JENNIFER LOVEGROVE
The Rusty Toque | Issue 11 | Poetry | November 30, 2016
FISH IN WINTERBright paths sinew through shoulder-deep snow to a pond slowly crystallizing. Wet plywood shacks list and slump, injured on the slush-edged shore. Then four unusually large paper-white fish swim by and a sudden elation surges through me and I can’t even swallow it back down. * An excess of tranquility or a lack. Having true intentions. You will get to where you need to go in life. Positive changes are afoot. Hard work lies ahead. Prosperity in economic activities. You will indirectly affect someone’s illness. People tend to gossip about you. Holding back anger. Reviewing old books. * Surgeons will guess around characters will sabbatical charlatans will likeness. Wallpaper’s shred-deficit your backbone downgrade sabotages productivity. Parachutist statistician stateroom to frenzy surrogates of wallow. Showcase defeatist your peacock excursions will bullfrog and backfire. I'M TIRED FROM CROUCHING
Every night, the same warning broadcast through the building: Your uniforms are not camouflage, just go to bed, and try to sleep through the night. I pull on my boots and go for a walk in the dark that’s sleep refusing to go back inside, meaning that has long since packed up its meagre lugs – dry leaf, rainwater, trampoline. The ATMs are fallow, I’ve gulped the last of the Ativan while bacteria race up and down the steps of city hall, cranked up on anything they can find. I’m tired from crouching, so I lie on the sidewalk as my night terrors stroll by, holding hands and window shopping. That’s it. Give me a new trap door, a clean blanket, another fetid father figure to crawl back under. The lights flicker off as a bus collides with a dark blue van. Blood vessels bloom, tiny wet despots, occupiers of language. Then the sky lowers, an arm snaps up, the corners tuck under and the night pulls taut overhead. PART VAUDEVILLEI crawl along a river on my stomach. A doe’s hind leg stomps once, twice. Here, there is food. There, a stranger. At the mouth, the rest-stop ocean keens, mistaking itself for the sun. It bucks its gleaming back and means to blind. The deer scatter and acrobats tumble behind them. No clean sails snap in time with warm wind. I stay on the beach with the ventriloquists, draped in wigs like the sick or the insolent, they pluck splinters from beneath my fingernails, intuit my leg back, like this. The pharmacy, not from parties or from pathology at all. Part vaudeville, part floatation device. What do they mean by water bottle, anyway? |
JENNIFER LOVEGROVE is the author of the Giller Prize longlisted novel Watch How We Walk, as well as two poetry collections: I Should Never Have Fired the Sentinel and The Dagger Between Her Teeth. Her new collection of poetry Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes will be published with BookThug in 2017. Her poetry was shortlisted for the 2015 Lit POP Awards, and she has recent work in The Humber Literary Review and Taddle Creek. She divides her time between downtown Toronto and rural Ontario.
