Hospital Bracelets/Ambulance Haiku

I had to go to the hospital in an ambulance earlier in the year. I keep trying and failing to articulate this poetically. This is the first thing I wrote, a few days after the incident, in the hopes (since abandoned) of rewriting it into a poem:

The back of an ambulance feels less important than it is. It is a constant moving serenity with the siren going distant but constant. I close my eyes because I’m blacking out anyway. I am not in control. I am passive: rolled around through halls and into cars and out of them, given shots, given the shakes, made drowsy, shot through with side effects. Time rolls away and then stops, wheeled into the ambulance ward. I feel comfortable until they tell me I can leave.

Another attempt made a few days ago, also the first real thing I’ve written since school got out:

Ambulance Haiku
fading in and out
sirens yell, the ground speeds by
faces float above

Moving In

Assignment: Write in third person from the viewpoint of someone under 10 years old doing something completely new to him/her, focusing on sensory detail to overcome the difference in vocabulary (cf. Clark Blaise, “Broward Dowdy”).

Allie’s aunt Clara was a tower of a woman in a slim taupe pantsuit, with brown hair cut in a neat, severe bob. She had to lean forward a bit in order to fit her door frame. Aside from her long, narrow nose, she looked nothing like Allie’s mother, her sister, who always wore her long hair down and hated wearing shoes.

Upon seeing the two of them in her doorway, Clara did not smile, but looked them up and down in a brisk nod. Allie looked up at her warily and took a bite of the sandwich her mother had given her in the car.

“Well, girls. Won’t you come in?” Clara’s voice was deep and low, not like Allie’s mother’s at all. Allie tightened her grip on her mother’s hand as Clara leaned down and took the small brown suitcase that sat at Allie’s feet, then turned around and went inside. Allie’s mother tugged on her hand and led her into the house.

Inside, the house was as enormous as it was outside. Allie supposed it had to be, in order to accommodate Clara’s height. It was draughty and smelled like nothing, except for the conspicuous aura of her house that still clung to Allie’s coat and her mother’s sweater. The foyer was rectangular, with one doorway on each side leading to another room. The room was empty except for a round, dark wood table with a thin plaster statue standing atop it, and a long, narrow painting of a yellow field of wheat that hung on the back wall. In the corner, a tall, spiralling wooden staircase went up through the ceiling to the next floor. The walls were marbled white and looked smooth, but Allie did not rush to touch them – the whole place felt precariously arranged, as if one touch would send it crashing to the ground.

“Would you like something to drink?” came Clara’s voice from the next room. It sounded faint in the silence that overpowered the house.

Allie’s mother let go of her hand and walked away, but Allie did not follow her. She stared up at the staircase, at the steep wooden stairs that led to nothing and the rails that looked like polished bones. She took a bite of her sandwich and chewed it slowly. It was bologna and mustard, her favourite. It was the only thing that felt anything like home right now.

206 Rue Bernard Ouest

Today I ventured to Mile-End for the first time, to a café to see Neil Smith, Zoe Whittall, and Jon Paul Fiorentino read as part of the Blue Metropolis Literary Series. All three were good. I stayed afterward because I didn’t want to leave – the place gave me a feeling I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and I tried to write it out. This is an edited version of what I wrote when I was there.

6:15 pm: I can’t help but feel like a speck of dust that has chosen to materialize at this exact moment in this exact place: insignificant and lonely and right in the thick of it.

7:30 pm: Maybe I’ll stay in Montréal after university. Live north of the mountain, write in cafés, work in a bookstore. By then my French will be good enough. Know the people who give the readings I attend. Think about going back to Toronto, never commit until 5 or 8 years later when I decide to go home in a grand and cosmic moment of “this city is fucking me up”. Realize that my eternal idea of Toronto was formed in 2006: secret swings and mashed potatoes, sushi and Queen West in the summer. Try to live with a city that I adore that has moved on without me.

7:50 pm: (After reading a bit of Bottle Rocket Hearts): I read so intently it makes my jaw clench somewhere around my ears. It feels like gripping the railing at the edge of a cliff, and if you let go you know you’re going to get that butterfly tightness in your gut that means falling. Is this what it’s like to find something perfect? (I almost wrote “love”. I can’t pretend I know what love is. I can’t pretend I don’t know what love is.)

The piano is sitting in the corner, cool and James Dean casual. I want to fall asleep in the arms of this warm wood room, rest my head against its solid brick chest, feel it nestle its jazz and mirror ball lighting in my hair, wake up in a loving old-souled embrace.

The Rooster

The original assignment was to write the beginning of a short story to the “then” moment (see Clark Blaise’s essay, “To Begin, To Begin”). This assignment was to rewrite it, having received notes on it. I’m not going to bother with the original version because I don’t like it, but the second one came out twice as long and light years better. This is the beginning of the beginning.

For the summer between her second and third years of university, Stephanie Chau had decided not to go back to Halifax. Instead she stayed in Montréal, where she could hold her job at the supermarket and where her boyfriend Ryan came over every night to make dinner and water the cacti on her windowsill.

For two months it had been absolutely perfect. Stephanie hadn’t missed the salt water or the beach, or her sister, or drinking at the Marquee until 3 AM. She had found a sort of Zen in carrying crates of milk cartons and in the mysterious pink and orange flowers her cacti sprouted. The dinner wine tasted sweet and full. She couldn’t remember what it felt like to sleep alone.

Then Ryan stopped coming, and she wished she could forget what it felt like to sleep with someone else beside her. The cacti, grieving, shrivelled into themselves. Stephanie started eating instant noodles for dinner every day, alone in her apartment in front of the computer or an endless stack of books. She cut her hair to her chin and stopped drinking. She considered getting a cat, but knew she would only kill it.