Stray Read online

  alabaster glow. I yearn

  for a domain that spreads

  like a spangled oil slick.

  My family lets me loose.

  Messages from Thunder Bay

  Tonight will be my first night in my new tent. I’m looking forward to a view of morning from the inside.

  We accidentally sent a smoke signal to the nearby camp.

  Sorry about the telephone last night. It was fine for a while but then cut out. You have a wonderful voice. I’ve always told you.

  People keep asking me about the outside — outside being home. I have a low tolerance for nostalgia and ghost stories, so I fashion a tinder nest as words unravel their loops.

  I find kismet in stomped out campfires and blue tarps luffing dust out of the ground.

  We press skipping stones to sleeping feet in hopes the double dutch rope will rock our dreams.

  I think I’m starting to look like a clear-cut.

  I’m miserable. Haven’t had time to take a nap. I know you’re probably not expecting much, but if you’re expecting anything at all you might be expecting too much.

  Down with Exhaustion

  Dank sunrise below Pink Mountain.

  You groan out of your tent,

  stretching the heels of your hands

  onto the pad of beige gravel.

  In the bush you find vertebrae in owl pellets

  and rickety moose calves learning

  to pull choice branches with their lips.

  All you can think is, I’d kill

  for some furniture, a carpet,

  an uncomfortable desk chair.

  Living outside for forty-three days,

  scrambling slopes and ringing

  a dinner bell — the pitch makes you mental.

  There’s no time except mealtime,

  no correspondence between words:

  red rot, bagging out, slash and cache whores.

  One morning your site’s blotted with clumps

  of brown fur, reeks like turned earth and saliva.

  Before you swallow the cold or realize

  maturity isn’t something you can work on,

  you crawl on all fours, gather up

  remains to forge another animal.

  Buried Animals

  I conflated pecking order with

  fulfillment. What I’ve given

  is no longer where you left it.

  I am the spectrum of uncertainty

  in the grand scheme of lost things.

  You are the irreversible find:

  a chipped clamshell of over-share.

  You can barely contain yourself.

  Glisten. Each comment reaches

  a depth determined by your siphons.

  Buried treasure to be mapped, later.

  I watch the tidal flats for bubbles.

  You don’t know what you’re doing

  but you’re sure you’re looking.

  I can’t think of what else

  to say to you about molluscs.

  They’re common and rarely alone.

  Ringling

  The argument

  one-upped your one-man show,

  left hand wrestling

  the right, declaring

  I’d be sorry one day.

  Swallowing chicken heads whole

  you’ve weaned yourself of taste

  at the centre of the sideshow.

  I never took a turn.

  My job was to relieve

  customers of the ghosts

  that spoiled a pristine aura.

  My X-ray vision

  illuminated dead relatives,

  lurking behind the living.

  They’d trust me, just thrilled

  to be noticed. I’d lure

  spirits close then carve

  them out of this world

  with an ivory pocket knife.

  I kept their glowing orbs

  in Mason jars,

  which sold for four dollars.

  The argument was about

  whether this was fair.

  I’m sorry I had to see

  your coat of tar and chicken feathers.

  People paid for this privilege.

  I shot myself out of a cannon

  to lighten the mood,

  grew a beard and the dog

  wouldn’t stop barking

  at me. Your need to distinguish

  yourself from all the men

  who tattooed my name

  into their flesh ruined us.

  The argument was

  our interpretative walk.

  It started when you started it.

  To a Point

  You’d chase me to my flights then, waving

  from the bottom of the escalator at my back.

  I’d wonder where to rest my insomnia, how

  to go round-trip without returning to you.

  A contract on the table is just a smaller,

  white table, made to be put upon.

  I haven’t moved in ages. In dreams,

  I still don’t. There are no messages.

  What happened to the perfect voyage

  scene we chipped away?

  With the time travel of jet lag between us,

  it’s late enough to call forth drink or purge

  all the boxes packed with half-lives.

  Any sense of myself will resume

  when I wake to the fact of altitude.

  I haven’t stayed overnight in ages,

  sleep’s easy to like and hard to know.

  Homecoming

  You’re at the Kal Tire in Vanderhoof

  when the first signs of life climb out

  the back of a Suburban, tossing a cape

  of muck across your dungarees. I wait

  until you leave town to flog my sorry.

