnier that way. I am safe in the cave with people who think and look like me. I have peacock feathers and a mane with clear path to mush gut. Rubric, rubric. This is too opaque, Erin, we can’t understand you. I have a dolphin's head. I have a narwhal spear. I have one wobbly soft bear paw and a single fang. Rubric, Rubric. Does anyone know? This is too opaque and we can’t-Rubric, Rubric. It’s possible I’ve swallowed too much chalk again. Two days ago, I grew mouse whiskers and a small pink nose to mark the 10th anniversary of the 100th time I said nothing when I should have said something. What does it mean to practice yourself and is that bad? Rubric, Rubric.
Mylesf but there’s mud. 

Say perfect score but with your lips closed it's funnier that way. 

III

Big party at my friend’s parents’ place. My cousin brings a stuffed giraffe with her and tells me something is wrong with it. The toy is bleeding from the mouth. She gets afraid and puts it in the freezer. Everyone at the party spends an hour joking around about toys moving in the night but I don’t find it funny. I saw the giraffe barfing. I can hear it rolling around in the freezer.
A guest chokes on his food. 

Long run, I can’t be successful because I don’t have the 7 highly effective traits.
I’m never on time. I’m too ambitious
I wear beauty like a bag of Cheetos.
Stubborn, 

I eat like a horse. 

Power suit, I cannot go out and play in July grass because I bled the tests on purpose.
I’m not afraid of doctrines. I’m too scary
I wear embarrassment like a nipple tassel.
Sorry, maybe it helps you?

I’m sorry.


Bottom line, I’m freezing because I tried to tell you that the men here are 
dying from small wounds -
diseases to the chest.
You didn’t come out on the porch. 
You didn’t bring me shoes. 
You called me crazy. 

You called the police.

“Hag, she should cover it
Up, Hag, cover it, zip and cover, makes me want to 
zip, and cover, it helps to…”

Help me Up.

Help, and either way, my feet are bricks
clanging against the tub:
MY LIFE, MY LIFE, MY LIFE. 

I am not an Emotional bank account.

Someone?

 
I’m hungry, I’m working, I’m asking.

Please.

You say the genes go as far back as 
the house is a park now.
Can you catch insanity like you do the flu? Like chicken pox? Like lice?
The carpet in my grandparents’ house was shag yellow. The beams exposed and I am the only one in my generation, and you are the only one in your generation who got this invisible
sick.

because it skips like that? Your Dad would take you, my Mom, your sisters
in a skidoo across the town’s swinging bridge,
you’d fear for your life and

at night 

I’d listen to dark 

water rushing.

I am hungry, asking
in wires and tin cans 
for a meal, cut up, and tiny.

I am rippling, a decision lion 
with gazelle body dripping
under the gums. I am fucking without shame
swinging my genius robe boy dick 
in your face, and at the head of the table.

I am hungry, asking
for permission in the horrible
net, no, or some other something-
little 

sunflower wrench.

 Cut up and tiny,
I am dreaming 
under dirt hills 
that he leaves 
me for a
 natural 
wife. 

Scales
Scraps
I
S

O
F

M

Y

S

E

L

F

I

S

O

F

M

Y

S

E

L

F

Swinging in the net. Oh, it’s hard
to know what to keep and what to kill in yourself.

IV

Purple sky and an ice highway.
One of my friends is pregnant, but she just found out.
The other one bleeds all over the cottage sheets.
There is the feeling that I want to have fun or move fast but I can’t. 

This domestic dominion is a question trap and I have microwave dinner answers and a medicated womb.
I tug, taking the case off all these feminine worth instincts-a thick glass I can’t get my fingers on because cleanliness is next to Mother Nature in linen rocking and I have blood dirt hill and not servant hands. My fate is to put my head in the casserole oven. Swaddle me. And don’t, in care, forget that I live here. I am scared of your need. I don’t want to be swallowed, blown over, or too focused on. I don’t want to die. I want to keep centering the world: a tree, others, you, myself, an apple, the sky- all citrine stones coiled in the belly of three ancient scripts.
God, Law, Man.

hurdle you dream:              “It’s beautiful.”

I dunno, I dunno…it’s

“beautiful.”

Square peg, round world, let me float. Agreeable, I was born to do more than love
even though I love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love.

Now we are at home and I see vistas growing up through our nail beds.
Fragile dominions, new.

Strange ok and sad and yellow and stone and
billowing. 

