--------- frances (2)
She arrived this morning on a chariot lifted by two men, which made her look alarmingly small, and her red curls were pressed against her skull like a crown from the hospital bed, and the men laughed as they carried her as if she weighed nothing at all.
Later when I lifted her arms I too felt the crepe-thin skin underneath, softer than raw dough, that capitulated easily to my fingers as if a made body was becoming unmade again; the clay unbaking.
I caught a glimpse of my own body in the mirror, something I've been avoiding. my stomach extended; a new curve between my hip and thighs; silver hairs that collude, cluster and hide; a dark spot on my groin that has bled and I'm not sure if I should get checked out. My breasts, more and more a burden of weight. Some unfamiliar force has been manipulating the stuff that makes me, right under my nose. Is this the hand of time people talk about? The one they felt sure wouldn't come for them? It feels like a stranger even as it holds you.
--------- ljepotica
she’s smiling from ear to ear, a smile with a hollywood quality to it, and has one hand holding her chest to keep her earthbound, as she is being quite literally serenaded cafe-side by three older serbian men playing accordion, cello and guitar respectively. her chair is charming twisted wrought iron, her white shirt tied at the waist with a thick 60’s belt. the old cobblestone street is dark and sprinkled with warm lamps. the video goes on for a few seconds and she’s eating it up – she knows the words to this song – and she’s taking pictures with them after. i’m remembering when i was in croatia, drinking beer with two girls i was trying very hard to make friends with, and how the waiter chatted with us and how it made me light up too, and i asked him about his hometown and his life and his upbringing. how he found out i was croatian and took an interest in me, asking about my family, my name. then how he complimented my eyes and i felt something shrink just a little bit in me. how he chastised me for not speaking croatian – ‘you have roots’, he told me, and i felt embarassed. his cheerful smile turned leering. still, i smiled and let it bounce off. i laughed when he kissed my cheek. i laughed and i pretended not to mind while a man the age of my father, with my father’s stature and his tanned skin, turned from my father to another man on this trip that wanted to stand over me. my lack of culture, and my vulnerability to share it, had left me embarassingly bare.
i was just a silly girl without a purpose here, looking for validation no one was equipped or willing to give me, looking for signs of the father that wasn’t here in the fatherland that wasn't mine. someone whose closest religious or cultural routine was toonie tuesdays at my local small-town canadian theatre and the monthly purchase of a costco hotdog while my parents grocery shopped; the distant memory of being told to count in croatian from one to ten and always forgetting five – jedan dva tri pet… jedan dva tri… – someone who spent jet fuel coming from far away to romanticise a lifestyle more authentic but occupied the same dirty hostel rooms as every other passerby and clogged the streets and forced babas out of their homes in the old town, no more clean washing hanging from clotheslines. someone with chopped-off roots.
--------- aug 13 2025
I am a diligent collector of the different smells of commercial drive – hot sidewalk; axe body spray; the sweet plums I was given at the art gallery; patchouli incense from paranada you can detect a block away; full garbage cans; the sour, woody must of old vancouver houses, of dampness, of unopened windows.
--------- jun 10 2025
my mom left, so i can now safely have a cigarette at my spot on the steps at clark park without the fear of her bloodhound nose on me. it's not much of a trade-off. my house feels comically large and dark now, mockingly. every superior possibility I have let die furls up in front of me, a browning leaf, and all I can see around me are more leaves, ripe to be pulled off the stem. what the hell do I think I'm doing here, looking out in the distance wistfully, at cats and crows and strange people, while her hair only gets whiter? so i can pretend this was my great act of independence..?
is it still virtuous to be independent? to pretend to be?
--------- jun 8 2025
my mother is visiting. we become a singular, drifting unit of comically different heights. her laughter emboldens mine. I walk slowly so she is beside me, wandering through the mall, solving riddles (literally and figuratively). at dinner we start a conversation about the world and what's happening and why, and as usual, I start off down an impassioned track that is too intense, too definitive, because it brings me comfort to be realist – and after finishing I notice a few tears wetting underneath her eyes, though neither of us mention it.
I become withdrawn and sour suddenly, without realizing it's because I don't want her to leave, even when our close proximity gives us both barbs. I deal with it by biting the soft skin of her shoulder, growling like a dog.
--------- april 2025
It's remarkable just how desperately I wish and long to have other lives – not just out of resentment for my own, but because of the desire to see the world through another's eyes. It is so tragic that I will never be allowed to be the person next to me, to be the child of my best friends, to be the couple sitting closely on a blanket at the park, holding their secret communion. There are so many worlds to which I am not allowed access. Is that maybe one of the reasons I've finally felt the distant urge to raise children? I don't fantasize much about the circumstances that would bring them to me – not about partners or marriage and certainly not pregnancy – just that they appear for me to witness their lives, a voyeur of experience.
--------- february 2025
I am trying not to blame him directly but he is the only one I can blame for the fury and the grief I feel. I wish I could connect with him, I wish I could share things with him. I wish we could sit and talk and learn. I wish he understood what he is losing. I wish he understood what he’s making me lose. I wish he understood the rift these people, so far away we will never touch, were wedging between us. I wish it hurt him that I don’t like to talk. I wish he felt the absence of intimacy with me in his life, and I wish it felt like a loss. A loss that he could do something with. I wish he cared to understand the things that are important to me. That he tried to listen. I wish he treated these things seriously, with weight, that he mulled over them thoughtfully – and that he saw my fury as the violent and hurtful thing it is, not something to laugh at. I wish he saw me as powerful. I wish my words had barbs and could sting. I wish my tears affected him, that they melted something away; my tenderness, my womanness. I wish we could touch, somehow. That the softness of my hands mattered more than anything. That my laughter mattered more than anything. I wish he admired me. I wish he understood the future of guilt he is cursing me to. I wish my poetry could make him cry.
Why are we constantly having to write these pleading letters to our fathers, if not on paper then in our hearts and our minds? These desperate and cloying declarations of our own humanity, the humanity of our mothers. As if our words will have any effect at all.
--------- frances
In the dirt field ahead she watches a woman ride her horse in circles, chased by the dust. She thinks of feeding them sugar cubes in the purple morning. Their velvet lips bigger than her hand.
How the clouds there come flowing from fibrous bunches, like a cotton ball attracting together backwards, rather than pulled apart; the birds, robins and chickadees and the sounds of them; the way her hair twists around the red root of a sprig of moss. The melancholy crown of the willow tree.
I am only 30 years in the future, but she still stands watching those horses. There’s a baby soft spot where her dyed red curls split at the back, pink scalp untouched from the sun.
--------- 25 / valentines
The wind is crisp on the ears and I'm thinking of the soup I'll make later and the onion skins that are rustling in my bag. I was told yesterday by a friend of a time his young body was sold for one hundred dollars. Quickly, it becamme another way the earth has been spinning mme faster. I try in vain to hold mmy fingers over the pulse of time, to keep my feet light and dodge the wheel.
to hold open the window.
The sun dips faster than I can catch up and I follow the river of people travelling home to their own.
I try to keep myself armoured, but come to find out that I've always been injected with that regrettable soreness, a swelling bulb in the chest –
that thing which makes my eyes sting.