I Like Commas. (Moving pictures edition.)

My goodness, sigur rós makes beautiful music.

These are taken from their documentary, Heima. It's gorgeous, check it out.

I Like Commas.

I (heart) my Métis heritage.

This is more flash fiction than poem. Enjoy!

Communal.

It’s sunny. First sun in months. Gitz joins us at a table outside the college; he’s carrying a guitar case. Laura and I are using an industrial strength stapler that she’s nicked from the print shop to assemble our poetry books.

“You’d be amazed what they hand over to me when I tell them I work at the aboriginal office,” she says. She’s half Haida. Says they’re one of the more eccentric tribes. When she tells me this, I realize that I’ve never thought of the First Nations as anything other than Noble and Proud and Dignified. On horseback. Fishing. A delicate kind of racism.

“Are you going to give it back?” I ask, pointing to the stapler. “It’s pretty sweet.”

“You could tell them you lost it at a Pow Wow,” Gitz says. “Or gave it away at a potlatch.”

We share a grin. He’s wearing black, and a shirt with a rainbow on the front. Asks if he can try on Laura’s Ray Ban’s to complete the look.

“I never buy expensive sunglasses,” I say. “I just lose them.”

“Nothing I’m wearing costs over twenty dollars,” Gitz says. “Everything in my family is communal; someone will just borrow my shirt and wreck it in a fight.”

“Tell me about it,” Laura says. “When I go home to Haida Gwaii, my family asks me to buy them stuff, but no one ever pays me back.” She laughs. “Family.”

“What’s your background?” Gitz asks me.

“Cree,” I say. “I’m applying for my Métis status, but to be honest I don’t know much about my roots.”

“Too bad.” Gitz back straightens a little. “Good people.” For the first time I can remember, he makes eye contact with me. A flash of recognition.

After he leaves with his guitar case and Laura’s Ray Bans, I ask her about Gitz’s reaction.

“Oh, his background is Mohawk,” she says, squinting into the sun. “They share a lot of history with the Cree. You two are practically family.”

Slam poem.

After nearly a year of listening, I'm ready to speak up.

Science Fiction Writers.

Cataclysm.

A thought upheaval, a shift.

Let’s not use the word paradigm, it’s pretentious.

The big reveal

brought on by electrons

in another dimension!

Ground control

We have confirmed the moon is not there

when nobody's looking.

Anthropomorphism.

The city of Monza, Italy

bars pet owners from keeping

goldfish in a bowl

with curves.

This law is meant to protect the poor fish

from a distorted view,

since bent light might not afford them a true

portrayal of their surroundings.

Catechism.

Hawking reveals that the universe

created itself.

Flaunts his big brain before the faithful,

who politely remind him

that faith

doesn’t work that way.

Fanaticism.

String theory and Jesus

in an all out

balls out

no holds barred cage match at Hadron Coliseum.

Get your tickets to the end of the world,

and see the particle

that started it all.

And I’m looking for enlightenment

from science fiction writers, get busy!

It’s not what were going to own,

what were going to wear,

how we’ll cheat death in the future

that excites me,

but how we’re going to see.

And I want to know,

how does life look from your goldfish bowl?

Jana put me in her blog!

I wrote the story, she did the artwork.

Poetry Thursday.

I wrote this while I should have been doing a million other things.

Exorcism at the guest house.

There’s an old fish plant

on the harbour in downtown Ukee.

Your parents ran the place,

but it’s been gutted for years now

renovated by a couple from the city

who loved the ambiance, but hated the weather

They left, but six hundred seagulls remain, circling

Salmon Springs guest house.

When we arrive at Salmon Springs

you tell me about a man in Suzhou

ties fishing line around the throats of captive cormorants

then steals the quarry

right from their mouths.

You say the places you’ve been are either

the beautiful future

or the end of time.

Cashier at the co-op blows the bangs out of her eyes

asks us where were from.

She quotes the radio, says bad weather is coming.

You tell her you went to high school together,

that you could smell the storm an hour ago.

On the walk home, wind blows the rain sideways,

you tell me small talk is rare

in Taipei.

Your stepmom tells us

your dad is happy to see you

as he embraces you stiffly.

A waitress gives you the cold shoulder at the Eagle’s Nest

Another shows you pictures of her kids

And asks when you’re coming home for good.

That night, at the guest house, we watch

the ghosts of fifty million salmon

weave through the room

flicker the lights as they pass through the fuse box

shiver past a pedestrian Ansell Adams print

then move upstream one last time.

