reclaiming the hill

we are going to walk and re-walk
this hill in frayed sneakers

until our soles and fingerprints
mark the pavement leading down
to the condemned bridge

so that when i move away
and they knock it down

you will remember our hands
on sweating thermoses of beer
and each other

instead of the longboard accident.

You will remember the narrow shoulders
of the bridge, how once
we could walk all the way across.

Words There Are No Words For Yet

The feeling of expectancy
Of a stair at the top of the staircase
Or the bottom,
The tiny seizure of knees and ankles
And psychic disturbance that follows:
Imsjunction.

The swelling rise and fall of the bladder
On rollercoasters or
In love:
Vesiphoria.

Teeth tight in the front
Of the mouth,
Is a borrowed term,
With this extra meaning tacked on:
Equivocal.

shit i found

In their apartments:
Thich Nhat Hanh and
Fall On Your Knees.
Tibetan Book of the Dead.
The anole in the freezer.
Xbox and ex-box (photos,
old gifts, junk).

A postcard from Mandela's
prison cell. Instructions
for how to make a bomb.
Goldfish in bowls. Knife.
Pilsner flag
from a beer box.

In their beds:
Beer box. Gravel.
Ticks. Small dog.
My earrings. Playstation
portable. Pencil leads.
Lost bra. Cat. Remains
of lost bra. The needles
used to pierce ears,
and a skin rash.

date interview

What's the most illegal thing
you've ever done?

Did you ever date E.?
Really? She showed me
pictures of you.

Are you nervous right now? I'm not
nervous.

Really?
What's your ethnic
background?

Are you blushing?

Are you that kind of person?
Would you have left because I
was late?

Do you think I'm an alcoholic?

Why are you even interested in me,
anyway?

list #2

I wish I was a poet.

We are going to tear up this city
and the Ganges. I am high
on your beautiful mouth.

Where are you from? It sounds
a lot like home.

Your guts are all over the floor.

I just had my first. It was great;
she was in and out.

I'm not just a story.

I'm glad I'm not the only person
who's ever been in love like that.

You were robbed. I feel ambushed.
I've only ever heard you read
love poetry.

Your last one, killing me softly.

list #1

Angry e-mails.
Hugs. Kissing.
A gasp, once.
Questions about the truth.
About home.
Hookah and crepes.
Joints and cigars, handshakes.
Fifty-five dollars in cash.
Butterfly kisses and more
angry text messages.
Kahlua shots.
An audition.
Wildflowers and rye.

Today

You stop to help me push my car
Out of the intersection at Clarence and 8th
Where it has broken down in the left turn lane.
Leveraging with hips and shoulders,
I can feel myself,
One year ago,
In some parlour game,
Blindfolded, on your lap,
And you are rubbing my back
Like a stranger.
We have just met
Again.

Yardage

Ask me for signage or language
And I will give you more.
I will give you verbage,
And, for the hell of it,
Adverbage, nounage and adjectiveage,
and garbage.
I will write blunt synopses for the TV guide:
"Everyone Leaves" or "They Don't Get Back Together,
Even Though You Thought They Would."
I will spoil the ending.

Space and Time

No tesseract, please,
No higher planes of being or geometry.
Just give me time,
Just give me space.

