PRISM nternationa FICTION CONTEST GRAND PRIZE "Ms. Pacman" by Josie Sigler FIRST RUNNER-UP "The Lights on Canada Day" by Susan Mersereau SECOND RUNNER-UP "In the Foothills" by Andrew Forbes JUDGE Jessica Grant CONTEST MANAGER Kari Lund-Teigen READERS andrea bennett Cara Cole Erin Flegg Sierra Skye Gemma Meredith Hambrock Jay Hosking Tariq Hussain Michelle Kaeser Anna Ling Kaye Will Johnson Gorrman Lee Ajay Mehra Jen Neale Karen Shklanka Cara Woodruff PRISM nternati ona POETRY CONTEST GRAND PRIZE "Self-Portrait" by Susan Steudel FIRST RUNNER-UP "Ghazal of Perpetual Motion" by Kyeren Regehr SECOND RUNNER-UP 'Towards a List of Definitions According to My Scottish Mother" by Patricia Young JUDGE Jen Currin CONTEST MANAGER Kari Lund-Teigen READERS Jordan Abel Erin Flegg Elizabeth Hand Leah Horlick Ajay Mehra PRISM nternationa FICTION EDITOR POETRY EDITOR EXECUTIVE EDITORS ASSISTANT EDITORS ADVISORY EDITOR DESIGNER EDITORIAL BOARD VOLUNTEERS Cara Woodruff Jordan Abel andrea bennett Erin Flegg Anna Ling Kaye Leah Horlick Jen Neale Sierra Skye Gemma Rhea Tregebov andrea bennett Alison Cobra Cara Cole Meredith Hambrock Elizabeth Hand Will Johnson Ruth Johnston Michelle Kaeser Veronique West Selenna Ho PRISM international, a magazine of contemporary writing, is published four times a year by the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia, Buchanan E-462, 1866 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z1. Microfilm editions are available from University Microfilms Inc., Ann Arbor, MI, and reprints from the Kraus Reprint Corporation, New York, NY. The magazine is listed by the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index. Website: prismmagazine.ca; Email: prismcirculation@gmail.com Contents Copyright © 2012 PRISM international for the authors. Cover illustration: "SOUP" by Mandy Barker (Ingredients: plastic oceanic debris affected by the chewing and attempted ingestion by animals. Includes a toothpaste tube. Additives: teeth from animals.) Subscription Rates: One-year individual $28; two-year individual $46; library and institutional one-year $35; two-year $55. Sample copy by mail is $11. US and international subscribers, please pay in US dollars. Please note that US POSTAL money orders are not accepted. Make cheques payable to PRISM international. All prices include HST and shipping and handling. 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ISSN 0032.8790 A ?5JIIS"i COLUMBIA ^ Canada Council Conseil des Arts ^i«.„.SE!v~,:i, <£> fortheArts du Canada CONTENTS JUDGES' ESSAYS Jessica Grant 7 Mad Skillage in Storytelling Jen Currin 19 Form, Mystery, and the Glass Eye: The 2012 PRISM Poetry Contest SHORT FICTION GRAND PRIZE WINNER Josie Sigler 9 Ms. Pacman SHORT FICTION RUNNERS-UP Susan Mersereau 22 Tie Lights on Canada Day Andrew Forbes 30 In the Foothills POETRY GRAND PRIZE WINNER Susan Steudel 21 Self-Portrait POETRY RUNNERS-UP Kyeren Regehr 29 Ghazal of Perpetual Motion Patricia Young 37 Toward a List of Definitions According to My Scottish Mother i ACTION Alexander Weinstein 57 Migration 1 POETRY Jared Harel 42 Meeting My Body Double Meredith Quartermain 43 If I Bartleby 44 A Natural History of the Throught 45 Out of the dark 46 How to converse Daniel Zomparelli 47 Untitled Stevie Howell 52 Dead Bird Babies Nathaniel G. Moore 54 YOU ARE KIND OF A SPAZ // 56 I DID NOT BRING HIM THERE TO HEART-STAB ANYONE, LEAST OF ALL YOU// TRANSLATION Federico Garcia Lorca 38 Adan / Adam Translated from the Spanish by Dan Maclsaac Rainer Maria Rilke 40 Eva / Eve Translated horn the German by Dan Maclsaac Contributors 68 Jessica Grant MAD SKILLAGE IN STORYTELLING In the remarkably clever and winning short story, "Ms. Pacman," mad skillage refers to a level of proficiency achieved only by the most advanced players of Ms. Pacman. A player exhibits mad skillage when, e.g., she tricks a predatory ghost into thinking she is going one direction, then unexpectedly veers off in another. Mad skillage (as I understand it) requires dexterity, courage, quickness-on-feetness, an appreciation of irony, and a thorough understanding of how ghosts think—or, rather, are programmed to act. Mad skillage is a great term and one I plan to incorporate into my everyday parlance. For instance: Josie Sigler, author of "Ms. Pacman," and winner of the PRISM Short Fiction Contest, and the authors of the two excellent runners up, "In the Foothills" by Andrew Forbes, and "The Lights on Canada Day" by Susan Mersereau demonstrate mad skillage in their storytelling abilities. How often was I, like a hotly pursuing ghost, surprised by their antics, my expectations confounded! How often did I shake my head (and my fist, in envy) at the sheer mad skillage exhibited by these three writers. Or, another example: so enthralled was I by "Ms. Pacman" that, upon reading the story's final two words, I longed to put my own mad skillage to the test. Thus I downloaded Ms. Pacman to my iPad. (Yes, she is available. She is even free if you go with the Lite version.) What I experienced playing her (madly, and badly) was pathos. I think this must be rare. I haven't played a video game since Mario and Luigi had six pixels each, bur I don't recall ever feeling pathos. And I doubt most players of the new-fangled games feel anything close to pity as their avatars steal cars, or dress up in virtual designer clothes that cost real-world dollars. But the question is, why did I care so much for Ms. Pacman and her quest (which I was botching)? Because the story, "Ms. Pacman," had given her depth. Surprising, touching depth. I knew she had a life outside the game. I knew she had a child. But hang on. I was conflating Ms. Pacman with the chatacter she metaphorizes. Or is a double for. The truly powerful metaphors (I find) are those you forget are metaphors. So deftly are they woven into the narrative, so natural are they, that the two sides of the equation become fused, inseparable—and forever altered. If that makes sense. So, not only is the represented object unexpectedly transformed, so too is the representative object. Thus, by the end of "Ms. Pacman," I could no longer separate the narrator's mother from Ms. Pacman. But neither, I discovered, could I separate Ms. Pacman from the woman she had come to represent: a single mother, hungry, hunted, addicted, coy, beaten, sad. Winning some, losing some. Anothet way to put it: in "Ms. Pacman," the game becomes an interpretive framework for the difficult-to-intetpret real world the child-narrator inhabits as she is propelled from town to town, bar to bar, trying to keep Ms. Pacman, her mother, and herself, alive. Or, one last way to put it: the story is allegorical. Not just Ms. Pacman but all her cohorts have real-life (in the story) equivalents; all are brilliantly translated into the child's reality: the maze, the dots, the ghosts. Tie video game is a surface stoty that carries a prismmagazine.ca secondary meaning. Beneath the game is another game, a high-stakes, life-and-death game, played by a child who is mother to her mother, who must learn mad skillage (off screen and on). This is why, when I played Ms. Pacman, I found myself deeply moved by the tiny, pie- shaped, dot-gobbling icon. This is why I loved her. The story is winning for the depth of its emotion—emotion kept slightly off-stage, or off-screen, by the game-speak and the pragmatic, instructive tone of the narrator. The characters (outside the game) remain for the most part anonymous. Thus, we are invited to further conflate the allegotical characters with their human counterparts. The second-person point of view is used to brilliant effect hete (not easy to carry off over the long haul). On the one hand, the "you" of the story is the narrator's childhood self. The story shifts into the first person just once, I think, when the adult narrator reproaches, and forgives, her younger self for her inexperience. But the story's "you" is roomy and contains space for the teadet, too. The narratot teaches the reader the subtleties of the game. Here is how you head-fake, corner, manipulate, eat, survive on one quarter a night. Thus the reader becomes a player herself. Might Ms. Pacman be her game, she wonders. And, after digesting the final words of the story, she rushes to download the game and keep playing. Judging a short story contest can make you an anxious, self-conscious reader. You want to nail down your "winning" criteria beforehand. What makes a story great? How will I know a winning story when I see it? You will. You do. Here is what I have learned: the best stories have a surface story and a second, submerged story. I don't mean all stories should be allegorical. But the best stories often are, in some way, bi-leveled. We are entertained by the surface story, but we read—we play—for the second story, one level down. This submerged story is incomplete and requires the reader to complete it. In short, readers like to puzzle and ponder. The stunning "Ms. Pacman" has three story-levels: one is the story of the narrator's on-screen mad skillage; another is the parallel story of her off-screen survival; and a third is the story of her mother, which comes to us refracted through the child's game-speak and incomplete understanding of the private, very adult "game" her mother is playing. The effect is dazzling and complex. The story invites multiple readings—interspersed with quick, disastrous games of Ms. Pacman, during which your heart breaks anew for the poignant yellow disk, naked but for her bow. PRISM 50:4 Josie Sigler MS. PACMAN 7984 JL ou sought her out in every town, at the edges of each rust-belt city whose smokestacks loomed against the darkening sky. You looked for her everywhere, from the VFW in Toledo to the Lion's Den outside of Gary to that one decked out in blue neon, Omaha maybe. Grand Island? Hard telling, given how many towns, how many cities, how many times your mom pitched your stuff her stuff, and whatevet stuff you were stealing from the motel into a papet bag and thumbed a semi, a battered pickup, a mid-size sedan driven by a family man, even a yellow Porsche, once, in a snowstorm, believe it or not, near St. Louis, Misery. That was what you heard, anyway, and it seemed to suit: Your mom bartering to get you in on the deal, secure you some butt-space in the car, even with a guy so rich he could buy more than one woman for life, didn't really need your mom—your mom, her cheeks aflame, snowflakes in her hair, giving hot debate regarding the exact price of the ride to the next stopping-over place, near or far, Rolla or Springfield or Kansas City or Evansville, while your liberated fingets, gloveless and red, ached from the cold and the residual effects of latching onto the joystick, cornering and head-faking those damned ghosts. Once the bargain was struck and the Goodyears were singing or sliding or rumbling over miles of highway, there in the roomy leather interior or smashed against a door without a handle or up in the bunk covered with a green sateen spread, you closed your eyes. You put your fingers in your ears, conjured the opening music, the first maze. You moved her through with ease, elbowing ghosts from your path. You dreamt up patterns that might get her free. THE MONSTER PEN But here she is again in The Wagon Wheel. The Rusty Nail. The Dusty Dagger. The Hard Hammer. The Broke Saddle. The Mad Hatter. The Mine Shaft. The Man Hole. The Stagger Inn. Devil's Den. Final Score. Rattlesnake Lounge. The Snake Pit. Blue Butterfly. Hillbilly Heaven. Le Bar. Pietown. Tigertown. Tasseltown. Elbow Room. The Cougar Club. Tomcat's. Alley Cats. Fat Cat's. Rosie's. Shelby's. Larry's Lounge. Sam's Swimming Pool. Hobnobber Ray's. Elmer's. They stand at the bar. You can feel the buzz—they're anxious to play the floor. You walk through the haze of smoke, your eyes peeled for the yellow cabinet. In the pictures painted on it carnival-style, the ghosts have thick mustaches, five o'clock shadows. Some shake their fists at her. One raises his eyebrows in appreciation. She runs from him, but she's looking back at him, too, fluttering her long lashes. The ghosts have sheets that cover their bodies. Meanwhile, she's all lipstick and legs, hairbow and heels. Outside of that, she's naked. You never notice that she's naked. I see it right away. In fact, it's all I see. But you are prismmagazine.ca 9 young. You will always be young. Of course, you are me. Or, you were me until I drew a line in time and stepped over it, became someone else. I can only tell these stories when I imagine we are not the same person, when I disregard the fact that the line I drew is scraggly, smudged, half-erased. And most of the time, I've got one foot on either side. ACT I — THEY MEET The first time you played you were six. It's one of the few early memories located in a precise place, an exact year: '81. You sit under the edge of the bar in a VFW hall in Livingston, Michigan. Wait right there, your mom says, and nods at the bartender so he'll watch you, which he doesn't. She leaves, and you curl yourself into a ball, knees to chin, eyes closed. Hey, a voice says, and you know it's talking to you, but you don't respond. Hey! When you open your eyes, the man is bent down, holding out a quarter. You love the jukeboxes in these places, their sad songs, but you tighten your arms around your body. Go on, he says. It don't bite. You teach out for it. He pulls it back. Laughs. Yout eyes smart. You aren't used to it yet, the way they tease. Seriously, he says, pointing at a machine that is not the jukebox. I'll show you how, be says. He leads you over, drops the quarter