I am five
by Marilyn Dumont
2002*

from green girl dreams Mountains (Oolichan Books)

when the grass-needled limbs loft and
blond grass-heads move like flames
I am five and
grasshoppers clack
snapping their hot wings
near my ear and
I am five
and breathing the body smell of this place
the skin of fruit-warm cedar, while
adolescent pines wrestle the wind;
they know everything
but I am five and
don’t know that this burning inside is
loneliness

25-Cent Hugs
by Jillian Bleackley
2004

from Reflections (BFP Books)

It was always a joke between my father and I.
He would ask for 25 cents
Before he’d give me a hug.
I would say, “I’ll pay you back,”
But I never gave him a quarter.
He still gave me hugs.
This was a game we often played and in fact, still do.
I’m sixteen years old and still love the game.
I guess that’s his way of showing he cares.
I will never in my lifetime forget the 25-cent hugs
My father gives me.
I am waiting for a half off sale.

Nothing to Forgive
by Jane Byers
2017

from Acquired Community (Caitlin Press)

Home from college for the holidays
facing my parents in the living room,
I say, I’m gay—
I couldn’t bear to use the ‘L-word’
My parents respond, we love you,
but little else.

Fears unrealized.
I weep that night.

For months we talk only about
work and school, winter sports.
Much later my mother says,
It was our problem to get over, not yours.

excerpt from

Incommunicado
by Rhonda Ganz
2017

from Frequent, small loads of laundry (Mother Tongue Publishing)

My parents practice being dead, I mean
they sail away on cruises—
ten days here, a couple weeks there—
and even though they take an iPad
even though they’ve got a pay-as-you-go cell phone
Dad’s too cheap to pay cruise ship WiFi extortion so it’s

radio silence

til they find a hotspot in some café on shore.

Til then, they say, it’ll be like when we’re dead
and your loudest wail won’t reach us.

geometry
by moberley Luger
2008

from Ragtime for Beginners (Killick Press)

We step out into the rain, and I unfurl
my red umbrella. Deftly, you take it,

cover us both. The stem is small
in your palm. I walk tight against you:

under here is the closest I have ever been
to anyone. I don’t want our walk, the rain

to end. There is a whole world I don’t want
to go back to outside of this small circumference.

excerpt from

Pectin
by Leef Evans
2018

from Sustenance: Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food (Anvil Press)

I'm not so generous some times and do not miss the things that look like you. But the cannibal world reckons for hostile selfish thoughts, and when I chew on my self I miss the hard-scrabble tangle of your hair; the hypnotic negative space between strand and strand and strand. Hints of skin I miss. The smell of cold water and drizzled apple juice. I miss the tickle, too, on my neck the first time we smooched (you ducked below my arm and laughed and ran. & I ran, also, too, after you, and cornered you in that ghoulish, rough-spackle tenement portico and moved in and finished the space between us and you didn't duck or laugh).

This is what I miss when I don't miss you: sugar and grit, instants and specifics distilled; you, jarred like jam with all your aspic finery and the jammed hologram of you in the fickle sparkle of dirty sugar, Sugar.

Observations Midway Through October
by Jason Dewinetz
2003

from moving to the clear (NeWest Press)

Today my father comes to visit, his face warm but
crooked with concern. I am busy with classes, distracted.
These days my heart is set, blue plum in a bowl.
In this cold wind autumn moves slowly,
each leaf hesitating its silent undress. At night
the tea steams with air that twists the candle flame.
Most nights I sleep well, the bed warming slowly.
Yet my hands, although at times not empty, notice
your absent skin. The cat sits in the window,
swallows the scent of those walking past, his eyes
fearless. My father carries a tomato, in his
briefcase, a thousand kilometres from his garden,
and gives me this.

excerpt from

Uncut Wood
by Rachel Rose
2012

from Song and Spectacle (Harbour Publishing)

Mortgage! Mortgage! scolds the Steller’s jay
as I put the breakfast bowls away.
It’s easy to get lost along the way.
This morning, Plum Blossom Form
flowed through my hands
and from the net of heaven
rain fell on old snow.
The baby chewed his mysterious toes
content with a single tooth.
Lao Tzu, old carpenter, tell me the truth:
what’s the difference
between want for nothing
and good for nothing?
What we love can always be taken.

excerpt from

Normal
by Brad Cran
2013

from Ink on Paper (Nightwood Editions)

For my daughters Micah-Sophia and Rory Sarah

I’m fighting normal. I’m choreographing
this other dance, where you spin across
the floor and out the door while the other
kids are still jumping on the spot, popping up
to learn ballet. From an outsider’s eye,
you might call ours the dancing raccoon disco,
or perhaps we are the hip hop squirrel brigade.
Or are we the bears who hold up signs saying,
Will work for honey and funk! What I’m saying is:
go barefoot. Or walk out with a handstand.
Live in possibility and in constant proximity
to desire. Don’t just dream; burn your dreams.
Heat your life with that fire.

excerpt from

Had I Stayed on the Farm
by David Zieroth
2007

from The Village of Sliding Time (Harbour Publishing)

I married the skinny girl
and our kids ran free as chickens
one of them, the second boy
moving along the ditches for days
trapping muskrat and living on
chokecherries and bulrushes
sleeping by a little fire of sticks
wrapped in his jacket, and hardly noticed
he was gone until he returned
as someone else, burnt and smoky
his sisters silenced by the strides he took
to reach the pump, his hands
a mess of little nicks and cuts where
the cries of the animals had entered him

viii
by Susan Musgrave
2009

from Obituary of Light: The Sangan River Meditations (leaf PRess)

We eluded beauty and went
right to the truth, evaded happiness
and went for the weeping. I loved you
with the fierceness we save for those
who can break us in all the broken places.
Never mind the lies, the promises
you couldn’t keep. They are small
mysteries, like the blowing milkweed silk.

Labour Day
by Rhonda Batchelor
1998

from Interpreting Silence (Beach Holme Publishers)

In fearful concentration, condensing summer to hold forever,
I carried brushes, paints, paper, down to the all-weather
dock, mixed the right colours but couldn't equal the day.

Instead I watched you row, then drift, across the lake, your
dark head bowed. And in perspective with the trees and sky
how small you were. Not frightening, not a midnight rager,
liar or unfaithful lover; just a miniature man drifting
in a borrowed boat.

excerpt from

Three Women, Nursing Home, Medical Wing
by Elise Partridge
2006

from Fielder’s Choice (originally published by Véhicule Press)

I am not ready to go, not yet.
I have amends to make with my mother.
I need to confess a lie I told.

I’d like to smell lilacs by our front door,
wake up in my childhood home
(only a few flagstones are left of the path).
I’d like to pick berries in June with my father.

I am not ready to go, not yet.
But I’m falling asleep in this field of poppies,
and their blue scent is hurrying me away.

The Old Routine
by Lionel Kearns
2007

from A Few Words Will Do (talonbooks)

I could tell you of events so complex
they would turn your eyeballs into pie crust,
clog your ears with seaweed, glue
your nervous fingers into a sticky fist.
But what of that now? I am here
on this rickety porch where years ago
I would sit quietly writing you a poem.
Now I am doing it again, perhaps
writing the same poem. Everything
grows and explodes and remains the same
as I jump out of my dying body just
in time to see it again, the world.