cervical slam redux

Because of a vaccine I can't afford and don't trust yet,
my fear of waiting rooms and mono swabs,
chest rattles and skin rashes, a city that won't talk
while it silently breaks out in hives and track marks, because for
all my rainbow flags I'm still afraid to tell the doctor,
we rustle elbows with the viral infections and wait for Pap smears
like we're on a date. Taking deep breaths like a couple
in a prenatal class while we inhale everyone else's pneumonia
and fear so I can hear someone tell me I don't have HPV....or cancer.
And this is how I know you love me: because you wait.
Because your face turned white in the car on the way downtown when
I told you I'm sure I'm clean, unless my ex really did cheat on me with that guy who
had herpes, and/or this time it isn't just a bladder infection.
But we're both sure I'm fine, and we're both lying. I am knee-deep in denial
like I'm wading to the shore of a city that isn't the chlamydia capital of the Canada.
I am so busy counting everything that's been inside of me since my last check-up --
tampons, ex-girlfriend, diva cup, ex-girlfriend, yeast infection, ex-girlfriend -- that I
don't even hear the doctor call my name.
This is how you prepare. Count the hands and mouths that have neared you like a
rosary. Put on your favourite dress and mascara because this should not but could
make you feel ugly. Take deep breaths. Practice saying "vagina" in the mirror until
you stop blushing. Remember that what feels red and fragile is muscle tissue strong
enough to birth watermelons even if you never, ever want to think about it. This is
how you prepare.
Now, you might wonder what's the big deal about lying back to stirrup your feet
while they do a little basement inspection, a little undercover investigation. What's
the big deal about unfolding yourself like a map you still can't quite read with names
you can't quite pronounce, where you don't let your lovers go with the lights on.
This is a big deal because I was eighteen and it was a first time like every bad movie
and Judy Blume novel:
Me: ouch and she: sorry until she: oh god and can I go get another doctor? who's like "Hide and go cervix?" and "oh look, you're retroverted," and I'm like "Oh hi, I'm Leah."
This is a big deal because I rolled up to the clinic determined to be a responsible user of my uterus and she's like "Lesbian?" and I'm like "Yeah" and she's like "Well, I can try....if you really want. " Like I really want a Pap smear. Like I'm sewn up. As if lesbian meant eunuch, as if all we really do is hold hands.
And I'm like "HIV?" and she laughs
And I'm like "Tattoos, piercings, dirty needles," and she's like "Pssssh,"
And I'm like "Hep C" and she's like "Nah"
This is a big deal. Now who do I have to blow to get a Pap smear around here?
This is how I know you love me: because you listen to me cry about health care as if my dog just died. Because you frog march me up all three flights of stairs to the clinic downtown.
Because this time, the doctor offers to hold my hand. Lets me skip the paper gown and keep my dress on. She says I have a pretty little cervix, and it's actually just off to the left. Two things I've never heard before. She tells me to go buy myself a Slurpee. But I smell like a hospital and there's cheap lube leaking out into my underwear when I walk (Wear your good underwear, the ones you reserve for first or third dates, or the doctor).
This is how you recover: go home and sweat in the bath until your apartment smells like an orange grove. Pretend nothing has ever reached inside you. Sweat until you get your results back. Sweat until we can get this without fighting, without a waiting room full of tears, without second thoughts. I don't want second chances for HPV or cancer. I want some results.

White Noise

He will be
The negative space in the prints
On her dresses.

When she pauses to breathe,
His ghost is passing through.

five birds

She wanted five birds,
but the last one would nest
in her elbow and hurt too much.

She has a spray of leaves hidden
beneath her arm, blighted
from bad ink.

She uses a poem as a garter,
holster for thought-stockings.

She hides her name on her wrist,
our forearms the last frontier
of canvas.

catch-up, listening to citizen cope

in ten years a girl will lend you
this cd and make you promise
to return it.

you will pad barefoot
down the hall of a third avenue apartment
to use someone else's washroom,

prop open the window with a beer bottle
and light candles for the buddha
drawn on the door.

the bed is a pirate ship and the girl
it belongs to is curled around you 
in the third-floor third avenue heat

and sweating salt. when you crawl
back into the wave of sleep,

her shoulders twitch, parrot-wings
over you.

i learned these lyrics on my bedroom
floor at ten to murmur them now,
return them.

Bicycle Perverts

I like to watch people on their bicycles
At intersections, when starting:
Mounting pedals, standing, pumping,
Asscheeks roll over steady slinking hips
Like haunches.

I like to watch people on their bicycles
Along trails:
Short shorts and spandex, riding
up into crevices and curves,
Camel toes and soldiers at attention,
Squeezing, leather between their legs.

I like to watch people on their bicycles
In disrepair:
Cyclists, spines in cat-arches,
Heads bowed down, enormous quadriceps open,
Pretzels looking for problems in their
Chains, derailleurs.