in. That's her, he says, The hungry gal herself. In a second, she's gonna start to move, he explains. He puts your hand on the joystick. Wherever you go, she's gonna follow. She's gonna eat the candy. You push to the left, then down. She swallows bite after bite. And it's true: you're in charge. You feel this down to the soles of your feet. You come to believe in your power so quickly. You haven't yet brushed up against your first ghost. BLINKY Also known as Shadow or Chaser, he's the most aggressive ghost. His programming is not subtle. In gamer-speak: his target is the tile she occupies. Before the game even begins, he hovers above the Monster Pen, ready to spting upon her. Just outside of Marion, Indiana: You stand in the door of The Wabash Cannonball, dripping with rain. He's on his feet before the door has closed behind you. It's as if he can smell her. But he doesn't seem to notice you. You are behind the scenes. You tug on her shirt. She slips a handful of quarters in your pocket and pushes you toward the machine. You slot a quarter, try to focus on improving your game. But he's gotten to her already. He's the ghost most likely to force her to gobble one of the power pills in the corners of each maze. These turn her into a ghost-eating machine. And when she's blissed-out, not- quite-herself, she needs to hit all the ghosts in order to make a real killing numbers-wise. Gamers call this grouping. Sadly, due to Blinky's ability to go Cruise Elroy, or triple his hunting speed, you may not have time to group. Then she'll end up getting just him. 10 PRISM 50:4 After they've danced, after she's got him hooked, she brings him over to make the unexpected introduction. He blinks at you. He's played this game for years, prides himself on having seen it all, but you sense he's not seen the likes of you. Staring problem? you ask, shoving the joystick. He nods, understanding what he's gotten himself into, squeezes her arm. The fact is, whether or not it's fair, your behavior affects her. This is why your resistance weighs on me so heavily. Sometimes I think you're better off because you never take it lying down. Other times, I wish you'd take a more subversive approach. But you are new at this, so I forgive you the bluntness of your tools. EARLY STRATEGIES Don't rush, but don't hesitate. Don't get cornered. Don't be tempted by the fruit, but certainly take what you can get. The ghosts have three basic behavior patterns: Chase. Scatter. Scared. When they're scared, they get blue. When they flicker, they're about to go back to being their normal asshole selves. When they scatter, it won't last long. You can tell what they're after by their eyes. As for your own eyes, keep one on your location, one on the horizon. And never, no matter how much you've lost, let her just curl up in a ball and wait to die. HER FIRST LIFE It's a terrible noise, the loss of a life. The way she just spins, helpless. You sit with her in the emergency room while they put stitches in the corner of her eye, her lip. What happened? they say. Fell against a table, she says. The two of you lived with him for ten days in that motel. He wouldn't let you leave. Why do we have to listen to him? you asked. It made no sense to you after all that travel, staying in one room. He sipped Wild Turkey, sat on the tailgate of his truck, watching to make sure she didn't leave. You he didn't care about so much. You ran back and forth to the gas station in the spring sunlight—or was it autumn?—yes, you shuffled through fallen leaves, marveled at the wide blue sky, the sun unbearably bright after so many hours in that dim room. He gave you money to bring her smokes and Diet Coke. Spaghetti-Os and canned tuna. Hot dogs. But you couldn't get her pills. She paced the room, wringing her hands. She begged him. He stated at the television. Something had to be done. So you walked in front of the TV, stood in front of it boldly, in fact. God, you were brave. My mothet needs her pills, you said. Her pills? he said. Yes, you said. Move it, he said, ctaning his neck. She gets sick without them. We have to go and find the guy who sells them. Get. Out. Of. The. Way. He taised the back of his hand, his eyes still on the TV. No, you said. A guy, he said. He turned toward her. A guy? His eyes widened and he stood. prismmagazine.ca 11 Come on, now. I ain't left this room, your mom said, her body shaking, uncontrollable. He caught her around the neck with his enormous hand, tossed her down like a rag doll. You realized that you were the instigator. But all you could do was stand by and watch as he brought his booted foot into her face. Then her terrible noise, a descending scale: No. No. No. No. No. Blood. The owner of the motel knocking. He was going to call the cops. At the mention of cops, your mom's pursuer got into his truck and fishtailed away. What beautiful strategy. But that's the irony, isn't it? You only see the solutions to her problems after the fact. (You could have taken a few of her pills before they ran out and slipped them into his whiskey. You could have called the cops yourself from the payphone at the gas station. Of coutse, your mom might have been busted, too, but maybe that's better than a kick in the face.) The nurses ask if she's raking any medications. Nope, she says. After she answers each question, the nurses look at you. You nod in agreement no matter what you mom says. You're coming to understand that nurses hear this shit all the time. They accept the lies because they know if they persist you might be separated, and she's all you've got. That's what their eyes really ask: Do you want to keep playing? Are you sure, sweetie? PINKY Also known as The Ambusher, he's sneaky, the one you don't suspect. He cuts corners, misdirects, plays hard ball. Still, he's easy to manipulate, responds more often than the others to head-faking: jiggle the joystick back and forth rapidly and he can't figure out where she's going. Take this guy in the Porsche. He wakes you by reaching into the backseat and tapping your leg with one finger. He's afraid to touch you. He's young. His hair is slicked back with gel. He's wearing a pink shirt with a small alligator embroidered on it. In most of the places you've been, he'd get his ass kicked for that. Faggot. College boy. He's slumming and you know it. He's not used to this kind of hassle, any kind of hassle from these bitches, as he calls them when he's playing tough. Kids? They're something he'll discuss only with girls who come from the right sorority. He doesn't have the skills to negotiate your exit, and you take full advantage of this chance to make him squirm. You rub your eyes like a much younger child and say, Mommy? Wanna give her some change for the video games? your mom suggests. She loves to play. Don't you sweetie? She's pretending, old head-faker herself. You can tell she's ripshit at you, but class is class, even here in the patking lot outside of The Wildcats Club. The worse you make this guy feel, the more cash he's going to pony up. He fumbles in his wallet, hands you a twenty. It gives your mom a chance to see how much he's holding. Of course, any strategy can backfire, usually due to minot input flaws. Your mom has lost out on mote than one trick because you fucked with his precious little head. Once in 12 PRISM 50:4 awhile, you're a few frames behind, and a seemingly innocuous or confused ghost turns on her. INKY He's the shy kind—or so they say. In truth, his behavior is erratic, his programming based on the movements of the other ghosts. At first, you didn't understand that Inky isn't blue, he's cyan. A seemingly minor distinction, but you kept running her into him and expecting her to live. The thing is, once in awhile there's a guy in one of these bars you actually like. Usually, it's someone who takes a real interest in your playing. After leaving your mom and College Boy in the parking lot and walking into the decrepit brick building that is Wildcats, you encounter a dreamboat like this. He sidles up as you're expertly flipping boards, tests his hand on top of the machine, exposing a tattooed arm. Some of the tattoos are characters from the Saturday morning cartoons you watch on motel room TVs while you wait for her to wake up. Some are weapons: on his forearm the dagger in its sheath seems' so real you could pull it out. Mind if I watch? he asks. You shrug, but you widen your stance, get ready to rip it up. You're better at the game than any kid your age, better than anyone else you've seen play. Sometimes you get a decent crowd built up behind you, cheering as you push your score higher and higher, write your initials in over those of locals who are twice your age. By the time your mom comes in, you and Tattoos are going at it two-player, fighting to the death. When it's his turn, your mom pulls you aside, winks at you. She fans out the bills she took from College Boy's wallet and then quickly tucks them into her shirt. It's a lot of money. Maybe too much. You shake your head, squint yout eyes. I left plenty. He won't even notice, she reassures. He's on his way home now, anyway. At least you're getting a real meal tonight, a motel room where you can shower off the road. So who's your friend? she asks. He turns and looks at her then, drops the joystick so that sad music plays. You look at the screen. That's one less life you'll have to work with when he walks away. ACT II — THE CHASE Rather than shaking the joystick immediately and maniacally to fake out a ghost, an advanced player will simply turn quickly in a false direction, then turn back. Once, smooth, and final. That's what we call mad skillage. She says a btisk hello to Tattoos. Then she walks ovet to the bar, orders herself a beer and a hot pretzel. He's deflated, offers you another quarter. No thanks, you say. Your mom pops her pill, which means she's going to play the floor. The bigger the wad of cash, the more desperate she feels, just like having a big score makes you want to keep playing. She always thinks if she can make enough for tonight without cracking into her big score, the two of you will be able to use it to get a real place, settle down and be a family. prismmagazine.ca 13 Tattoos turns away, starts to walk toward the jukebox. Then, he turns, heads to the bar. She looks at him like he's the only thing she cares about on earth. She'll look at the next guy the same way. And then the next. It seems like she likes the chase, I know. But trust me: she's really just trying to eat. TIPS! PATTERNS & HOLDS Some players of the original Pacman devised patterns by which they could always clear the screen without getting killed. Then they played by pattern alone, their satisfaction derived from perfect execution, not the adrenaline of the chase. But the ghosts in Ms. Pacman also go through periods of random movement, which in your opinion is the real genius of the game. Of course, it nevet hurts to have a field of approach in mind—as long as you don't count on it. In every Flying J there's a shower stall that locks. It's usually to the left of the bathrooms. In many bars, you can detour through the stockroom if you watch the tender carefully to figure out where it is. If you're small enough, you can use the space behind the bar as a warp tunnel and they forgive you. People just think you ate lost. The ladies room is a good bet, too, but don't get caught in there alone. Find any older woman to stand near. Best if she's local. She'll tell him to step off, you're a baby. In most states, fire laws require multiple exits. If the building is up to code, they're well-marked. But remember that most of the bars you end up in aren't up to code. Worst-case scenario, you can always wait in the back alley neat the dumpstet. No one ever looks there. This is a hold, a rare place in which if you keep still, they can't see you. That's where you are when College Boy drags your mom out the backdoor by her hair, Tattoos in hot pursuit. ACT III — JUNIOR Bitch stole three hundred dollars! College Boy screams in an unexpectedly high-pitched voice. Three hundred dollars. She's gone mad, you think. It seemed like a lot when she fanned it out in front of you, but not that much. Of course he noticed it was missing. She spits in his face. Score one for her. He shakes her hard, kicks her legs out from under her. She struggles to get away from him, but his grip is tight. Mascara runs down her cheeks. Tattoos cracks his knuckles, gets up in College Boy's spitty face while he's wiping it and says, I don't give a shit. She's with me, now, and don't nobody— What? College Boy shrieks in that tetrible cricket voice. You think this whore is yours? He laughs. Buddy, get real. That's the whole idea of a whore! She ain't never yours. Tattoos raises his fist to hit College Boy, then pauses. He's heard what College Boy is saying. He shakes his head, pulls his hand back over his hair, and then tucks it in his pocket. He looks down at your mom writhing on the ground between them. Might as well get your money's worth, I guess, Tattoos says. They meet. They make a sweet lover's romp across the screen. Then, a stork flies over them and drops a bundle, out of which emerges a baby Pac. They look at this baby in fascination and awe. A new maze is introduced. Even casual players will tell you that the so-called "junior mazes" are the hardest. 