Prairie Fire

Potential Stops on Our Maritime Book Tour

- LUCAS CRAWFORD

84

Let us pack our matching baggage–

In Sackville, WWII radio towers transmitte­d frequencie­s well into our millennium. Residents heard voices haunting their Sunday night sinks until the towers tumbled.

Don’t bother wringing your dishpan hands. Whet axes and dry herbs for the artisan empire.

Pregnancy tests carpet the Dieppe mall bathroom. To expulse or not to expulse. Evangeline, did you go to the appointmen­t alone?

In Antigonish, bishops move obliquely. Check blind spots for crooked spooks, for shadow popes on ropes, for a pilgrim girl [sic] who doesn’t know she’s a Jew.

Everywhere, you and I skip Mass to try weightless­ness.

In Sydney, I miss my fellow phantom faggots who would cruise “the fruit loop” for ass. In Sydney, echo; recurrence. Biscuits with jam, clotted dreams and molasses.

We gab. But there’s a sonnet corona in your whimper. We are old oaks in thunder. We are trust falls timbered,

sweet tree, sweet tea.

Halifax? O Memory.

In our Fredericto­n downtown, two dumpsters face off. One reads GO FOR IT. The other, SAFETY FIRST.

Look left to right to left. Tie up mixed messages in thin leather laces. Try not to know what to do. Just let me be gorgeous trash, here, and there, and there, with you.

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