Watching the spectacle of bodies on bikes--
Not machines of mobility but strange sex apparatuses--
Staring out car windows, on the decks at pubs.
They wonder if I am the man who calls into the talk radio station,
Says, “What's bothering me? Bikes.”
“I know, right?”
“Are they cars or are they pedestrians? Just decide!”
But I am the third voice on the line,
Breathing heavy.

Memory Foam

You told me when you left me your bed to be careful how I slept: "it's memory foam."

Sleep alone, on the left side of the bed.
Sleep on your back.
Memory foam learns while you are unconscious to better and better create the perfect sleeping experience for you! Memory foam is a sentient being. Memory foam knows how to treat you right. Memory foam is like your first lover. Memory foam is like the first time you tasted a vodka cooler. Memory foam is like moon shoes for your whole body. Memory foam is like an Indian guru you will follow for 7 years in hopes he will perform a miracle for you, simply touch you.
Memory foam is polyurethane, no springs like other mattresses. It will mold to a warm body, become your shell if you fancy yourself a homeless crustacean. Memory foam was invented by NASA after years of studying astronaut sleep and the effects of LSD. It is the number one most effective preventative measure against gangrene. It is the number one most effective and inventive pleasure against my flesh. Memory foam defies the laws of science. Memory foam is witchcraft especially for your vertebral column.

The first time I slept on your memory foam mattress, I fell into a deep depression and could not leave your bed for months. This bed has become so used to one body that long after you left it to me, I was left curling up in your retained grooves, restraining my own arching backbone like a cocoon. I am Jonah and your mattress is the whale. I am alone in a cave of blubber and visco-elastic.

And breaking out I slept sprawled, I tossed and turned, I invited strangers into my bed to disrupt the exacting science of the memory foam. I hosted orgies, I watched television on my laptop, which burned an abyssal hole into the surface of the foam with its motor.
I did all the things no one is ever supposed to do in bed, lest they disrupt the sleep cycle: I ate full meals, I smoked, I got drunk and made art, I jumped and danced to the Talking Heads, I held a seance for the spirits of younger John Lennons and Yoko Onos, I bedded-in for peace
and quiet.
And then I raged and threw up and learned to play every Celine Dion song ever written on my ukulele. And I gave the memory foam a night to remember.

If memory foam is the number one most effective preventative measure against gangrene, it is also so comfortable that it is the least effective incentive for ever getting out of bed.

This mattress will maintain the imprints of my body for years to come, each twitch and shift and sonambulatory gesture like a psychedelic flashback.
When you come back to sleep in your bed again, you will have a body memory, an out-of-body experience, you will wear a body suit, a straight-jacket, you will have to visit a body shop, go on a body break.
You will be what they call embodied mind,
because there has been a transfer of memory from me to your mattress,
and your mattress will never let you forget it.

yellowquill

Reserve or reservation
I don't want to make
this explanation

This is how I know I am speaking

i trip over words,
say things i don't know if i mean
for argument's sake:
these things must come from somewhere
and if i sound hesitant
it's probably because i am
if i sounded sure
how could i be sure i wasn't
regurgitating?

You are so good

You are so good
To each other,
If you were gold prospectors
In the Yukon,
You would build an ours,
Not a mine.

what's in a name

You sir, your job
has changed continents.

Faced with the misplaced masses
of Europe, our suitcases full of
candlesticks and cholera, our seasickness
and the smell of Old World
disaster, you

counted us like the sheep we were
until you rested your head on our
yellowed maps, dreamed of the Balkans,
borders redrawn, snow like you've never
sunk foot in and hunger your family hadn't known
for generations. The sheep we were flocking to

New York, Boston, Halifax, Montreal

our heads counted like livestock when really,
we were moths fluttering papered wings
against the lantern of a new country
that promised, this time, they wouldn't burn us.

I am the first of a second generation
of women in my family to be literate
in a language that someone remembers
how to write.

You, sir, you named me.
My family's passport into this country
was a number tattoo and an X, and faced
with an unpronounceable name

you have changed me.

In my great-grandfather's tangle
of consonants, palatalized,
something that would have been written
in Cyrillic if he had spoken Russian, if he
had a passport, if they hadn't burnt down
our leaf-heavy family trees with the synagogue,

in the sound that was my name you pulled out
something you could recognize, a family
that was someone else's, maybe your friends,
a sound that would make us a home.