14 PRISM 50:4 You have to do something. So you wriggle from your position. They don't notice you standing there clenching your fists as they begin to tear at her halter-top. You aren't strong enough to stop them with your bare hands. So you search for a weapon. You find a small pile of bricks that have slid out of the wall near the dumpster. You grab one. You walk toward them holding it over your head like the goddamned Statue of Liberty. Liberty, my ass. Every damned thing's a fight. Hey assholes! you say, letting your voice reverberate off the back of the building. They look at you, theit faces unholy. They let your fierce form register. Tattoos leaps back, as if he's caught himself at something he didn't know he was doing. He begins his retreat. But College Boy gets on top of your mom and says: Whatcha gonna do, little girl? Smash me with a brick? Smash us both? Nope, you say. I'm gonna smash your car. With that you take off running. His car is easy to find in the parking lot there among pickups and rustbuckets. You stand before it. You almost stop yourself because it's so beautiful, so delicate. But you can't let him call your bluff. So you let her rip. The brick sails thtough the windshield, broken glass spills onto those fine leather seats, and a wailing alarm fills the night. He comes running around the building, his face shining as pink as his shirt in the streetlamp, his mouth open in a scream you can't hear over the Potsche. You tear down the street with him in hot pursuit. But you're younger and faster. It's a minor triumph, really, but you'll remember it fondly, your feet pounding the cracked sidewalks, the graveled alleyways, his panting and footsteps fading. You head back, gathet your mom. Doubling back to collect what you've missed is a move you've been practicing for years. It's saved her skin before. You drag her down side streets toward the highway. You tell her to stick out her thumb. A FREE LIFE It's the best noise: the ding! ding! ding! ofhaving earned a free life. Ten thousand points, and you can finally relax. And the days you spend in that particular motel room are glorious, filled with Western movies, Big Macs and chocolate shakes, thick sleep. Your mom takes long baths, pulls herself together. College Boy is two states away now, and in her life, distance is the time that heals. It's exciting just how free you are, the ways in which your life is nowhere near average. But this is also true: the mote lives you have, the longer you stay in the game. The price of freedom is that anything can happen anytime; there are no rules. Your mom, she's got a real habit of squandering any kind of windfall. Three days in your thirty-dollar room and she puts the rest of her hard-won cash in her veins. Then she's off and running for the next score. HATE GAME Every once in awhile you play to kill, crash her into every ghost on the screen, avoiding all protection. Other players do this once they've already screwed up, as a way to get to the end faster so they can start again, work toward a high score. You do this to see just how fast, how often, wanton risk leads to death. Sometimes it takes longer than you think, but prismmagazine.ca 15 it always happens eventually. It's 1987. Talk of risk and protection has made its way to the middle of the country. And your mom, well, she's the poster-child for fluid-swapping fuckups everywhere. TIPS: CORNERING You're taller than your mom by the time you'te twelve. You can't watch her as well as you should anymore because you have to watch yourself, too. When you come into the bar, they stare at you. You learn to stare back, unafraid. Thanks to your patterning days, you always feel sure you can escape if you need to. But only some of it's pattern. A good deal of it is flow. Here is a key technique: start to turn before you arrive at an intersection. Doing so, you gain a few frames. This can help you avoid a situation that could cost you a life. Near New Orleans, you're on your way to find het when he holds up two shots and juts his chin at you. He mouths: Come here. Talk to me. You roll your eyes, though in all honesty, you'd love to take him up on the shot. It makes the evening pass faster, but it makes you sloppy, too. He looks hurt, mouths Please? You tip your head toward an empty table, start to walk towatd it. He nods, holds the shots above the heads of the crowd. He's not blue anymore. He's flickering. You turn suddenly to the right. He starts to make his way toward you. He's red, now. You turn again. He narrows his eyes, follows. The difference between you is that you'te looking ahead but he's just chasing. You wind your way around a table. You'll have to make a sharp turn to get to the hallway. By the time he gets to the table, you're in the bathroom, locked in a stall, safe but miserable because you're going to be playing this game all night. He pounds on the door. You don't answer. But he isn't giving up. He waits for his moment. Then he comes in, pounds on the stall. SUE Clyde was the orange ghost in Pacman; in Ms. Pacman, he's Sue. Sue does her own thing. For this, you admire her. Of course, you're mildly offended that they've given the stupidest and slowest ghost the gitl name. But whatever. The world is changing some if not enough. A couple of pixels to acknowledge that women can be dangerous, too. But they didn't even bother changing Clyde's looks, giving over just a few more pixels to a bow or a pair of heels. In the bathroom stall, your heart is pounding. Go away, you scream. Go away. Go away. He's yanking on the top of the door, making the cheap metal walls sway. Bitch, he screams. They have no othet word, it seems, and so you're lumped in. Suddenly there's a second male voice in that bathroom, saying, What the hell do you think you're doing in here? A scuffle ensues. You look beneath the door and see a pair of boots and a pair of heels. Curiosity gets the best of you. You open the doot a crack, peer out. A vety tall woman with thick arms has your pursuer by the collar of his jacket. She's 16 PRISM 50:4 shoved him up against the tampon machine. His eyes are wide. Listen motherfucker, a man's voice threatens from her throat, You keep your fucking pecker in your pants or I'll cut the fucking thing off. You got it? Yeah, he says, breathless, confused. You sure? Yeah, he says. She shoves him out the door, fierce. Then she looks at you, says in a honeyed voice: Jesus. A girl's got to have a place to go where they can't follow, huh? So you come to love the drag queens who work alongside your mom. They're like your mom, aftet all; they have the same sadnesses and smells, but when they hold you, comfort you, theit arms are both tender and sttong. They help you with yout hopeless hair. You and your mom stay for a few weeks in this particulat queen's trailer. She stays home with you some nights while yout mom goes out. She paints your nails and asks you questions with her beautiful, thick-lined mouth. Then she listens, her red-tipped fingers holding a Virginia Slim. One day you ask why she likes to dress up like a girl. Well, look at them, she says. I wouldn't want to dress like one of them. Would you want to dress like a boy? Sometimes, you say. Not for the same reasons, though. You wish you could walk the floor as a hunter, not a target, for a minute or two. Alright, then, she says. She takes you to the closet, roots around in the very back for a minute. She presents you with a dark blue suit, a white shirt, a tie. You put these on, and she pulls your hair back in a tight ponytail. You look at yourself. You laugh. She comes up beside you, places her arm on your shoulder while you camp it up, make muscles. She laughs, but then she's quiet, brushes your shoulders. You're handsome, she says sadly. She gazes steadily at you in the mirror. You look, too, suddenly serious. You see the threat of your body next to hers. You loosen the tie, begin to strip back down, eager to return to yourself. You ask why she's so sad. Her friends are dying. She's dying. She's the one who first tells your mom to get tested. Girl, she says. You still got a chance. PASSING THROUGH There's a 1 in 100 000 chance that a ghost will pass through her and leave her unharmed. It's all in how the program defines collision; thete are subtle coding flaws, or serendipities, you might say, that allow what appears to be a collision to register as a mere close call. But you're not sure if cells can be tricked like that. The most circumspect of playets know bettet than to count on something like this. Moderate risk-takers who pass-through once may actually take more risks for a while. Players who relish risk will even try to work this miracle into their patterns. Eventually, it catches up with them. You warn her. Everyone warns her. prismmagazine.ca 17 CRUISE ELROY But people rarely change. Nor do they vary from place to place much. The only thing different is that the game speeds up. The ghosts stop turning blue. They're always a threat. Take as a lesson in speed the trucker at the rest area off 1-70 where the last guy let you off with just enough for the candy machine. Standing there in the cold—or is it a dripping August heat that persists well past dark?—eating your melting Whatchamacallits and Doritos, pressing a beaded can of Coke to your sunburned forehead, you watch him walk from his rig to the men's room. Your mom's eating a Snickers and Salt & Vinegar Lay's, which she hands to you. She digs in her purse for a lipstick, smears her lips red, and goes in. The rest areas are the worst because there's nothing to do while you wait. But it takes all of thitty seconds. Your mom's played her cards right. She's convinced him to get her to the next town before she puts out. He shows you the bunk as if he's performing a public service. As if you might live under the illusion the ride is free. Though you appear to simply do as your mom says, take a nap, you stealthily flip the bedcovers so that what touches yout skin is the side that's never touched him. You don't watch your mom's hands as they sneak across the valley between her seat and his. He barrels down the road faster and faster and the lights make you dizzy. When you arrive in the patking lot of Harem, he flips a dollar bill at you. Of course, you're so good at the game by now, you never need more than a quatter to keep the game going all night. Now get lost, kid, huh? he says, like you and yout mom have nothing to do with each other. So you climb over her, get out. Another parking lot. Always a damned parking lot. You want to give up. But you've known fot years that you can't just stand there on the asphalt or the gravel in the rain or snow or heat. It's the fitst rule of survival, and if all else fails, it applies: keep moving. THE KILL SCREEN But even if you play the game perfectly, you will inevitably hit a series of screens with bugs in their programming. First, the board turns upside-down. Then it goes invisible. You don't know what you expected, but this isn't it. You thought maybe she'd finally get out of the maze. She'd be able to rest. You've long wondered whether the ghosts would simply disappear or maybe redeem themselves, start talking twelve-step programs and making amends, but they don't. They simply begin to chase her in places you can't even see. She hasn't been able to shake the cough that rattles deep in her chest. You lie beside her all night in the motel, your hand on her heart. You call the cab at first light. In the clinic, her face is pale and she's shaking when they call her name. You wait, your fingers tight on the edge of the chair. Finally, she emerges, rhat white slip in her hands like a flag of surrender. Our mother. She won't meet your eyes. Of course, your only recourse is to pretend you can still win, you can still get her through unharmed. You hang the joystick to the left, navigating her around the chairs and 18 PRISM 50:4 the magazine table. You pull her into your arms. As long as you can hold her, you think, she's not dying. She can't be dying. But through the prism of your sorrow it comes up red and flashing: GAME OVER prismmagazine.ca 19 Jen Currin FORM, MYSTERY AND THE GLASS EYE: THE 2012 PRISM POETRY CONTEST J_n a talk composed in the 1960s, but never given, the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote that the three qualities she admires most in poetry are accuracy, spontaneity, and mystery. Bishop defines accuracy in terms of imagery: "like something seen in a documentary movie." Spontaneity is "natural sounding...a good attack, a rapid line, tight rhythm." Mystery, appropriately, is never defined. However, Bishop gives a clue to what she might mean by "mystery" in one of the final patagraphs of the talk. She writes: Off and on I have wtitten out a poem called "Grandmother's Glass Eye" which should be about the problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rathet like the situation of the poet: the difficulty of combining the teal with the decidedly unreal; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye. Perhaps the "mystery" of the poem lies here: in the gap between the "real" and "unreal," the "natural" and "unnatural." Bishop seems to be saying that the real experience the poem gives the teadet ("sight") is at odds with the artificiality of the made poem, the words themselves ("the glass eye"). A poem makes a little world out of words, and when we read a poem, we enter a world. What we take with us when we leave that world is an experience: the mystery. A good poem gives us an experience that is larger than the language used to make it. Perhaps I am taking liberties with Bishop's ideas. Yet, the term "mystery," more so than the other two terms, begs for one to take such liberties. Still, I am left with many questions about my own and Bishop's use of the word "mystery" in relation to poetry. If this mystery is only inherent in the reader's experience of reading/imagining, as I've claimed above, then how to track the mysterious in the language, the movement of the poem itself? Mystety must also be part of artifice—mystery must also be the shine of the glass eye and its roving. A Accuracy. Spontaneity. Mystery. The three poems chosen as the winners for this year's contest all share these three important qualities. Each poem also makes interesting use of form, whether it is the end-stopped free verse of Susan Steudel's short lyric "Self-Portrait," the tightly controlled couplets of Kyeren Regehr's "Ghazal of Perpetual Motion," or Patricia Young's dictionary entty poem "Towards a List of Definitions According to My Scottish Mother." 