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KAYLA CZAGA


The Rusty Toque | Issue 12 | Poetry | June 30, 2017

False Noon on Highway 16


The 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 It


​Sometimes 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. 
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  • Home
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