And so named after hot malted drink used
as a sleeping aid in most of the former British Empire,
we go bravely into this continent as
Horlicks:  "The food drink of the night!"

Look up my name on Wikipedia
and you find that it can be used as a
synonym for bollocks. Or a verb:
"To make a complete disaster of something."

Or, for a child, how to give your daughter
an expansive and colourful vocabulary
before the age of six when I learn how
to answer to

whore, and spell my name without the W.

You sir, you made my family
a new home, a fake name, a heritage.

Three generations later, you make me
an activist for sex worker's rights
because if I had a dime for every time
I was called whore

for this name, this skirt, this pair
of boots, this walk home alone

I would be rich.
I would pay my family's way here
six times over.

My passport into this country was an X.
You sir, have left your mark.

unbirthday

The best birthday gift I can give
this year is forgetting, for

the old roommate whose parents
chose his day for the divorce,

for the coworker who is brought to
tears at the thought of 31.

I will smile like I've forgotten how
to count, like I've renounced calendars.
I will try harder not to remind you. 

Other Peoples' Houses

When I clean your house
I count every stain I have made:
the waxy iron melt on the upstairs carpet,
cat piss and
vomit,
salsa behind the oven,
white film in the refrigerator,
a gouge on your dining room hardwood,
faded blood on your son's mattress,
gummy build up of dust and soap scum
in the corners of the shower.

I have marked my passing in your house
in splintered glass and toenails,
leaving the oils from my palms on your walls.
You will not know that I lived here
while you were gone,
only that someone did.

manarchist

He tells me he was burning
bras before I was even born.

(Just so he could get to second base
with the foremothers, I'm sure).

Older

I give a great deal of thought
to how my hair will thin as I age.
What will I do with all these dead parts of me?
Tie them up and carry them around my head.

Girls making excuses

To touch eachother:

crowded bars and bathroom trips,
smoking roaches until our fingers burn,
checking the cat for ticks,
brushing the phantom mosquitoes
off our legs.

security.

The look in your eye
when the alley-drunk
staggers towards me,

the edge in your voice
when you tell me
inside.

Last week he asked you
to show him your tits.

I was insulted,
thought you thought
I couldn't handle it,

'til you told me inside means
you don't want me
to hit him.

skeleton hug.

this hug is better than kissing you,
your ribs holding hands
with my spine.

ew.

new year's kiss is outside my apartment
throwing glitter at my landlords and smoking,
taking vodka shots from my coffee mugs,
leaving lipstick stains i will drink from tomorrow
morning.

they say she looks like me...someday

Someday, I would like
to go to a funeral
without you.

catch-up

Stop trying to be the folk musician
who drank himself to death, singing
women into the mountains.

This one will not be mused.
She has gifts: solitude
and her own songs,

two things you couldn't give her.

one week of penance starts...NOW

Tequila shots and your phone number made
the 2am walk down Portage alone seem
like a really good idea.

I'm 24 hours into love with Winnipeg,
the anarchist bookstore and the bus driver
who drove me a block in the rain for free.

All evening I've been walking, circles
around you for confidence, bootheels
leaving small crescents of rain for
questions.

On the way back to the hostel,
there's a shadow of a man on the sidewalk.
We see eachother, one block and extra few feet
of height between us.


If I cross the street, will they scrub
the sharpie-scrawl of FEMINIST
from my knuckles, call me coward?


If I cross the street, I am being prejudiced.
If I cross the street, I am tomorrow's news headline.

Half a block away, he crouches
to look at something on the ground or take the
gun or switchblade my fear has handed him
from his shoe. My lungs clutch
and stall.

Tomorrow's headline: Dyke Ignores Intuition
to Avoid Racial Profiling, Stabbed.

As I take my first shallow
step off the curb into the road, he stands. I set
my jaw square.

Eyes wary on eachother
in the light of a police cruiser,
we both cross the street.

At home, I recant the shame of crossing the street
to avoid a man. How he, too, passed me.
How I thought I had dismantled this part of my
brain so long ago.