20 PRISM 50:4 In the winning poem, "Self-Portrait" by Susan Steudel, mystery, accuracy, and spontaneity are all apparent in equal measure. The images in the poem are vividly accurate ("a bust sculpted from the artist's own frozen blood"), and the phtasing is what Bishop calls "spontaneous" (the "naturaf'-sounding repetition of "My client gets upset.../My client is sleeping," for example). But what about mystery? While the poem "tells," in that it is a series of declarative statements, these statements merely leave us with questions— they do not add up to a final epiphany or a finished narrative. The poem gives us just a glimpse of the world it speaks of. Rather than using linear logic, the poem leaps from line to line; why "writing from the hotel bathtub" after "prize for most original pumpkin"? Is the title telling us that this poem is an ars poetica, or does the title refer to the artist's blood sculpture? Such guessing is part of the delight of reading: the mystery of a good poem. Mystety, then, must lie (at least pattially) in what we don't know, in what the writer holds back—in what the poem makes us wonder about. The mystery of Kyeren Regehr's "Ghazal of Perpetual Motion" also depends upon the poem's use of leaps. The ghazal form—a series of seven to twelve (seven being standatd) couplets—is perfect for this. Each couplet is self-contained, so each reads like its own mini-poem, while still speaking to the central theme. (In this poem, the central theme is loss.) Ghazals are inherently nonlineat, and this allows the writer to leap from one image or statement to the next. In keeping with the ghazal form, Regehr's poem does not proceed linearly; we jump from "I have no patience for the repetition of history" to "Even starvation has a period of beauty." As readers, we never know what exactly is lost—a lover, a child, youth, memory itself? What is the connection between the (possibly dismembered) arm of the child in couplet one and the broken leg of the cat in couplet two? Do we need to know in order to appreciate the poem? Elizabeth Bishop atgues that "the poet doesn't have to be consistent." "Ghazal of Perpetual Motion," like most successful ghazals, is not bound by consistency: it leaves us, as does "Self-Portrait," with more questions than answers. I would like to extend Bishop's term "accuracy" to refer not only to the accuracy of the image, but to the accuracy of language, as this is a quality all three winning poems share. Each poem has been carefully crafted: there is not an unneeded or misplaced word. Brevity and concentration characterize both "Self-Portrait" and "Ghazal of Perpetual Motion," and Patricia Young's "Toward a List of Definitions According to My Scottish Mother" is as tightly packed as a dictionary entry. In fact, it is a list-as-dictionary-entry- as-prose-poem, but tathet than providing one definition, it gives us multiple, interlinked definitions: we must understand what a "blether" is to make sense of "bletherer." The mystery of this poem lies in its use of humor: humor always depends on an element of surprise, and in this poem, each definition leaves dangling threads of a joke. Many of these threads are picked up later, and we are surprised when we encounter them again in a different context. Yet, the final "punch line" is not final; it does not tie up all of the loose threads. We never learn what "haud yet wheesht" means; it is not clear why "bism" comes after "distillery"; we don't know who the mother (is it the mother?) threatens in the last line. prismmagazine.ca 21 Elizabeth Bishop wrote that her grandmother's glass eye "fascinated me as a child, and the idea of it has fascinated me all my life.. .Quite often the glass eye looked heavenward, or off at an angle, while the real eye looked at you." In their mysteries, these poems are able to look away from us and state directly at us at the same time. Read them and blink. 22 PRISM 50:4 Susan Steudel SELF-PORTRAIT Into the second bar of Satie you could tell. Today we visited the national pottraits. My favourite, a bust sculpted from the artist's own frozen blood. I took the prize for most original pumpkin. I am writing to you from the hotel bathtub. My client gets upset if I'm awake while he's sleeping. My client is sleeping. prismmagazine.ca 23 Susan Mersereau THE LIGHTS ON CANADA DAY Tt hat's what Gloria said. She works up at the 'Passage store but they btought her down here for the ten to six because so many of us were doing the three to eleven or the four to twelve or the four-thirty to twelve-thirty of the five to one for the fireworks. I was watching outside through the front windows, it was so dead and so hot in the store. Gloria was at the dtive-thru. Mary was doing the eleven to seven, so she was out back on her four forty-five. I said, "Is there an accident? Is it gonna blow?" It would be hard to tell, you know, if the refinery was really on fire, because it's sott of going on fire non-stop twenty-four seven all the time anyways. I know because I lived in Woodside all my life. I can see the stacks up along the harbour from my place, the ones with fire shooting out and most of the others that just have smoke, and there's one that's always got the hard black smoke coming out of it. And they're always going, I can tell you, I've lived here all my life. Gloria said, "Do you think we have enough hot cups?" She won't tell us straight to do something because she's not really a supervisor or anything and she knows it, but we always know what she means and I normally do it because she sucks up to the management. She's still trying to get ahead or something like that, I don't know, but Gloria will tell on you to Chetyl. First I saw three cops running outside over by the refinery. I went out back and got the cups like Gloria said. With Cheryl gone she technic'ly had seniority, you know, she's been working here for forever. But when I got back and looked out again, I saw more police over there, just past the Circumferential. I think four, five cars, plus a big cop van. I was shocked, like, "What's happening over there?" Cause if it blew, you know, we would just be gone. But Gloria was too busy wiping her drive-thtu monitor then. One time Mary said she's seen creatures coming out the stacks, giraffes and things, from the shape of the smoke. "Some days an elephant," she said. She nearly got fired a few shifts ago, Cheryl caught her smoking a joint with her boyfriend next to the parking lot. She told the owner and everything, but then they didn't fire her because technic'ly she wasn't on shift and technic'ly she wasn't on the store grounds either. Cheryl was mad, would've fired her if it were up to her, but Cheryl has to do what the uppet management says. Mary laughed about it, she doesn't care, it's not like she's got kids or any real responsibilities or anything, you know? What would it matter to a girl like that if she got fired from the store? It's not the fitst time I thought about the refinery exploding, but it was the first time I had a real, you know, physical reason, with all the cop lights and everything all surrounding it, for thinking it was maybe finally ready to go. And even on a regular day, to tell the truth, I sometimes think it must be bad, all that stuff going into the air, the real long pipe with the black smoke and all that. But it's always been there and I've lived here all my life and I seem fine. No cancer or anything in my family, you know, like they talk about on the TV. Even when the fog is thick as a cement wall, those fires cut right 24 PRISM 50:4 through, they're just always going steady all the time, night and day and night and day. There was just the two fellas in the store, practicing again for their Shakespeare play up at the centre. Nobody else wanted to come in, I guess, it was so hot, you know, with the sun getting in through all the windows and evetything. When I got on for the three to eleven, Gloria said that they'd been there since a while after she got on for the ten to six. "We can't give them more hot water even if they ask for it," she said. "Cheryl said that's always been the rule; they bought two medium teas at 11 and asked for two refills of hot water and that's the total maximum they're allowed so they have to buy another tea if they want more." "No problem," I said. I figured she would be there for only a couple more hours anyways, and I wasn't planning to make any trouble with Gloria. Those men didn't notice what was happening outside at first, either, only I did. They were doing their funny medieval talk too loud to see, repeating the same words over and over, pretending to tear up. It was some irritating after a half hour or so, you know what I mean? But no one else was in the store and I don't like to make trouble with anybody anyways, so. We get a lot of strange ones in here. All times of day, you know, there's the people who come down from the NS, we get a lot of those people from up the street. And mostly they're pretty good, I'm not saying they shouldn't come in. They've got just as much right, you know, I say. But Gloria, years ago when I was just starting at the store, she had one of them rob lief. Guy points his finget in his pocket like it's a gun, tells her to take out the money. Of course he was just off his meds, acting sctewy, but they transferred her shifts up to the 'Passage after that. It's a nicet store I always heard, though I never been, cleaner and newer and farther away from all the ones we get here. But mostly they're just a little off, you know, touched, and you get used to it once you've been at the store long enough. It could happen to me, I figure, but for the Gtace, you know what I mean? It's no reason to be going that extra long way, having to take a bus or something, to get up to the 'Passage store. The fireworks is always a crazy night. The families come from all over Dartmouth, they always want their coffees and apple danishes, hot chocolates, you know, fot all the kids and all that. By eight o'clock it's lined up out the door and around down near to Pleasant Street almost. Half the years they're cancelled anyways because it's too thick in the harbour. And the other half when they do them, they say it just looks likes green and red and blue fog and you can't see anything. But everybody comes out every year just the same, the kids and the teenagers and the grandparents and everybody all together. They come to the store and then they go over to find a good waiting spot ovet across along the water, hoping for the best I guess. Doesn't matter here, anyways, because they're behind, you know, out of view of the store. We can never see. But that afternoon it was just real quiet, a couple hours yet before the rush was gonna come in. "Gloria," I said. "Come look what's happening over at the refinery." She looked down at me from the drive-thru with her squished face, she goes, "That's not how we do the cups. Cheryl said." Forget the fireworks, I kept seeing burnt out bodies all across Woodside Dartmouth. "In my mind, you know what I mean, if that thing blew?" She at least came over to the counter then, saw all the cop cars. Usually you get promoted up pretty quick. Within the first yeat or two, you know, prismmagazine.ca 25 wherever you are, that's where you're at. I just got dayshift finally, myself, a couple months ago. When I saw that Cheryl put me on the schedule to work the fireworks, I figured she screwed up, so I went to her office and said, "Cheryl, I work dayshift now. I can't just work 'til eleven and then be back in for the six to two the next morning." And she looked at me for a minute like she didn't understand what I was saying—the way she likes to do. And then she said she needed me to work the three to eleven because of the crowd that comes in between seven and eleven when there's the fireworks. And I said, "Well that's okay then, but the next morning will be hard." And so she looked over the schedule again for a minute and then she changed it from the six to two to the eight to four. Eight is at least better than ttying to come in fot six after working the three to eleven fot the fireworks, you know what I mean? Cheryl's got a duplex out Westphal way, she and her husband bought it three years ago. She held a nice holiday party there for us this past Christmas, too, just before he left her. My place is a little on the cozy side, if you know what I mean, just a few blocks up near the highway, by the Circumferential there, but at least I don't have to be driving in, spending all my tips on gas to get into the store every day, you know? Or on a pass like Gloria, I used to see her though the front windows out there waiting for the number 60 for close to an hour after her six-thirty to two-thirty was over, and me working the three to eleven back then. Anyways, I've got Robbie. He comes down to see me a couple times a week, and I