  You’re stranded at the camp scales.

  I predict an abandoned food processor

  discovered in your brain’s pleasure centre,

  that you’ll barbel your way to the crick.

  I still itch for your closet room — so cold,

  spectral breaths spooked our sleep, for

  dry humping till someone’s zipper breaks.

  It will sting, taste bitter, when you hear

  what I’ve done. Your face crests, bushward.

  Driving 25 Sideroad, North of 30

  I’ve nailed down where

  I fell in love with the world

  to a particular stretch of drive.

  Four towns flung along

  my chosen route. I bet on

  which place’s future is fated

  to creepy pit stops, arid gas pipes.

  It costs to pluck them out.

  Windshield glare morphs

  a row crop into a tornado,

  which rips barn walls

  into picture windows.

  Scent of cut hay stirs an old bruise

  to ache: a mark worth questioning.

  So much seems inevitable.

  Young: on the riding mower

  in open-toed jelly shoes.

  Fledgling: the site of lust’s first spark,

  I was directionless, on fire.

  Now: my car, open windows;

  the a/c vent gifts me a cough’s worth

  of dust, and still moves me.

  Finding oneself is a chore.

  I want the wild impulses

  of another’s troubles.

  We’re at that age

  when our childhood pets are dying.

  Age seven, summer, walking shoeless

  on the gravel roads to toughen up my feet.

  By August I’d be calloused, floating

  above the coals of ground like a saint.

  Those roads are paved now. You can pass the farms

  faster. On this stretch, my father used to jolt me

  out of backseat boredom, shouting Deer!

  but every time I looked, the same slow cows.

  I am controlled by this
promise. To see

  a thing less fragile but just as strange

  and worthy. Like a seagull is an eagle

  to each memory, perfect in its place.

  Acknowledgements

  In the poem “Fraterville Coal Mine,” the italicized lines are from a letter written by Jacob Vowell to his wife, Ellen, while he was trapped and suffocating in the Fraterville, Tennessee, coal mine disaster of 1902. Source: United Mine Workers of America. See “Oh God for one more breath,” Letters of Note (blog), January 23, 2014, http://www.lettersofnote.com/2014/01/oh-god-for-one-more-breath.html.

  Earlier versions of some of these poems have appeared in the Fiddlehead, PANK Magazine, the Malahat Review, the Puritan, Riddle Fence, Minola Review, This Magazine, PRISM international, and in the chapbook Playdate by Anstruther Press. My thanks to the editors of these publications.

  I am grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Toronto Arts Council for financial assistance that allowed me to write this book.

  Many thanks to the Banff Centre for the Arts and the University of Guelph for their generous support.

  Gratitude: Al Moritz. Ross Leckie. John Barton. Catherine Bush. John Shoptaw. Bob Pickering. Dionne Brand. Everyone at Goose Lane.

  Thanks to brilliant advice-giver and confidant Kevin Connolly. Thanks to mentor of mentors Karen Solie. Extra thanks to an incisive and wonderful editor, Linda Besner.

  XO:

  Damir, for encouraging me in the first place. Friends who have humoured my first drafts, sat through readings, and bolstered me with their love. AA, KB, LB, LJ, RG, AGR, AI, AK, HL, AP, RR, OS, CT, DW. Dear pups of Waldorf, Peterborough, Dartmouth, Fredericton, and Toronto. Jim Johnstone. Michael Prior. The LDC. UNB-ers. Guelph MFA classmates. Banff soulmates, especially Wes. Soul sister — Nadine. Cousin Jackie. Lifers — Maya and Sarah. True blue — Doyle. Makers — the very best mum and bro; my dad, Tony, who was unfalteringly supportive.

  photo: Nadine Sander-Green

  Allison LaSorda grew up in Campbellville, Ontario, and after some years in the Maritimes now lives in Toronto. A recipient of scholarships from the Banff Centre Writing Studio and the Vermont Studio Center, she holds an MFA from the University of Guelph. Her writing has appeared in PANK Magazine, PRISM international, Brick, Riddle Fence, the Malahat Review, the Fiddlehead, and others.