He was a Black man.
I wore a torn skirt, my tall boots,
smear of red lipstick and soaked denim jacket.

My fear of strange men met its match
in the mirror. I looked at him and thought,
danger. He looked at me and thought, deportation.

Trapped between a whore and a cop
on the same street, he would be the one
in handcuffs.

I'm wearing my whiteness home like an umbrella
tonight, covering girl-bones and lipstick and tequila
and your phone number, shame and regret,
leaving crescents of rain down Portage,
crossing the street towards you. 

Last Catch Up

He says
He likes
Anything that makes you sweat.
Well, yes, sex,
and physical exertion in general,
but
uncomfortable first dinners,
hospitals, phone calls,
exams, too-hot summer weather,
hypothermia,
bad sex, physical labour,
fitful dreams,
habanero peppers,
fever?

Inverted

In this city, the underground scene
is actually underground, and its locus
is a bar, connected and themed by tunnels and mud.
Two childhood sweethearts run it,
and each cocktail is named after a dinosaur.

He is tall and has
a thick scar across
his left eye, from a broken razor blade.
She is short and wears
pockmarks on her skin and
polka dots on her dresses.

It is last call and she will
walk home along the same
route as a major natural gas pipeline.
She has given a fake phone number
to a man at the bar,
but wishes she had given him
the real one.

On Sunday, she mows this drunk's lawn,
severs the roots from weeds
and leaves before he comes home.
He is sobered when he sees it
and never returns to her bar.

She is happier in the tunnels,
has given up both fresh air and smog,
marching bands, mathematics,
pan-handlers, government funding,
and this underground system of tunnels
make her better at navigating the internet.
Under Chinatown, she sees the city
not in nostalgia,
but inverted.

Superstitious

Everything that has
Happened, happened
Because I whistle indoors,
Spill salt shakers:
Salt the earth,
Spoil the seeds,
Curse myself.

Superstition manifests in the body,
Wrecking its guilt in
Ulcers, cancers (mine, and others'--
In this case, my mother's),
Nausea, sun stroke,
Sinking feelings, migraines,
Knees not as beautiful as other girls',
Bad teeth, dryness of the lips and feet,
Indigestion.

I have worn another woman's wedding ring,
Sat at the corners of tables,
Picked up unlucky pennies with holes in them,
Faked sick,
Forgotten to brush my teeth,
Intentionally left the phone to ring,
Driven a car to work,
Eaten fast food in public,
Shaken hands with men.
Each superstitious sin is a
symptom.

What is a print?

This is not a print.
This is made with a printer.
A print is made by a print-maker,
With rollers and fingers and inks and glues.
Ink for making prints is made of
Tiny particles of grease
that stick under
fingernails.
That is
also a
print.

Stranger Song

No song is stranger
Than the song of cars.

On highways,
It is the song of air
In ears and lungs:
A dry whistle.

Here, cars hug the boulevard curbs,
Watch while I grind handles and side-view mirrors,
Scratch new coats of paint with my pedals.
Strangers pass like steel spectres
In the city.

True story

She tells me
She has ennui
But
She really has the flu.

(I qualified for the semi-finals! A draft snippet of a slam-to-be.)

I just wanted to buy some worms.
I was tired, I was feeding a houseful
of hungry lizards, and I drove all the way
into the North End cuz I was trying not
to shop at Petland.


And while I was deciding between
frozen or live bloodworms and reading
nutritional information for lizards, I hear
three things:

the chime above the exotic-pet-store-door,
the scream of the parrot behind the counter,
and a woman telling a story
about a sick relative, one of those stories
no-one really wants to hear when you ask someone
how they are but you don't know how to say
you don't care, so you listen.

And I hear her say,
"I tell my kids, I tell 'em when I'm in the hospital,
I don't want no goddamn Indian nurses coming
anywhere near me. They can go back to the goddamn
Phillippines. That's what I tell them."

And when I stick my head out from the bloodworm aisle
to ask if these come in packages of twelve at Petland,
where I'll be taking my business so I don't have to listen
to someone's racist tirade, before I even open my mouth,
she stops talking.