don't worry about him leaving because we're not really together or anything. He's not into that and he's been really clear about it. I wouldn't want a serious thing with Robbie anyway, even if he wanted it, because he really likes to drink. And my dad drank, you know, I don't want anything to do with that. But Robbie's a good comfort a couple days a week or once a week or every other week or whenever he comes by. We usually get some fish and chips from up at the store by my place. I'm saving up for my family, my real husband once he comes along, I want to be prepared. I got my living room all done up, and my kitchen'll soon be there, there's two more chaits to pay off and I'll have the set. But anyways, Mary was out back on her break and the others weren't scheduled to come in until a little closet to the rush, so it was just me and then Gloria who first saw all the cop cars turning in and starting to line up across the street, right from the ferry terminal on up to the refinery. We heard sirens further up the road and we put our faces to the front door and looked up the street and there were like ten police cars over by the watet there. I really staffed to feat for us, I feared for all our lives. "Because I just don't know," I said, "how you'd know if it was on fife until the whole thing blew up of something, you know?" My neck was so wet, I undid my collat, but Gloria seemed to be trying to close hers more, you know, and pushing her shirt into hef waist. I didn't know how she could stand the heat coming in those windows. It's like the Halifax Explosion we learn about in ouf school days, you know what I'm saying? The refinery would be the same thing, flattening Woodside away all together, and killing everybody up at the centre and the mental hospital or wherever, blinding out theif eyeballs and all that. "If it's got a good thythm coming out," Mary said once, "I've seen a hippo climb out of the stack and then disappear in the air just as its tail is coming out. And then the same hippo climbs out fight after it." She just went on, you know. "And then anothef and anothef, until theie's a whole parade of them up there slowly fading into the sky." 26 PRISM 50:4 I told her, "It's an oil refinery, Mary. And that's just old oil smoke coming out of it." We were looking and there were like fifteen police cars, plus some vans, three or four of'em at least. And I was thinking, "If that refinery blows up, we're gone, there's no way." It felt like a real life and death situation, you know, before we could see what it really was. He was wearing a trench coat. Just one man. Using it to hide the rod, you know, 'cause you're not supposed to fish down there. You can't get a permit for that area. I know, because my dad, years ago, he wanted to go down there and they were like, "You can't do it. You can't get a permit for this area." You have to go farthet up, to the 'Passage, or other areas even farther away from Woodside. So I guess this guy was wearing a trench coat to hide the rod, and I heard later that somebody had saw his arms over across his waist like he was hiding something and they figured it was a shotgun of something and they called the cops. The police were maybe especially on guard with it being Canada Day and everything, I don't know, and maybe there was an overflow of them at the station, you know, just waiting for the tush like we were at the store. That's why they treated it like a serious and potential violent situation, crowding all theif flashing lights on him and all that, pointing all theif guns at that one fool man. When I have my own kids I won't be working here much anyways. I want to be at home with my little ones, make their sandwiches for school and everything. I might have to do part-time for a while, the seven to noon or something, I'm not afraid of a little wofk, that's not how I was raised. But some day I'll bring my own children in here on Canada Day and buy them chocolate donuts for the fireworks. Hot chocolate and cherry danishes and the whole works. Gloria, though. I don't know what she's gonna do. She's all alone, you know, and she's already old, at least forty-one or something, and looking even older, forty-eight or forty-nine. Mary and some of the other girls call her "cat's ass lips" behind her back. I don't do that, myself, though it's true. They should put Gloria's wrinkled-up mouth on those cigarette packages if they really want to, you know, defer people from smoking. But I shouldn't talk. I still smoke a few, myself, just five or seven extfa lights a day, you know, and I'll quit once I'm not working at the store anymore and once I get pregnant and everything. It's just while I'm here at the store. We couldn't see it but we heard it—bang!—a warning shot straight up into the air. Holy smokes. They were yelling for the man to put his gun down. I wondered if they were gonna shoot him right there, you know? And we couldn't even believe it. The two theatre fellas finally saw that something was happening that's more important than theif crying and bawling in the corner, and they turned to look out of the front windows too. He wasn't even doing anything, just trying to catch a few fish for his supper. Not that I'd eat any fish that came stfaight out of the hatbour here, you know, because the flushes all go directly into it. But I do like the fish 'n chips near my place. Five dollars and you get two pieces and fries and the coleslaw and the whole works. It's not as good as the Snack Bar up by the ferry terminal that people all go on about, but that's a five-minute walk away and where I go is right near my place. Gloria's buzzer was going off something crazy. Beep! But we had to keep watching what was going on. And that man. He was on his knees and he put his arms up. Beep! Beep! He was crying and everything, and his fishing rod fell out of the trench coat when he came down, begging for his life, you know. You could see it. Gloria and I could see it, prismmagazine.ca 27 even through that whole mess of fed and blue and white flashing lights. And I was thinking, "Are they going to shoot that man? Are they gonna shoot him tight there and take his life out just for tfying to fish without a permit?" Beep! "Helloooooo!" someone was saying into the drive-thtu speaker, not seeing what was happening right behind them. But we couldn't move. That man went down right on his face. We couldn't hear him, but we could tell he was crying like a child and asking the cops not to kill him. Beep! "Is anybody home?" The cops started to put theif guns away then, you know, statted to see what was the teal situation. With the fishing rod and not a gun. And soon after, all the cats turned off their lights and started making theif way back out onto Pleasant street, back to the station, down the Circumferential. I was dripping in my uniform, all that hot afternoon sun on me coming through the windows, and I pulled out the middle of my shirt to fan some air, just to cool down for a second, you know? Gloria looked at me, and from her big eyebrows pushed together and her lips squished even tightef than a cat's behind, I thought she was gonna say something about what we just saw. But instead she just looked down at my shirt, she said, "We could be secretly inspected at any time." Like those two men hollering and pretend-crying over in the corner all afternoon were really there to inspect our shirts, or the number of rows of hot cups in the cupboard, you know what I mean? Anyways, she went back over to the drive-thtu window like nothing just happened at all. "Welcome to the drive-thru. This is Gloria here." And I did tuck in a little, since she's technic'ly got seniority and everything, but it was so hot in the store, you know? So it was technic'ly hardly nothing at all in the end, nothing compared to what we get in here sometimes. Like the lady who poured out her coffee all over my till one time for no reason, I had to talk to the cops that time, Cheryl banned her. I can tell you, too, it can get some dirty in here with all those fireworks people coming in, and the people from up at the NS and everything. They do all kinds of crazy stuff in the washrooms, you know, even on the best of nights. Feces and all that all up on the walls one time—Gloria took care of it. It was in front of Cheryl and I figure she thought she'd get some extra points or whatevef for doing it, I don't know, I don't care about that stuff, myself. I keep my head down, you know, do my job, take my cheque and get home. I'd like to know, though, what makes people do ctazy stuff like that. You know? Where does it come from? But I've got no problems with anybody, really. And I don't even want to be supervisor. An extta twenty-five cents an hour? Fifty cents? It's not worth it, you know, for all the extra responsibility a supervisor has got on them. But I feel sorry for Gloria because she's never gonna get what she wants, no matter how many feces walls she wipes up or how fast she is at getting the dfive-thtu orders, or ironing her shirt and tucking it fight into her pantyhose, you know what I'm saying? The othet gifls came in all at once, it seemed like, two for the five to eleven, one for the five to midnight, two for the five to one, two for the six to two. Gloria said, "Everything is stocked here and clean." And she just left like that. Soon the store was getting pretty lined up with people, and none of them knowing, you know, what had just happened actoss the street not an houf ago at quaftef to five, how the cops came in after that man because he didn't have a petmit, just like my dad that 28 PRISM 50:4 long time ago. They were lined up here good that night, the kids wete so worked up—"When's it gonna start? Have they started yet? Are we missing it? We're missing it!" I heard it was the best fireworks we ever had, the sky stayed cleat for once and everything. I guess there was even those ones that go up and fall partway down and then go up again. But fot those fifteen minutes, you know, the store was just a ghost town. Pow pow—pop! Me and the girls went over to the side windows, tried to see what we could. But we couldn't see any bit of them from the store. Zip zap. Pow pop! Pish pish pish. Boop bopp! Our faces were pushed right into the glass, trying to stretch enough to see further into the hafbour. Pop and pop-pop. Pow pow pop-pow! But you never can see them from the store, even on a miracle clear night like this one was. For myself, with that noise, you know, my mind was gone back to that afternoon, all those burned up bodies and everything, you know? The mothers and fathers and grandparents and the kids and everybody all messed up and on fire, all across right all the way down Pleasant Street, it was all I could see. Quartet past eleven I finally got off, the fog'd finally come in from the ocean of coutse, and I stafted walking along Pleasant Street. I was just minding my own, you know, thinking how the store by my place would still be open for another forty minutes and I could get the fish 'n chips special, just like I used to do when I normally did the three to eleven. In the fog the refinery lights always look even bfightei, more spread out, so the whole sky looks like it could be on fire. I imagine, you know, the pipes would of broke apart like metal splinters or something and flown over the air and gone right through people through their chests, with them still sitting right in their cars, you know what I mean? Or even through the two Shakespeare fellas sitting in the corner there in the store, or even me or Gloria, or Mary out back on hef four forty-five, you know? If that refinery had just blown right up. When I was a little child, I used to follow the stacks to see where they started, there must be technic'ly a hundred of them at least. But I could never tell, still can't. I end up just getting dizzy, you know, trying to follow that mess of pipes, all mixed in with each other and everything. It's a confusing mess of pipes and stacks, I can tell you, makes no sense to me how it works. So I was just walking home like that when I see the shape of someone against the lights, sitting on the curb in the dark. It was Gloria sitting there, almost in the parking lot beside the refinery. Holy smokes, you know, 'cause she must've been out there for something like six and a half hours—almost a whole shift's worth. I walked over slow, I said, "Gloria, what's going on?" Because she was crying and I have never seen her cry, not even after the robbery that time. She was looking up at the refinery. "Did you stay to see the fireworks?" I asked her, but Gloria didn't say anything, she just kept looking. "Everybody said they were real good this yeat. With the ones that go up and down and then partway back up again." I didn't even know what to do, you know, and I couldn't leave her there like that, I'm not like that, so I said, "Gloria, do you want a smoke?" I sat down and lit one and handed it to her. She took a long dtag and handed it back to me. She started to say something then. I could hardly make her out, you know, but I knew the words because I had heard them all afternoon, too. prismmagazine.ca 29 "O, let me not be mad. Not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper. I would not be mad! O, let me not be mad." "Gloria," I said. "You're okay. You're not one of them ones." But it scared me how she kept looking at those lights. I said, "Are you working in the morning?" And Gloria said, "Six to two. Up at the 'Passage." "You should take a cab," I told her. "It'll be so hard in the morning." "It don't matter." We each took another drag from