STUART ROSS
The Rusty Toque | Issue 13 | Poetry | November 30, 2017
BirthdayA pigeon stared down at me. I denied myself everything (because it was my birthday). But in the cave of tattoos all they could offer was a terrible kind of pleasure. The air-raid siren banged my head. A squirrel plunged its teeth in my ankle. While I washed my shattered dishes I saw them through the window: they talked deep into the quivering night. When he hung up the phone she hid all her philosophy books under the mouldy sofa bed. In the diner destroyed by fire he ordered a tuna sandwich with a pair of pliers torn out of his head like a piece of wood and a river. At Laundromats Here There Are No DryersWhere I am, bicycles have no wheels. Figs have no trees. The protests in the streets have no protestors. The garbage bins are lidless. Firecrackers, incidentally, have no wicks. Rats have no hammocks, and fish aren’t able to read. Do you see, now, how different it is here? My clothes are soaked but they are clean. I pull them on and walk through the park where the temperature has no limit. I lie back in the grass that has no ants, peer into the sky that has no birds. But the clouds here, I haven’t yet mentioned the clouds here: they sing these very personal songs about wronging and being wronged. They smoke a lot of cigarettes. You can hear it. And I sing along though I have no voice. I sing with my eyes. |
STUART ROSS is the author of 20 books of poetry, fiction, and essays. A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent (Wolsak and Wynn, 2016) won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry. Stuart’s latest is the novel Pockets (ECW Press, 2017). He blogs infrequently at bloggamooga.blogspot.ca and lives in Cobourg, Ontario.
