KAYLA CZAGA
The Rusty Toque | Issue 12 | Poetry | June 30, 2017
False Noon on Highway 16The black X on the calendar meant your dad wasn’t coming home that night, would inhale aluminum filaments at the smelter to finance your future. Funny how he had a better view on your future than you did. You could only see as far ahead as Kristie’s headlights tonguing the dark along the highway to Smithers. At the college party, you didn’t know lyrics to city songs, laughed at twice-told jokes. Girl, your Kitimat showed. A moose head with bras dangling off its antlers made you hug your chest and curl in a corner of the tongue-coloured couch. You woke to Kristie pushing on your boots, a clock blinking noon. She smelled like cigarettes and boy deodorant, like a person you didn’t know. Her car coughed on. Grey mist fingered through the clouds, rubbed against bushes. You wanted to tell her that the cow with legs tucked up under its body looked legless, like someone’d lopped them off and left it bobbing for dead in the field. She didn’t speak, kept checking her rearview. Stop here, you wanted to say, to grab her hand and pull her toward the warm animal in the field, to find its legs together and prove to her that things weren't always how they appeared. You wanted to take her face and kiss the apathy off it while her keys dangled and engine exhausted itself. Instead, you let her drop you off at home, crawled in through your bedroom window. By the time you’d shimmed inside, her car was gone, the street dark again. Dunk Tank
It’s you again, with your purple hair and black sweater with rainbow cuffs. You know three songs on the guitar and feel smarter than anyone. Years later you’ll learn, but for now you’re brilliant and it’s Messapaloza-- a half day of class. In the afternoon, you and friends loiter schoolyards and parking lots. The volleyball girls wrestle in Jell-O. Travis Lechner, lead screamer of Occult Nosebleed, commands the crowd to live real. The French teacher struts like a heron, beige socks hiked to his knees. You’ve been suckered into a shift at the dunk tank to fundraise for a school in Tanzania. You’ll be dunked six times—twice by a boy named Brice you love but never talk to. When he runs out of money, he’ll throw grass at you, chunks of hotdog, himself. You climb up and waive to your friends eating Filipino kebabs by the track. Tonight you’ll drink with them by the waterfall. Is this the year some kid will drive his ATV off a cliff? You’re sitting on a chair, smart girl, above the drunk goggle obstacle course and rootbeer-guzzling contest and you know everything-- can diagram reproductive systems of worms, know exactly when two trains travelling 60km/hour will meet in Kitwanga for lunch. This is the year your mom’s kidneys will fail while you’re in History class, the year Kristie will stop talking to you or painting sad-lovely portraits of her dogs. Brice pays two dollars to throw three balls at you. The wind sighs like it’s locked its keys in its car. You’re sitting on your chair, smart girl, only your chair drops and then there’s this moment before you fall you’re sitting on nothing and you think maybe you won’t fall—maybe you’ll just hover here forever. Though You'll Never Admit ItSometimes a man asks you to marry him because he wants to keep your body where he can see it. You were eighteen, newly baptized and trying to wear your skin so it looked brand new. Waving banners in a church basement, you pretended to be as pious as your new friends who’d harmonized hymns since kindergarten. They gave you purity journals, new translations, whispered gibberish over you until you grew holy with goosebumps. Sometimes a man asks you to marry him because likes the way you look ladling chili for the congregation. He sat intentionally in your pew, learned your political views, and claimed you hovered over him in a dream—a braid of blue mist. He forgave you your atheist father and partner dancing. Sometimes a man asks you to marry him and then rides away on a red motorcycle. Last you heard, he’d knocked up a receptionist in Prince Rupert, was teaching orphans how to use power tools. Sometimes it feels like a brick sinking to the bottom of you when you remember the earnest way you waved him off as he shrank to a dot on the highway. You believed him when he said he’d felt the call of the Lord, and would be back in a year or two. Sometimes it feels you’ve shed your salvation, snake-like, watched it wither in the sun. Your new skin fresh and itchy as a miracle. |
KAYLA CZAGA is the author of For Your Safety Please Hold On, which won The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and was nominated for The Governor General's Award for Poetry and The Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, among others. She lives in East Vancouver, BC, and works at "quite possibly the nerdiest bar in Canada," according to the National Post.