the cigarette. "Is it any better up there?" I asked hef. "Up at the 'Passage, is it any easief there?" "No," she said. "You know, Cheryl had me on the schedule for the six to two tomorrow, too. But I talked to her and she changed it to the eight to four. Still early but not as bad, you know, as the six to two. It's hard when they put you on the schedule for three to eleven when you're on dayshift now and they don't tell you and then they put you on the six to two oi the seven to three or even the eight to four the very next morning, it's hard, you know what I mean?" Glofia said, "Yes, I know." That's what she said. She was looking up at the those pipes, the ones with fife and all the ones with smoke and one with the hatd black smoke coming out of it. Just the same stinky old burned-off oil poisoning up the aif and getting into us every day, you know, through our uniforms our bones, like always. But with her staring up there, and the lights burning so orange in the fog and all the lights that happened all that day, I don't know, but I still felt awful afraid. I can tell you, I feared, then, for my whole life. 30 PRISM 50:4 Kyeren Regehr GHAZAL OF PERPETUAL MOTION We toss everything in its path—our eye teeth, the TV remotes, our amber throats, the tender white arm of a child. Our calico cat drags its back leg home after a disagreement, again. I have no patience for the repetition of history. The garland maker must wipe hef fingers regularly, or each white flower will be stained with its own pollen. Lopsided heart-shaped leaves begin to appear on the sidewalks. One of us should gather these belated yellow valentines. What I love: decanter it for the snowy months. It takes time to detect that rusty base note of neglect. Abscission begins when trees wean their leaves off chlorophyll and water- even starvation has a period of beauty. I declare causality, but all that can really be said is that one event follows another, follows anothef. prismmagazine.ca 31 Andrew Forbes IN THE FOOTHILLS IVlarty came down out of the mountains in early March trailing a string of bad decisions. He started high up in the Rockies and swept into Calgary, coasting at great speed, almost like his brake lines had been cut. I was working in a big sporting goods store, selling skis and running shoes and golf clubs. I had been thinking about heading back to Ontario, but that would've required putting my tail between my legs, and I wasn't ready for that just yet. He'd been married to my sister for a short time, before she cracked up. My mothei still says Eileen's "taken ill." Most recently Marty had been in Hundred Mile House, doing I don't know what, exactly. The details were vague. Before that he'd been in Vancouver. Trouble trailed him like a wake; bad ideas poured off him like a stench. Every time I saw him he was driving a different car. Not new cats, but different ones. This time it was a blue Cavalier with lightning bolts down the sides. Since he and Eileen split and she walked herself into an emefgency room wearing a nightgown, Mafty has drifted like pollen from place to place, his welding papers in his back pocket. He'd stay for a time, use up his luck, then move on to the next town. He'd done like that after he got out of the Air Force at Cold Lake, but then he met Eileen and they had a couple of years where they imitated nofmal people, settled in one place, rented a nice house east of the city. They stayed in nights. Then real colours began to show through and things went haywire, like I'd felt they would. Since then he and I have kept in touch, in a fashion, and all the while I've battled feelings of guilt for some sort of disloyalty to my sister. But then again I have since childhood suspected my sistet to be the cause of all bad things. Matty is big. Not obese, just large, built on a different scale than most human beings. He stands about 6'4", and his limbs are like telephone poles. His torso is like the front of a transport truck, and on his feet he wears a size 13 or 14 pair of boots. When he dtinks, which he often does, it's usually from something big, a jat or a big plastic travel coffee mug. He drinks vodka mostly, Russians of Sctewdrivers. Drinks them like watet. Sometimes the only way you can tell he's on his way down is that his face and neck get beet red. Eventually he just collapses. Finds a bed of a sofa and you can forget about Marty for 12 hours or so. The thing with Matty is, when he comes to stay with you, there's no way of knowing how long he'll be there. He arrived on a Saturday afternoon and immediately went to sleep on the futon in the other room, the room that had been empty since my roommate skipped out on me. Marty stayed there until midday Sunday. I could hear him snoring. Once or twice in the night I heatd him get up to use the washroom, a bear of a man, a lumberjack, shaking the whole apartment as he moved, then planting his feet before the toilet and uncofking a tofrent of piss. Watef running, then slow, heavy footsteps back down the hallway, the sound of a California redwood being felled as he tumbled back into bed, and then nothing, just faint sawing, for hours and hours thereafter. 32 PRISM 50:4 A chinook had followed Marty down from the hills, and Sunday was a warm, springy day, a breeze alive with smells where the day before it had been cold and dead. By Sunday noon it was a beaut of a day, the sun at its full strength, the sound of watet running off the roofs, everything slick. I could sit at my window and watch the snowbanks below melting like ice cubes in an empty glass. I'd opened the windows and was listening to CCR when Marty emerged from the second bedroom. I always listen to CCR when winter turns to spring, and even if this was a false beginning, I needed to feel good about things after the wintef I'd had. "What in the hell are you doing," he asked me. "Polishing my boots," I said. I was standing hunched ovef the table where I'd spread out newspapers, some spare rags, and an old shoebox containing my polish kit: a tin of polish, two brushes and a shining rag. "Look at you, youf highness!" "Sunday," I said. "Every Sunday I polish my boots. My dad used to do it." "I see," he said, then looked around, sniffed and rubbed his stomach. The smell of polish in his nose must have reminded him of the smell of food. "Got any vittles here?" he asked. "Sure, yeah. Cereal, toast..." "Eggs? Bacon? Potatoes?" "Yeah," I said, "though the potatoes might have sprouted." "Alright then, you do your thing, I'll cook." And he did. He went to work in my pathetic little kitchen, and with a cutting board, a dull knife and a single fry pan he beavered away until he had made us a rich spread of eggs and bacon, toast, beans, warm stewed tomatoes. When my plate was empty he refilled it. Only once I was done did Marty sit down and eat. He had thirds, finished everything. I had forgotten this about Marty, that he loved to spend time in the kitchen, and that Eileen nevet had to cook. By mid-afternoon, still full, we were sitting on the couch sharing my cigarettes, the sliding doot to the patio wide open to let in the sweet warm breeze. CCR had given way to Rush in the five-disc changet: Marty's choice. "What time do you work tomorrow?" Marty asked me. "One," I said. "One 'til close." "Good, then you can sleep in," he said, lighting another. "Why do I need to sleep in?" "Thete's a bar I think we should close tonight," he said. "Passed it on the way here." And I thought, why not? What's the worst that could happen to me, in the company of this man who'd cooked me such a generous meal, on a Sunday night in the foothills with the watm breath of springtime upon me? "Let's do that," I said. We took my truck, the truck I drove out to Alberta from Kingston, the truck that I lived in for two weeks until I found an apartment. It occurred to me that there was no definite plan as to what we might do with the truck, how we might get back to my apattment ot, failing that, where we would stay after this night of drinking. It's something I felt that we were actively not discussing, a thing floating between us. I kept returning to it in my head, but deciding that I shouldn't bring it up, because I felt like Marty was daring me to do just that, to be the responsible one, so that he could be proven, in a single chop, the opposite. prismmagazine.ca 33 Marty defined himself by these softs of oppositions. We drove west, stfaight toward the Rockies, which loomed puiple and holy before us, an unreal painted backdrop. The last of the sun was honey oozing between the peaks, and through it we moved slowly, lazily. In the middle distance the foothills burped up from the prairie, little practice runs, junior topography. That's where we were headed, to a place called the Starlite, located nowhere in patticulat, just a sign, a parking lot and a roadhouse. We stood in the patking lot, Matry and I, feeling—what? Apprehension? Excitement? It's likely, given what ttanspited later, that we were not feeling the same thing at that moment, though it felt for all the wotld that we were comrades, men linked by uneven pasts and a hope that the near future, namely this night, would prove to be a kind one. We leaned against the truck and did some damage to a six-pack libetated from my fridge. The light disappeared and the night came on and we watched two ot three tmcks pull in, theif drivers making their way to the Starlite's steel door with their heads down. My hair plastered down and my boots newly polished, I felt like a handsome devil. Maybe there'd be women inside, I thought. That's why I had come, for drinks and whatevet interesting faces this evening might invite in. The usual things. I assumed that's why Marty had brought us out there, an assumption I'd find to be false in due time. Marty specialized in broken women: those who'd known bad men, bad times, those who'd become familiar with the youth justice system. That's what drew him to my sistet, of course. She hadn't yet gone off the fails, but he saw something in hef. Marty would ride their momentum for a time, have some laughs, then jump off before things completely fell apaft. He had a knack for it. When you were riding alongside Marty, you would meet women who quickly began to tell you all about themselves—everything, in one sitting— and you'd hear some crazy rhings. Then they'd want you to commend them on theif strength, given all they'd endured. Sometimes I'd say something along the lines of, "Well, we've all got trouble, sweetness, but we don't necessarily go blabbing it to the first person we meet in a bar." This stance had, on more than one occasion, hurt Marty's chances with cerrain women, and he openly discouraged me from adopting it, or at least voicing it. I'd try to comply, if only because part of me felt that I owed Marty something. An explanation on that one: while duck hunting with borrowed guns three years earlier, I broke my tibia galloping down a slope toward the spot we'd selected, on the rim of a broad marsh. Marty tied a stick to my leg and then put me on his shoulder and carried me three kilometres back to the tfuck. He let me dtain the vodka from his flask while he drove me to the hospital. An episode like that can endeat a person to you, even in the face of theif obvious shortcomings. I was remembering all this as we stood outside the Starlite. I could hear the wind, which had taken on a coolness I didn't welcome, and I could hear the bar's sign buzzing. Far out in the night I could heaf tfaffic on the highway, ttansports moving between Calgary and the mountains, and Vancouver beyond that, though at that moment the road in front of us was empty. "Don't see his truck," Marty muttered, lifting his bottle to his lips. "Whose truck?" I asked, but Mafty was pitching his bottle across the gritty patking lot and stiiding towafd the Statlite's front door. If he heard me he ignored the question. Inside it was dafk and musty with a checkerboard linoleum floor that might once have been black and white, but had gone grey and yellow many years ago. There were about 34 PRISM 50:4 a dozen patrons scattered about, most of them in high-backed booths, while three men in plaid shirts and leather vests slumped over the bar. The walls were wood panelled, but the chintzy variety of wood panelling, the kind your dad might have installed in your basement. It was warped in several spots. It had been a year or two since they'd got rid of smoking everywhere, but you could still smell the stale tobacco coming out of the Starlite's every plank and fibre. I imagined the bar stools' stuffing exhaling it every time another ass applied pressure to them. Marty strode to the bat and took a stool, and I followed. The man behind the bat wasn't very interested in our being there. He was having a conversation with one of the other men sitting at the bat. But in a moment he came to us and we otdered beers. Above the bartender's head a small television perched on a wobbly looking shelf played a hockey game. The Flames were in L.A. The men at the bar were looking up at that through theit eyebrows. We slumped over the bar and half watched the hockey game and drank beer for an hour or so. There wasn't much conversation between us. Just quiet drinking. Then Marty stood up and excused himself to the men's. I watched him go in the mirror over the bar. Then a moment later I watched that big steel doot open and let in a blast of cool ait. Riding it were a strange pair, a man and a woman, she taller than him, who nodded to the bartender, then walked past me to a booth in the corner. As they passed me I could smell them: she wore