CURTIS LEBLANC
The Rusty Toque | Issue 13 | Poetry | November 30, 2017
CrokinoleI have waited in thirty below, an hour in an uncertain queue, to be readmitted into a former life. That smell—burnt oil, ice salted into water, seldom cleaned taps of the Strat Hotel. A safe amount is always half. Men with prairie stock and too much disposable cash, shitfaced on their five off from the oil patch, break each other over the hoods of parked cars for a chance to get the blood running to their hands again. The used car dealership across Whyte Ave is the blue of the crescent moon nightlight in my childhood bedroom. I could’ve stayed, chest fastened with coldsnaps, chronic nosebleeds each December. But when you cleared the disks on your last turn, I had a clear line to your centre. Good GuiltA disbeliever and a skeptic, I underestimated the house red at a karaoke bar on Jasper Ave, spat my way back to my parents’ on the bench-seat of Chris Rogers’ sedan. Half-dried saliva speckled my shoes and I left them on while I draped myself around the toilet. When morning interrupted, I found the ceramic cross that used to hang in my room next to the doorframe in pieces on the carpet. It had been some time since the saviour and I had fallen out, but I’ve always been a person of habit. That’s why the crucifix was still there on the wall for me to smash it. The next time I feigned Catholic, I attended the service after Chris fell from the balcony in Puerto Vallarta and snapped his neck. Mostly now, I fear the demonic. Yesterday I found so many grubs in a bag of pecans they appeared to flicker. Six flies circled my desk, mark of the musca atratus. I cut the air with the flyswatter and incanted my good guilt: I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it. |
CURTIS LEBLANC was born and raised in St. Albert, Alberta. In 2016, his poetry won the Reader's Choice Award in the Arc Poem of the Year competition and was shortlisted for The Walrus Poetry Prize and CV2's Young Buck Poetry Prize. More of his work has appeared in Geist, Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, EVENT, Eighteen Bridges, Poetry is Dead, The Literary Review of Canada and others. His chapbook, Good for Nothing, was published by Anstruther Press in 2017. His first book-length collection, Little Wild, is forthcoming from Nightwood Editions in 2018.