And it takes me a second to realize she has shut up
not because she's ashamed of being overheard or
annoyed that I'm eavesdropping. It takes me a second
to realize that she is staring at me, and she sees

my nose ring. And my dark hair, long like it usta be
and my lazy-girl's unibrow and my skin like it gets in
August when I have been too cheap to buy sunscreen.

(to be continued. . .)

(Yesterday's)

In the summer
The ambient noise on Broadway is
Kiss of beer bottles in backpacks

catechism date #2

confession:
you call in sick to work
to stay in bed with me.

sacrament:
you work in a christian bookstore.
and it's lent.

catechism date #1

when i say "jesus!" you say,
"what about him?"

for you i will beatify
a few new exclamations,

for you i will rethink
those rosaries.

I had ideas for things we could do together IV (last one)

If I read your favourite books
By the river you would stop for me.
Weren't you by the river those days?

I think the reason I haven't found you
In the neighborhood where we both live is
That I am moving too quickly.
My bicycle wheels turn too fast,
Pedestrian legs wind pavement.
If I moved more slowly,
I would stay in one place long enough to
See you pass it.
If I stood still,
Like a pinhole camera on a long exposure,
Would I capture you?
I will be a beetle on the sidewalk waiting.

If 2

If it makes you feel any better,
in two weeks this whole alley
will light up red from the sun


settling in the telephone poles,
peering in the windows
of the apartment block.

I had ideas for things we could do together III

I grew sprouts from lentils
In a mason jar.
They tangled together and expanded until
I had sprouted a mold
Of the space inside the jar, and
I had to smash it to keep this
perfect form intact.
I will bring you this shape,
and hemp hearts, and pub ale.

If.

If I drive past your used-to-be-my house
enough times

memorize what used-to-be-my furniture
in your new configurations

I will remember I own nothing
and forget.

I had ideas for things we could do together II

The first time we sleep
In the same bed,
We are not sleeping together
But waking up together.
While you are asleep I am going to
braid your hair together with mine.

I had ideas for things we could do together

There is a game where I
try to stumble you home without knowing
where your apartment is.
Meanwhile,
You are trying to walk me home,
Which is a conflict of interest.
Whoever successfully walks
the other home first wins.

hooked on phonics.

at the end i'll be called to account
for every word i have re-molded
on the press of my tongue.

the animal who chases the roadrunner
and calls to your dogs in the sound
of a nightbird:
kai-oot.

the past perfect of carrying women
off by their hair or heaving yourself out
of bed in the morning was the word
for poppy dust and needling elbows.

(dragged is for queens. this word was drug.)

for the retractable r's in
feb-you-ary
lie-barry, i learned to think
like a brewery, like rarity -
february, library.

saints are piercing their lips here
to re-lisp their way through the gates

the parabled way into heaven:
the narrow eye of a needle,
a holy breath through the gap
in your teeth.

Double

In a text message
I tell you I feel
gilty, and
I think you can identify.
Our anatomies are mirror images;
plated with precious metals,
hamstrings strung, fingers stinging
with paperthin goldleaf,
you drawn out like
a funhouse doppelganger.
Gilted, silver particulate accumulates,
settles in our lungs.
I can identify it only
in x-rays and mirrors.

another june, another blog! it begins!

(in retrospect i will regret this conversation, except for the parts where you told me she lied) 
 ---
in the alley i bring you a handful
of the tiny bones in my ear, thrumming
with sweat from dancing,

sink my feet into a memory of rainfall
on the roof of your solarium
(a word for a roomful of sun
where we only ever sat for storm-watching).

in this story there are werewolf movies,
a well-collared shirt, the red river valley
and banjo strings pulled taut against a dry night,

the time you taught me to play the jaw-harp,
your mouth against metal against mine,
spools of wire and our teeth.

(why would i keep this story from you
when you have already heard my every breath
through your bedroom door?)

we speak the fragile rhyming
of two women in love with the same
person or country, names changed and maps
rekindled for new borders.

when we touch each other we are bridges
from the same burnt place,
somewhere we haven't quite left yet,

i know,
because your arm around my waist
is reaching past me.