flowery perfume, and he smelled sourly and pungently of pot. They took off theit coats and hung them on hooks neat the mouth of theit booth. Then the man came to the bar, chatted with the keeper, and got them a pitcher of beer and a couple of glasses. The man wore a knit Rastafarian hat, green, yellow, red, beneath which lay a long, dark ponytail. He wore an open plaid shirt with a black t-shirt beneath, from the front of which smiled Mr. Bob Marley. The woman was tall and thin. If they were to make a movie about this whole incident they'd probably cast Katherine Heigl to play her, and that could work, but only if Katherine Heigl was falling apart a bit. The skin of her face was sagging a little, her elbows were bony, and her hair looked sort of like straw. But she was still pretty, there was no seeing around that. Probably as pretty or prettier a woman as either Marty or I would ever know again. She looked nice in her jeans, and she was a good three or four inches taller than Bob Marley. It was obvious to everyone present that out little Bob was punching well above his weight. They settled into their booth and I more or less forgot about them. Matty was taking his sweet time, I thought, and a moment later I saw the light leak out from the bathroom door as it swung open. Marty's path back to our stools took him right by Marley and Broken Katherine, and on the way by he said, loud enough for the whole bat to hear, "Good to see you again, asshole!" Why would he have done that? I wondered. Marty fell down onto his stool and I could smell the drink on him. I realized that he'd lapped me several times over in terms of consumption. He was close to drunk; if he wasn't already there, he was on the outskirts. I thought maybe that had something to do with his greeting to Bob Matley. "How do you feel tonight?" he boomed at me. "I feel pretty good, Marty," I said. prismmagazine.ca 35 "That's good. That's frickin' good," he said. "I gotta say, though, our evening might be about to change." "How so, Marty?" "I might have to beat that little guy to death," he said, and he was smiling broadly. His face was red, his ears and his neck. Something was facing through him. "Why's that, Mafty?" "Oh, that don't frickin' mattef now," he said, and he swivelled around to face the bar. He was finishing a beer and then he otdered a shot of vodka. Then a second. "You want anything?" he asked me, but I just tilted my half-full beer glass to show its contents. "Fair enough," he said. Aftef a third shot he spun back around and faced the cofner where the couple sat. He was looking at them over my shoulder and grinning. He watched them a moment and he moved his mouth like he was looking for something to say. He chuckled to himself. "You need a ladder to kiss her?" he shouted. "Fuck you," someone shouted back, but it didn't seem to me that it was Marley. He might have a defender in this, I remember thinking. "How do you fuck her? Marty shouted to the whole barroom. I wished to hide then in my glass of beer. "Marty," I asked, "do you know those two?" "I might've ran into them before. Here." Then he laughed like a clown might before it touches you in the funhouse. "On the way into town, am I fight?" I asked. "Sure, sure," Marty said. Then he shouted, "Look at him! Look at you! You look like her kid brothef!" The couple was ttying their best to ignore all of this. I don't imagine they were successful. Everyone else in the Starlite had gone quiet, like villagers waiting for a bombing run to end. "You don't talk much," he said to me. "I don't have much to say," I responded. "Not much important, anyway. I don't really know what's going on here." "What's frickin' going on here is that I stopped by for a sip on Saturday afternoon, stopped right here at this establishment, and I was enjoying myself, talking to blondie there. Seemed to me we were getting on great. Then her fella there comes in and starts saying some unkind things, and I got agitated because it seemed to me that if he and I were laid out on a buffet, at best he'd be an appetizer, where I'd be the main coutse. I could see she might feel that way too, and I was about to do something about it when I was advised that the gentleman a few stools down was a police officer. That changed my plans somewhat. So I said I'd come back and we'd finish." "And you brought me." "You weren't busy, were you?" "Suppose not." Aftef Marty's speech I decided I'd have a double Canadian Club, no ice, and as I ordered that I happened to glance in the mirror and notice theif booth had gone empty. Then I heafd a microsecond of shouting. My jaw went electric and the stool I'd been sitting on was suddenly beside and above me. Marty's head was nearly staved in by the thick glass bottom of an empty pitchef, whereas I think Katherine Heigl had walloped me with a plate. There were shattered bits of light in my eyes, on the floot. The linoleum down 36 PRISM 50:4 there smelled of winter and salt. I was still ttying to move my face when I heard Marty get to his feet and start to shuffle after our Bonnie and Clyde, who'd retreated to the other side of the room. Bob Marley was holding a stool in front of him and Marty, whose face was bloody, was headed over their with his fists loaded. But the baitendef shouted, "Hey!" and when I could see over the bar I noticed the shotgun in his hands. There wasn't any doubting who it was pointed at. In fact the whole room of people was lined up against Marty and, to a lesser degree, me. Clearly the other two had thrown the fitst, but they were local and we weren't. We weren't even Albertans. And we probably didn't vote the same way eithet. They had their reasons is what I'm getting at. "Christ!" Marty shouted, then reached down to yank me up. When we got to the truck it just worked out that I climbed into the driver's seat, though I had no business being there. I felt like someone had packed cotton balls into my skull. There was a sharp pain where my teeth ought to have been and I couldn't speak. In my dreams of that happier life, things like this were securely in my past. They weren't adventures to me anymore; they caused my heart to ache. I'd look at myself and shake my head. Tiat happiet life—the hope of it, the possibility of it—came to me in sparing moments now, like when I'd eaten that breakfast Marty had made, or when we stood in the blue twilight in the Starlite's parking lot earlier and it seemed like maybe we had a good evening ahead of us. But evety time one of those moments spiang up they were gone again just as fast, and that happy life got further and furthet away, like a thing you watch blow away in a storm. It was full-on night now, the roads bare but for my sweeping headlights. I didn't feel as though I was driving, but rathet that the ttuck was driving me. I felt safe. That's why it was so surprising to me when that tree came up. I thought, who'd put a tree there? But of course it was that we'd left the road behind. The truck wasn't saving us, and Marty reached over for the steering wheel. He was saying something but I couldn't hear it because of the wind whistling in the hole where the windshield used to be. There was an interval when I was aware of darkness, but not of anything else. I don't know if I was conscious or not, or just what state I was in. When I came to and tried to open my eyes there was a dazzling spray of light. What was interesting was that I couldn't be sure if the light originated inside my head or if it came from somewhere else. I knew there was a helicopter, and quickly reckoned that I was in it. The 'coptet's blades sounded like a series of pops. Pop-pop-pop-pop, in a sort of fast slow motion. With each pop it felt as though my head might implode. I tried to look at myself but came to find that I was strapped down. I wanted then to throw up because my feet were above my head and the level earth was a distant memoty. I wondered about my truck, and in fact I must have asked aloud, because someone said it was gone. I thought that was too bad, because I felt a great sense of loyalty to that blue 1988 GMC, the tfuck that Marty had driven to the hospital after our ill-fated duck expedition, as I sat in the passenger seat and my head lolled around like a pinball and the pain felt like it had a centre and a million radiant arms. Our borrowed shotguns rattled around in the bed. It had been a good truck. My blood felt milky. The helicopter rose and rose, as though it was going to take me ovet the mountains, of into the clouds. What happened then was that I had a flashback to the moment before we'd left the road, Marty and I, in my blue truck. I had been thinking prismmagazine.ca 37 that sometimes your life isn't the one you want to be living, even if it isn't terrible or dire. There was nothing I wouldn't mind seeing the end of, I had said to myself. That included Marty. Now in the ascending helicoptet, still going up, I didn't know if Matty was alive ot dead, and I didn't want to ask. I knew he wasn't nearby, in my helicopter, but maybe he was in his own, thumping similarly heavenward. I wondered if we'd both wake up in the same ward, a mint-green curtain separating our mechanical beds, and laugh about all this. But I hoped not. I hoped I wouldn't see Marty on the othet side of this. It was all his doing; I couldn't see things any othet way. My head was enduring a slow explosion and my eyes didn't seem to be wotking quite right. The rest of my body was at that moment either a rumour or a memory and I had to face the reality that Alberta wasn't really working out for me. And goddamn Marty, I thought. The mountains had sent him, and it was my great desire that the mountains should take him back. 38 PRISM 50:4 Patricia Young TOWARD A LIST OF DEFINITIONS ACCORDING TO MY SCOTTISH MOTHER 1. Blether (noun): person of either gender who talks incessantly about trivial matters. 2. Wee blether (adj./noun): child who talks incessantly about trivial matters, though not necessarily a child; a wee blether need only be a person of small stature. 3. Bletherer (noun): inter-changeable with blether. 4. Blethery (adj.): describes a person, usually a woman named Agnes or Maggie, who talks incessantly about trivial mattets, though may also be a man named Hugh or Billy, notably in his cups. 5. In his cups (colloquial): state of having consumed latge quantities of whiskey. 6. For the love of the wee man, haud yer wheesht! (command; exasperated): given to, usually male, though not necessarily male, blether who has stumbled into the house in the wee hours of the morning in his cups, reeking like a distillery. 7. Distillery: (a) place of employment (b) source of rack and ruin. 8. Bism (noun): errant female child. 9. Cheeky bism (adj./noun): errant female child who, having been reprimanded, attempts to defend herself. 10. Cheek back (verb): defensive strategy of a bism who has been reprimanded for errant behaviour. 11. I'll smack ye, so I will (menacing but idle threat): uttered by (a) mother to child (b) blether to bism (c) bism to blether (d) Billy to Agnes (e) Maggie to Hugh. 12. Wee hen (adj./noun): term of affection for female child who has apologized for (a) errant behaviour, and/or (b) cheeking back. 13. Gonnae no dae that nae mare: promise (usually broken) made by a man, woman or child to no longet (a) talk incessantly about trivial matters (b) consume great amounts of whiskey (c) misbehave and/or attempt to defend oneself (d) utter menacing but idle threats {so help me God). prismmagazine.ca 39 Federico Garcia L orca ADAN Arbol de sangre moja la manana por donde gime la recien parida. Su voz deja cristales en la herida y un grafico de hueso en la ventana. Mienttas la luz que vine fija y gana blancas metas de fabula que olvida el tumulto de venas en la huida hacia el turbio frescor de la manzana. Adan suefia en la fiebre de la arcilla un nino que se acerca galopando por el doble latit de su mejilla. Pero otro Adan oscuro esta sonando neutta luna de pedra sin semilla donde el nino de luz se ira quemando. 40 PRISM 50:4 Translated from the Spanish by Dan Maclsaac ADAM The tree of blood drenches morning where the woman, newly born, moans. Her voice leaves shards in the wound and on the pane an etching of bone. While the light reaches and overcomes the pale limits of an oblivious fable, the tumult of veins escapes into the fresh mist of the apple. In a fever of clay, Adam dreams of a child who looms galloping through the double throb of his cheek. But a dark othet Adam lies dreaming a neutered moon of sterile stone where the child of light will be burning. prismmagazine.ca 41 Rainer Maria Rilke EVA Einfach steht sie an det Kathedtale grofjem Aufstieg, nah der Fensterrose, mit dem Apfel in der Apfelpose, schuldlos-schuldig ein fur alle Male an dem Wachsenden, das sie gebar, seit sie aus dem Kreis der Ewigkeiten liebend fortging, um sich durchzustreiten durch die Erde, wie ein junges Jahr. Ach, sie hatte gern in jenem Land noch ein wenig weilen mogen, achtend auf derTiere eintracht und Vetstand. Doch da sie den Mann entschlossen fand, ging sie mit ihm, nach dem Tode trachtend; und sie hatte Gott noch kaum gekannt. 