Why choose tonight for a posthumous migration, I wonder.

You say there’s always an exorcism in homecoming.

The next morning

the seagulls are gone.

Stranger than...

I wrote this scene for class. Can't stop writing about the bees lately. Anyhow, enjoy!

Tough Girl

“Ya know, I’m not just some guy.”

“Of course not.” I checked my reflection in the giant stainless steel honey tank in front of me. The curve of the tank made my eyes look really far apart and my face look bloated. I sucked in my cheeks and pulled the lever on the tank. Warm, amber-coloured honey poured out the spigot into a two litre plastic bucket.

“I guess you could say I’m in a bit of a low, but I used to be big time.” Joe set down a stack of hive supers with a thud, and cracked his knuckles.

“Oh really?”

Joe was not my usual type, not at all. He had a crooked smile and just-got-laid hair, and walked with an exaggerated swagger. He claimed the swagger was due to a bad knee. Motocross accident.

On his first day, Joe had purposely walked around the honey house shirtless until Meg told him to put some clothes on. His abs were marvelous as long as he was standing upright. I looked away whenever he bent down, and they cascaded over his chrome Hell on Wheels belt buckle, and settled on his Levis. Since Meg was out in the fields with Al for the day, Joe’s shirt was on the floor again.

“Yeah. I started off selling weed for my dad, he grows for the Angels,” he said, with obvious pride.

“The Angels?” I wondered what kind of marijuana growing outfit would call themselves The Angels? Maybe for medicinal purposes? For people with MS?

Joe snorted. “Yeah, ya know, Harleys? Leather jackets?” He lifted a frame out of the top hive super. The frames were only about two feet long, and half as wide, but they were laden with honey encased in tiny beeswax cells.

“Oh,” I said, “The Hells Angels.”

“Bingo!” Joe said. He placed the frame on the de-capper. It was a ghastly device, something out of a bee horror film. Hundreds of little chains ground against the cells, de-capping them, then tiny razor sharp blades removed the excess wax. A pile of carcasses, wayward bees who refused to leave their stash even in the face of imminent death, was steadily growing under the machine.

Joe turned to face me and lit a cigarette. “In a couple of months I was their top dealer, so they moved me up the ladder.”

“Oh really?” I wondered if Meg would be able to tell he’d been smoking inside, but decided to keep quiet. “To what?”

“Lingerie,” he smiled broadly, “I sold Lingerie, to strippers mostly. Was damn good at it too. What are ya, a size seven? Eight?”

Oh my. “I guess that’s a pretty fertile market,” I choked out.

“Sure is,” he said, “They gotta have something nice to take off.”

He took a long drag and seemed lost in thought for a moment. I put another bucket under the spigot. One down, 199 to go.

Joe’s eyes re-focused. “I was living large, travelling around Vegas, drinking champagne and talkin’ about g-strings with some of the hottest ladies I’ve ever seen.” His brow furrowed. “But then the internets took over and the girls started ordering stuff from China for half the price.”

“That must have been hard to compete with.”

“There’s no competing with the Chinese.” Joe ground out his cigarette emphatically. “They’re takin’ over the world. Your kids’ll be speakin’ Chinese. You got any kids?”

“No!” I laughed.

“Married?”

“I’m only 22!”

“Huh.” He looked me over with an appraising eye. “Well anyways, I was losin’ money, and I wanted out.”

“So what happened?”

“Only two ways out of the Angels,” he said. “Death, or five the hard way.”

“Jail?”

“Damn Federales got me in Tijuana.”

“What were you doing in Mexico?”

“Nothin’ really, just picking up a prescription,” he said. “Lemme’ tell you though, Mexican prisons are every bit as bad as they say. I figured I was done for.”

“Oh my.”

“Yeah, but here I am, and in two years I’ll be back on top again, just you wait. Some guy I met on the inside is gonna’ set me up and I’ll be golden.”

“But what about the Internet?” I said.

Joe looked confused. “Not lingerie,” he said, pointing to his nose. “Grade A stuff, straight from Venezuela. Far as I know, you can’t order that on the internet yet.”

He started to laugh, and I tried to laugh along like I knew what he was taking about, but he shook his head and pointed at something next to me. I looked down and realized my bucket had long since reached its capacity. Honey was running off the bench and collecting in a gooey mass on the floor.

“Crap!” I said. “Oh frack a duck, that’s going to be hell to clean up.”

“Woah, Kiki,” Joe said, with false solemnity. “I didn’t figure you were the type to use harsh language.”