TOM CULL
The Rusty Toque | Issue 12 | Poetry | June 30, 2017
Huron CountyWe rip the scab off at Lucan bleed north up 4 endorphin high remember? you remember the ditches, corn, windrows picking stones in the same damn fields year after year. All the straight lines, grids and you, all the while, behind the mask at home calling for curves. We turn off the highway gravel pops in the wheel wells stop at your old house, stand on the dirt road, watch the August storm close-- fields of tassels bristle against the black horizon. At the graveyard, where you necked boys on the bones we set our lines amid the head stones, but nothing’s biting. Hit the road then, plunge deeper into whatever the hell this is-- a trip home? You’d might as well piss into the wind. Well ok then. Cladeboy, Exeter, Vanastra, Clinton Londesborough, Blyth, Belgrave full cooler, camera, memory stick handling me a beer we’re here, my uncle’s place just up the road from our old house. The plan was to sneak onto the property, take photos of the hoop barns in the back meadow where the new owners grew the dope before they got busted by the cops, but the gate’s closed, locked, a truck’s parked ‘round back someone’s living here. Fuck it, maybe we’ll try tomorrow after sundown. Trespassing is coming home. At Ripley's AquariumThere’s a hairline crack in the Great Lakes. The paddlefish see it, swim by mouths agape. Water presses against the pane, longs to sneak across the road, slip into Lake Ontario, under the nose of the Gardiner-- that eroding hulk of concrete and rusting rebar patrolling the lakeshore, holding, for now, the lake out and the city in. Schools of strollers hunt in the shadow of the CN Tower: Britax, Bugaboo, Chicco, and Graco Peg Perego, Combi, Cybex, and Kelty swim tight patterns, swarm Ray Bay, nip the heels of tourists trying to escape through the gift shop. Our toddler runs wild in Rainbow Reef, cranking knobs on video screens: a cuttlefish lances a shrimp, again and again, in fast forward, reverse, slow-mo, the room a blur of Darwinian wheels spinning in muck. Plastic kelp fronds wave to the beat of the atmospheric xylophonics piped through the dark conveyer-belt corridors. Selfie sticks and walking sticks spar for space in Planet Jellies-- a Hollister showroom of club colours; neon luminaires transform tentacles into undulating hits of ecstasy. Through the window, I see starving gannets begin to circle. More seabirds appear on the horizon, flocks of boobies, pelicans and terns arriving hourly from the coast, their bills sharpened by the winds. They are hungry, smell salt water, sense food moving somewhere beneath Ripley’s dome. They dive wave after wave, descend, beaks cracking the building’s skull like hammer drills. Inside we imagine hail, look up in concert at the ceiling. Children stop fondling the horseshoe crabs, water drips unnoticed from their fingers, the tanks of glass start to sweat. dad boddad bod silver-back flexes pipes ogles glutes BMI Fridays boys’ night HRT loud mouth soup Motrin Sundays dad bod bitch tits milfs soccer moms big promo squash with silver fox disk degeneration standing desk, orthotics Obusforme, cottage dad bod cuts carbs secretly scarfs carbonara Raw Food, Paleo sauna sweats Scotch barks at boyfriends blubbers at weddings search history delete dad bod social smokes smokes smokes buries dad then mom settles estate punches brother gum disease, colonoscopy dad bod twilights dad bod is a boy on a swing screen door ajar smells Pine-sol, hears a lawnmower sputter legs are tan, hair shines pumping for the sun he’ll go all the way round |
TOM CULL grew up in Huron County and now resides in London, Ontario, where he teaches creative writing and serves as the city’s current Poet Laureate. Tom’s work has appeared in The New Quarterly, The Word Hoard and been anthologized in Translating Horses (Baseline Press), 150 Stories (Office of the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario), and a forthcoming collection dedicated to water protection and social justice (MSU Press). His chapbook, What the Badger Said was published in 2013 by Baseline Press, and his first book of poems, Bad Animals will be published by Insomniac Press in Spring of 2018. Since 2012, Tom has been the director of Thames River Rally, a grassroots environmental group that he co-founded with his partner Miriam Love, and their son, Emmett.
