Jim Johnstone
Canadian Gothic
It’s the undisturbed that I suffer—
inked blades of grass, spades
interred to their necks in clay. Two
shores away, you cling to a farm
that won’t yield, fix your hope
in a home that doesn’t want you.
Pre-fabricated crops. Handprints
healed into the soil’s tract. Perhaps
this is why you’re motionless—
pitchfork clutched to the ditch
of your chest like a comic valentine.
She loves you. She deters the sun
with a scourge of flesh. Before
words, beechwood was used
to bless, quicken our rogue taxonomy—
your name reduced to a mass
of outcast slivers. Now, the missed
are missing again—cut incomplete
without the purr of our neighbour’s
apiary, a blight of crows. In the
winged, hate is ancillary. They
endure our stillness—wait to alight
on sculpted cheeks, thrust
their mouths toward our eyes.
0 Readers’ Choice Award, Poem of the Year Contest 2009
Arc 63, Winter 2010
Arc 63, Winter 2010 : Table of Contents | Contributors
Arc 63, Winter 2010