Found poem from a Tampax box
and deciding I don’t want to keep trying for a kid this year 

ABSORB
THROUGH
YOUR CYCLE
out of sight stop
leaks before they
happen leaks stop
out of mind even on
the light days even 
if not satisfied with 
your guard braid
performance that
smooth layer of 
remove then remove
and send the original
receipt back with
prepaid card scan me:

formfit 
amazing 
bleached
fatty 
cotton
limited
super
S

U

P

E

R

S

U

P

E

R

S

U

P

E

R

In the range, a leakguard, I absorb.

    
In the household, I expand

                                                                                my gentle blood,
gentle my blood,
gentle.

I’ts beafituul, I donnu, I donnu

“I am keeping, I am keeping.”

V

In a French class for Anglophones, in a kid’s room
with scratches on the wall, or possessed in a Hotel bed with doves for palms,
We hold each other.

And I wake you up.         And you wake me up.

Drooling from the work. Afraid, we salt the windowsills.
Growing in rooms we save ourselves. 

In this house every morning 
a colpmex igame taht bemoces mroe caelr
I keep myself alive.

K:

What’s the problem here?
What’s the problem and what’s the way through it?

E:

AGH, my stomach is so full.
Or is it my head? My stomach head is full. 

K:
Is there change? 

DNA of my life, What’s the thing that’s not changing?  Keeps rebuilding.

E:
Attempts.

K: 

Long cold currents,
sun flowing down in sheets. 

K:

I went in love like a bee.
Chest as wide as wheat fields.

Men go or stay with their limbs, the ache cooled
Then go eventually


Mud stomach, pain hibernation


Looking for a way the drawer of it can shut, dark water spilling.

A coagulant please

I’m doing the dishes after dinner,
Trying not to cry until my son’s asleep.
He’s playing doctor while the tub is filling.

“Let me listen to your heart: hmmmm. Yes, you’re perfectly fine.”

yes mothers are overworked and used wrongly but 
it’s beautiful, to me it’s beautiful, how they take it all in, metabolize it 

what was given wasn’t a waste,
not in the end, not if it never balances,
Balance, fairness - a low hurdle, unleavened, a bird that never flies.

What’s better than balance is flight, is life.

For a long time I was too mad to be sad.
But it tilted or collected as things do
and now the great waves of sadness
crash, set after set. Good to feel the soft
hammers of them,
eyes blinking open through bead curtains of salt. 

Sadness comes from and never leaves
the ocean of sadness. Mine, yours, 
my blood’s, this apartment.
All the ungrieved grief, cities stockpiled, 
empty fields stockpiled, forests
going through it at their own slow pace. 

Love is a clearing in a terrifying 
forest of days. Loss is when that clearing 
transforms to prison, to mirage. 

Blindside, the past arrives out of breath. Lamplit ends. I thought it would. Letting voices tell their own knees as if time folded. Trains passing, vein bushes, low to the ground. Grates, slivers of height, what’s sacred parked in the rain. The treetops after box after box then just social terrain. In the dark, load the uhaul, hungover.  Careful with the baby as the dead who died in battle. Box him away. He's disappointed. 

Frustrated, not knowing how space clears spells that bind. What would happen if I stopped. His head flops. Out the kiln wind a deep sleep with troubled dreams left for the next tenant. About the dissolving of self in a fog, a gust of time. I lay still beside something to do. Hallway jasmine scent by the back sliding. That intersection in time. Wouldn’t change your Toast. Old ocean feeling you get… ‘oh We are. oh We are.' Googling ‘how yesterday, I fell’.  It was hard and I am into sky. Softly, somehow, the walls are alive, lit with just enough. Sadness looks different than give way. He's asleep. I kiss form, set intentions. I watch the light, blinding but vague. Only clarity is years. Gather yourself and leave. The tender Not That. I flame, like one candle can. Something needed an exit. Silence of it. Uncertain blackness of the branches seeps out, black coat slick with it. Different from what you hear when it’s looped back on itself. Forehead highway and a green overpass; nothing but tomorrow, and all the falling, falling. Pressures and balances as it stands. All these days and that conversation after a long walk keep you from freezing in the blankets. The suddenly tiny, brushed Before – the cake we baked. Our son's impossibly round scraps of today were pure. Stop to be sad. Eyeballs in almost-dark, gleaming, he whispers, hoping to transfer joy in billows.

New Note turned us back at exit 69, dark water rushing,
beautiful quiet of a bobble head. Union workers, heading to want.  

Wanting to remove the top of your chairlift so we could keep reaching. 
Do you remember,  I was thaw, miracle. Or precipitation, at least.
I dunno. There’s a lot. 

This year a nightmare of endurance. We grew covered in mirrors. The words in the ground. 
A lot of shortcomings but we did some 
great explosions. But you don’t want it. 
It’s breakfast dishes pushed to the side, peel out the car window.

