MATTHEW WALSH
The Rusty Toque | Issue 13 | Poetry | November 30, 2017
From the Ocean to the Prairies is a Long Way to Go
200 km north of Edmonton I fell in love with a stationary man who worked the projector nights at the single-screen Rex Theatre. His family, a stationary family. The mother, a stationary woman retired and now paints still life of fruits and her greyhound. His family from Red Deer, pulp and paper people. They were not sick of it. My first time In Drumheller I was like what the hell is this place. I slept well in a motel built upon old slaughterhouse land. I had fucked up dreams where I told upset cows I loved cows and had friends who loved cows. I pulled cherries out of the VLT in Boston Pizza. In the bathroom a hand scrawled how do you tell up from down? In Reptile World I saw a green lizard in the gift shop where couples from Nevada used all their international data on him. I believe it was worth it. I got cold sleeping in a car dealership outside Winnipeg under the comforter of a 2002 Sedan Ultima. In Brandon I took a picture of Brandon University for my friend, Brandon, and I got my palm read by a stranger named Sharon who read sun lines through Thunder Bay and the surrounding areas. There were so many trees, a classifier of trees could talk the entire highway. The highway deer at night, like paper cut-outs on hill-sides before the houses and urban sprawl, so many and identical. Dear Ottawa Ex-Boyfriend, I heard you were dating a younger man, and you steal everything from him and buy him bacon to make up for it. I fell asleep near Gaspé, and woke up in Cap de la Madeline, La Bonhomme dancing ludacris at the entrance of his ice palace, maple syrup strips on snow. I heard fiddle, so many fiddles. A man from the bus followed me, and I said yes, Banff is a catalogue city, of course I was tired of the air conditioning breathing on me like a drunk guy in a bar. I missed the cadence of my own legs, all my landmarks sore. I wasn’t thirty thousand feet in the air and I didn’t need to look and see if I could fly. Eye PoemI had a friend who tried to write a poem with two rooms in it. The rooms were supposed to be his boyfriend’s eyes. He looked up all parts of the eye for terminology, as an anchor point. I said whatever you do don’t call the poem Two Rooms and that really cleared the room. I thought he was going to jump from the fire escape and Patty went to go meet Patty at seven-thirty. My mother once tried to write a love story on the computer and I laughed at her. I said what are you doing? which hurt her feelings and I hurt her feelings twice in my life. My grandmother died and I contracted a virus which went into my everything, including eyes. My mother’s friend at the gas station asked did I have something in my eyes. I said, no they’re infected, so a lot of things can happen to your eyes. I think about light travelling to the forest floor or my friend coming back looking for his debit card, lifting up all the house plants looking for it. My friend doesn’t want his voice too Victorian. I tell him don’t do that Byron thing. I would reflect on the tired land of my lover’s body, but I do not love the word lover if there is no cat in front of it. My friend Patty’s eyes go grey to purple to grey. She says her ganglions are weather-controlled. Ganglion is a cool word, gang lion. There is always something you can try and do for a boyfriend. Nostalgia is good in poems. I had a boring childhood and loved a lot my Viewmaster. I had slides of He-Man I could slip inside to check out his butt all day. I had an eye for his green tiger, who taught me you could not count on someone else’s mood. I tell my friend risk it, make a sexual innuendo, just make the poem pay. I once worked on a poem for a kill-fee. My end lines were how I walked down my boyfriend’s elbow to all other streets and avenues of his body. |
MATTHEW WALSH is a queer poet from the eastern shore of Canada, who had taken the bus twice across Canada. His poems can be found in The Malahat Review, Arc, Existere, Matrix, Carousel, and Geist online. He can be found on Twitter as @croonjuice
