Waste Not, Want Not
(For Sherin Mathews who was found dead in a culvert
after her adopted father force-fed her milk)
Consider everything —the small spaces
between bones and teeth, cracks of light, hollows
of darkness, calcium and cartilage.
Contemplate whether the clouded glass
was half-full or half-empty. Should we weep
if milk spills like moonlit rivers across
cold granite tables? Somewhere a stove pot
is frothing at the lip and boils over,
and somewhere it’s soothing a wee one’s cry.
Perhaps, if the cup had been brimming
with twilight then the stars could flitter
like fireflies and burn holes through the blackness.
Maybe someone thought the milk was spoiled
and poured it down the drain, not knowing
it might get caught in the pipes and clog.
If the milk had been left to stand awhile,
it might've grown skin. Even something
seemingly sour can be turned sweet again.
In the dead of night, I hear coyotes
taking nips at the moon and the details
film over like a half-digested dream.
It wasn’t so long ago that missing
children could be found on milk cartons
and folks knew better than to dispose of them.
(Previously published in Prism)
Applesauce
You were a good dancer, knew all the steps
until we ended up in the back seat
of your father’s Fairlane and I forgot
who I was and became the huntress,
forging ahead through the velvet brush
down the fuzziness of your soft navel
to the golden warm undercarriage
of your body. I could smell the sharpness
of leather mixing in with the mustiness.
It was hot that night like the summer
the air was thick with flies and manure.
I had gone to the cellar to cool off
among the jars of peaches and apple sauce.
The peaches were sweet and firm, delicious
and cold. The cellar was ripe and heady
in the sweet-sickly scent of nectar.
Peaches bruise easily when plucked like that.
With you, it was more like applesauce.
(Previously published in Prism)
Salmon Run
I never told you but I left you once.
It was September, and I packed the kids
in the car, caught a boat to Nanaimo,
and checked into the Coast Bastion hotel.
It was there I pondered leaving for good.
No one stays here for long. Even Salmon
know when it’s a good time to run, to take
that leap up freshwater streams to migrate
to their ritual spawning grounds. They`ll risk
life and fin for their unborn children
before rotting into ocherish dust.
All night the fog horns wailed in the harbour
like women in mourning and I felt numb
as I sank into the soft-red ashes,
the sweat and dander, the microscopic
bits of love left on the pleated sheets.
There’s an emptiness that will reel you in
like a riptide, a vacuum sucking you
inside while the blue-silvery light swims
out into the tapering darkness.
In the half-light, I bundled up the kids,
followed the long-narrow halls past vending
machines and ice and then crossed the lobby,
vast as an ocean with no ships in sight.
(Previously published in 3rd Wednesday)
Three Minutes
The time it takes to make the bed, grab
a hot shower, boil an egg, or fold
a paper airplane. Three minutes. The time
it took my mother to make up her mind
to leave my father. I can still hear
the cap popping off of her Final-
net hairspray, the spurts of air hissing
out and freezing her blond curls into place.
Sometimes winter scars the land, conceals
the lesions and diseased tissue below.
Everything appears so spotless and clean,
almost beautiful in its rebirth
but If you pull the snow back like a scab
it will bleed. I wonder if the earth aches
when it thaws. Three minutes. The time it took
the doctor to uncross my legs, grab
the cryoprobe and shoot a steady stream
of arctic-blue liquid nitrogen
against my cervix. Three minutes
before a glacier unearthed my body,
once beautiful as unbroken black ice.
(Previously published in 3rd Wednesday)
Ode to a Poem
I wrote a poem Neruda would blush at,
Blake would find innocent and Ginsberg
would howl at. The poem was bathed in the plum
shade of a Georgia O’Keeffe flower.
Imagine, blooming a poem like that,
words perfuming the body in one sweet scent-
ence after another. I wrote the poem
last winter before the snow or perhaps
it was September, ripe and red as the wood
stove pushing heat up the smoke stack to pant
hot spurts into the starry sky. The poem
had no heart, soul, or glass to shatter it.
There were no carnal apples or oranges
sliced but it quivered like a grove of aspens.
No poem --not even the sallow sunflower
dripping seeds from its black eye or the weight
of a song could compare. The poem –not
this one, was the best poem ever written,
and when I read its sublime words out loud,
there was a silence that was unheard of.
I wish you could have heard it. The poem
fractured time and space and each word splintered
the bone white page. The poem rose like a ghost-
ship out of water, breaching the surface
like a whale caught in a bohemian fog.
I wanted to share that poem with you
today, but the poem had a previous
engagement and sent me in its place.
Great poems can do that. Poets can’t.
(Previously published in The Stinging Fly)
Bionote
Pamela is the mother of two children and the author of three collections of poetry, all of which she considers her babies. She has babies forthcoming from Oolichan Books and Porcupine’s Quill.
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