The river turned. You say, skip the applause, it’s red curtains singing.
straight to answering machine. 

I’m underground slivers, and graft two trees with a block of knives. I’m a whole apple to eat.
But you’ve got plants to water. 

A disco ball is just styrofoam and mirrors. 

My feet and yours on circumstance— you don’t want to shovel poured light. You want to ride back down the chair lift. 

Quiescence, Yah-vember, rarest month. Booths close for the season. Don’t leave the mouse in the time ghost.  

With you in the morning dark, moon still shines —like a cup I pick first. See solstice sun slice through rock. The baseboard heater, Christmas lights strung from what we are. From intensity, from a place of death. It was just for a minute, kept warm enough in winter. Aurora. 

How to love who’s there. Close the shutters, watch through a lengthening tube.  
Off you go. There’s a whale passing. 

Do it now. It’s ok, I’m ok.

First Christmas concert.
Earnestly he flutters the paper snowflake, tomato sauce on his red sweatshirt. 
I’m thinking about who’s gone oh look who’s back, baby jesus. No no it’s good through the good slot, the surprising what is and what will do. Is that how snails turn a packed lunch to wine?  

Oh man. These days it’s too uncomf-terful, 
circuits of distance and passing. Isn’t everyone 
trying to feel a lot lighter and steadier? Light pours out into night, 
but between people. There, then not. 

What of the world is still a long dream, where everything is in that lunch kit.

Festive local tv front row center, shortie. His life taking off,
beginning. Good is surprising eh. 
What fits me through that last turbulence. If  self is a picnic basket, 
love is what gets thrown in, blindfolded. 
But we are good. Full. I see the giant eye of what was. Oh my beautiful needs. 
Who floats, dressed for school: ‘Mama! I got just so sad.’ 

Light: we play some UNO after breakfast

K:

Had some willddd dreams last night.

E: 

Sleep medication that makes for vivid nightmares.
And after it was all towers.

K:
Felt like a wide angle lens on these last couple of years.
Subterranean. Arena sized area, tons and tons of furniture. 

E: 

Hotel/bed/room and a man with shaggy hair possessing me,
then I shot doves out of my hands.

K: 

Massive job and too much.
Cleaning out the house. 

E:

Why was there sacrifice? 

K:

Sequence of tunnels and the basement warehouse.
In the dream I wasn’t sure I agreed with the therapist woman. 

E:

Shame connected paradigm.
Both of us used different
techniques to call the creature out of me.

K:

Be doomed, faux pragmatism…something too shallow.
How do you feel this morning? 

E:

A wing in a huge home full of methods of healing.
This fucker,
my shield,

but I was
vulnerable. 

K: 

Soft spots, pain, exhaustion, etc. 

E: 

There’s something useful in it. 

K: 

External beings helping.
Knowing the edges.
Clearing the boundaries of your space.
Humans just love limits and to clamp down/get calcified. 

E:
We are strong and can do a lot together
even though it was scary. 

K: 

You’ve got your solid stone hearth :)
Gorgeous. 

E:

I’ts beafituul, I donnu, I donnu.

I’m not a Nurse, but I take care,
not as sword or soft fruit, but as snake,
sensitive and indelicate, 
feeling future under the skin. 

“I am keeping…”

In this house every morning, 
a colpmex igame taht bemoces mroe caelr 
In  winter, in drips,
I keep alive.

K:

Who am I when everyone’s gone, what am I

when I’m not what I wanted.

Turn yourself to Eye and jump

into the thousand arms of it all.

Get smaller, smallller, smaller

so you can see everything.

Nap in the flower in the middle of whatever.

Be nothing with it. Be joy for no one

in its tender, useless arms.

Find scent

forget your whole life,

shrink it to a crumb, a half sandwich

you can carry on your back as you

leap from rock to branch to sky.

Let your heavy body rest under quilts

while you slide out through the walls

to eat wild cranberry under the moon.

Waking mind can’t help

not with this or much.

Peel your socks and jump, 

soft welcoming cold water.

Be nothing other than what you are.

Floating, looking, Eye, tongue, filled with air.

E:

 it’s fragile
as egg
as soon or skin
as hallway lined with silver cold sheets
as edible red berry thawing out poison
as baby’s new nail
follicle pushing
as words (those sometimes kites)
as falling-breaking hip or face
as trying,
both: blue and tender
The days, the years,

something. 

 Pulse                                                                                                                                   Scratches made in something hard 

a sharp tool

it’s lonely and no one is solid.

 Say Unfathomable but with your lips closed. It’s funnier that way. 

 Hope this text doesn’t wake you up. 

 You there?