But First, which is a preamble to last year's June 29th

First you need to understand
how we all sat.
That we have chosen this,
legs-crossed,
Starbucks,
Birkenstocks in socks,
Chucks;
to click through slides
as if they were your family pictures
as if they were an album
that is always about sex and death
and paint and canon
and Canada.

So we have chosen
Emily Carr and paid
the requisite fees
to look at paintings of
disappearing savages and gape-trees
holes hollowed out like
we know the answer
and yet it is
always about canon and Canada
and never about sex.

If we wanted to set a precedent,
we could choose one.
For example, at the Farmer's
Market one morning,
I saw a woman set a dangerous
precedent like a hangnail,
loading a Lada with cabbage
(which is not a euphemism)
filled up like a fload,
but not floating,
because the cabbages were
like blunt objects.
They settled on each other
leafily and
stuck in
the way that cabbages stick
to other cabbages
(this is not a euphemism, either).

Unloading the unfloating
cabbages,
from bottom to top,
this woman set her stall
spilling cabbages,
still sticking onto sidewalks.
So if you're silent once
things have a tendency to
slip or spill over.

Maybe that doesn't make sense
since it's
hard to apply the cabbage story
to an academic setting,
so you need to know
that we applied to grad school
and are ready to box up our books.

Second you need to know that that
burned out hole was a cunt
and no one said it.
But first you needed to know how we sat.