42 PRISM 50:4 Translated from the German by Dan Maclsaac EVE See how she stands on the cathedral's grand face, close to the rose window, caught red-handed with the apple, for all time guilty and guiltless— and that swelling fruit born after she left the circle of eternity and in love cut her path across newly fallen Earth. Oh, she would have loved to linger even a moment longet, to savour the peace and wisdom of the beasts. But since she found the man dead set against staying, she followed him and Death- God she had barely known. prismmagazine.ca 43 Jared Harel MEETING MY BODY DOUBLE I forgot who you were, yout name and face, your place in my mind was suddenly amiss. Forgive me, I whispered. This is my pad. Those are our siblings. Here is a . I reached for you, yet felt only wind. The sky, I admitted, is terribly blue. That poodle you are petting was probably You didn't say a thing. The nattative forbid it. I showed you my penis. I pointed out trees. PRISM 50:4 Meredith Quartermain IF I BARTLEBY am a copyist, what am I copying? Down or over. From what page to what page. The flow of ink through the nose of the pen replicating reptilely the tick of a clock turning into another alley-way of lines or mind running down grammatical streets—ever outward like a river through all the islands and channels of its delta after hurling itself downward from mountains and even befote that from glaciets that had oozed fingers into high valleys but now are said not to be oozing but rather shrinking away from those mountain crags—those humps and hulks and heaved-up layers of ancient seas jumbled quixotics, masked tectonic rafts of tock my pen makes into loops and sticks and dots. They shrink from a hot stove, from an odious task, from dtudgery, from an admittance they're no longer wanted—these glaciers—no longer loved by the mountains. No. The mountains have had enough, and these glaciers must leave, must melt away, must sink into sedimentary, metamorphic and igneous fissures, cracks, and fractals of mountainhood and meadowhood. Slowly, ever so slowly pulling away the blankets and sheets—inch by inch sliding back the antimacassars on mountainous couches and chairs once protected from human oil but now gradually subjected to this pulling away of garments, this peeling back of scarves and coats, this dtawing down of sweatet sleeves and chemises, this relentless embaring of mountain flesh despite snatches at collars and cuffs, fringes and hems, despite the pocketing of a sash or a sock, a garter or culottes that nevertheless melt trickle pour and hurl themselves down as if under a ttuck. Can mountains think of trucks? Humans think not. Mountains leave the question open, preferring to send it as a wave of photons from a stat goes out into the univetse. To end on a distant planet, an astetoid, light-centuries deep in some far off galaxy of ideas. Mountain thoughts. Could come to rest on a speck of sand in a camel's eye—an eye that may not look kindly on the camel-kid it has given birth to. That may not allow the kid to suckle. An eye that curls its velvety camel lips and gazes across the steppes while the camel's owner walks five miles to the next yutt and brings back the violinist—the ownet and his wife and theif five children gathering round the camel in a man-holding-animal-huddle of hoof-stomp and dung and wind-blown hait, the violinist drawing his bow across his sttings until slowly from the eye of the camel seeps a tear. prismmagazine.ca 45 A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE THROUGHT Violet. Opposite yellow on the colour wheel. Also a flower written about by Robin Blasef. A song says they ate blue, suggesting sky or someone's mood. Can colour be ironic? A droll black or a meant-to-be-read-two-ways green? If you are a man wearing a pink jacket or, heavens to Betsy, you dress your baby girl in blue? Je pense que tout le monde should be addressed Mistef, including baby girls and breast-feeding moms. If everyone wore blue, according to psychology, our thoughtfulness would be encouraged. We would see a decline in outbursts of verbiage that leave you wondering, What was that all about? Seeing blue on our social associates, we'd be inclined to credit them with having the ability to put two and two together. We'd look before we leapt to conclusions about lack of brain capacity. I don't really like where this line of thoughtlessness is going. Because in fact I've lost my train of thought. How indeed does one lose a whole train? Entrainer en francais: to drag down. My train sunk in a violet pool—no, something fat bigger It's sunk into a violet sea. A train of camels nose to tail plodding one hoof in front of anothef dragging my thought across an empty desert of sky and sand. Not to a violet sea but out to the whiteness at the edge of the desert. Whiteness of page already sliced with lines waiting for the tiain of camels to make pictures in the eye of a beholder through which a thread is needled. A simple t separating through and a thinking throught which once rhymed with fruit or newt, but now fhymes with caught and fraught. Halt. The ones at the edge of whiteness. Then seriatim stoppages of camel humps detoulant backwatds to my throught's ancestot and the ancestor of that ancestor. It being not so much a throught-line with an engine and a caboose as a series of births of reproductions. Camels not actually walking, unless perhaps the desert moves under them, but camel pasting a camel in front of it and that camel in turn pasting one in front of it—the "train" getting longet pushes apart whiteness at eithet end and lets the thinker walk up and down her caravan. 46 PRISM 50:4 OUT OF THE DARK light returns, seeping through cracks in curtains, even ones firmly yanked togethef— above and below theit bunched skirts waves of grey grow on ceiling and floor, spinning away streams of photons to land on sleeping cheeks and eyelids. To prick the skin of a limp hand. Wake up you cotpuscles of blood. Run away through your tunnels and chutes. Tell all yout friends we're back. It's time to jump on the bed and have a pillow-fight. Time to row your boats. Oh I don't know about that, our boats ate tied up, nosing the weeds of plaid kilts on the men who clean gutters much to the disappointment of crows. There goes our feeding trough and bathtub, say the crows, get another pine cone, block up the downspout when the men in kilts take away their ladders. It's enough to remind you of Hitchock. Watch out. A black wing grazes a kneecap caught out between sock and pleats. The rowing boats nose into weeds inside the subcutaneous tunnels whose branchings and forkings, twigging and budding, await the corpuscles. Who now talk with particles of light, give them a slap on the shoulder. Did you see the Canucks? Five nothing against the Canadiens. Then they blow it in the fourth period. Should get a new goalie. Where's the boss? Reading. The inside of her eyelids to download a freighter of REMs into central processing. Please wait. Sixty percent complete. The photons clear off. Bounce on glass in a wooden square, ricochet off a silver watch and the handle of a trunk made of slats of wainscoting behind which a mongoose had lived that had puzzled, when she was a girl, the woman asleep—was wainscoting a wall of hidden compartments and secret channels through which a mongoose (a furry bird from Mongolia) ran like a telephone signal? A friend of a girl in a story. Something her father had put in the attic she wasn't to know about—and if I catch you in there you'll be. Hef brother in his diamond box—maybe he was behind the wainscoting. She squashed her face and arms into the slats and dragged blindly along their ridges and valleys. To a small wet nose poking out of a knothole. In the central processing unit of the sleeping woman who thought certainly the girl was that age where she really could fly—just jump off the thitd step, push the aif away with your arms and legs—float over chairs, tables, window sills—the simple buoyance of thinking. The cotpuscles in their rowing boats drift back and forth moored to theit kiltish weeds. Occasionally one or two detach and meandet off on the current. prismmagazine.ca 47 HOW TO CONVERSE How does one do it, with or con—together and deception—then re-versal's turning back? I gaze into my conversant's eyes. Around us triads and pairs with glasses of wine—the loom bursting with chatter till the walls feel theif seams crack—they groan with the pressure of vocalizations, and struggle to hold fast this suiging throng of speech—even thinking of themselves as a pressure cooker and hoping that whoevef is boiling things up is keeping track of the flame because if they are not, the gauge may fly off the top and spew volcanic talkativeness into the night. No stopping now—out it must come. I've been reading your book, I tell him, knowing that the same cannot be said on his part about mine, but knowing also that by telling him this I will stop his gaze, at least for a moment, from wandering over to the well published politically active speakef surrounded by women, near an absttact canvas of grey, pinkish grey and bluish grey squares. Oh, out it must spew—the paper I've written on innovative language in poetry, and who indeed is making any claims that reairanging words in challenging conniptions hurled cruelly at readers in the way of Attaudian theatre would change the will of government to hand evetything over to globalized corporations? He helps himself to liverwurst though I'm sure he said at Geotge's party he was a vegetarian. Those poets only write fot othet poets, he says, making a pumpernickel and ham sandwich. Nowadays, he says, I only read to latge audiences of analysts. His eye shifts to the female-adored figure against gtey-shaded canvas. But somehow, I say, shouting over the din, we must live inside this monster—we have to go on—we have to have other parts of ourselves besides loathing and disgust, despait and cynicism. Must somehow see, as Olson did, humans in a universe. After all, we still must love. Critique is love, he says between mouthfuls of mustard-coated ham. What I love I theorize. I tweak its premises, massage its syntax, arouse its rationale, seeping into its ctacks and faults, then freezing till it snaps, so everyone can finger its shatds. Why would I not do that for what I love? 48 PRISM 50:4 Daniel Zomparelli UNTITLED I'm not gay, I'm from the future. —Christopher Nealon, Plummet Homos shoot photos offootlongschlongs. —Christian Bok, EUNOIA /// You keep saying / you're from the futute but your BMW is a 95. // Used to fuck in bathroom stalls and now you do / it in yout 600 square foot condo before 9pm because / the sttata has been concerned about noise levels / and hetetonormatizing. // The token gay guy on Big Brother, never wins. // I'm sorry Ma'am your Husband has been / queer / eyed. // Have I met you before / Dumbledore. prismmagazine.ca 49 /// I buy Butt Magazine for the articles. Living in a Gipstets paradise // American Apparel supports gay marriage and all I got was this lousy shirt. // Beats and boners over bedding. // Don't quit your gay job, you will need that when the gay depression hits and you ate left without a gay penny to yout gay name. // You might be an overweight / middle aged wife / who gets no respect / has lost all confidence / can't get a job, lost / a son and can't affotd / clothes, but RuPaul / will help you at 8pm / pacific standard time. 50 PRISM 50:4 /// Jock strapped to my work. // We tried to use KY him and her, but we didn't know who should use what. // I don't get it. // I bought this because I wanted to have washboard abs and the guy in the magazine has washboard abs. //1 think he's hot because he looks like he would beat me up, and I'm really into guys who look like they'll beat me up. // What about the gays gaze? // Rock Hudson / and a pack of smokes. // Ginch by Gonch I Calvin Kleined my way to the top. // Alt + Ctrl + Delete // Me // Dtag and drop it into the folder. // Undo drag // I've been using the crystal method. // Unfrienimy // Don't worry, I'll just retweet it. // I'm such a stupid bitch, I'm a stupid bitch. // Madonna is sotry. prismmagazine.ca 51 /// You put the homo in home ownei. / He had moulds done of his cock, ass and mouth. I really respect his entrepreneurial nature. / DIY // Poke. / You don't make friends with Salad. // Do you think he's sexiet than me? // Carb break! // I BBM you, you BBM me, we BBM / each othet. // Hunting boots from Brooldyn & co, fishing pants from Holt Renfrew, plaid shirts from Armani beard from time. 52 PRISM 50:4 /// I have a blog. I have a gay blog. I have an activist otiented gay blog. I have a pom activist orientated gay art blog. I have a tumblt account. prismmagazine.ca 53 Stevie Howell DEAD BIRD BABIES Mothet's migraine, or her chalky pill, sublinguates into an upright snore. A small white buttetfly's origami, abraded of her silk, she can't fly anymote. We fluttet outside, to the steep, muddy hill, do snagged pitouettes on bicycles in the backdoor bare bulb's deepening luminescence. Never touch the dead bird babies! They are dirty and will give you scabies! (until) Father arrives, summer lightning strikes, and blisters beyond the ebony doot. Velvet haired girls migrate, by lightheaded hunger, past his repellence, to where he performs. Through spring, I nest my secret in my pocket, by fall, I forget its fragmenting presence, my curio of eggshell crescents (and quills) 54 PRISM 50:4 Never touch the dead bird babies! They are dirty and will give you scabies! Laundry embedded with glassy, opaque, lunar shrapnel; and we are thrashed, pinned still. prismmagazine.ca 55 Nathaniel G. Moore YOU ARE KIND OF A SPAZ // Carla hugged me when I came over she was wearing a little brown dress She had invited me to an impromp tu dinner patty on 29 RUMSEY RO AD her roommate and I argued about the value of a GOTH MOM television show. Catla's elongated olive-skinned beautifully sculpted head (high cheekbones, sleepsunken eyes) looked like a big Egyptian cat Goddess But Hungarian and alive TALL sassy electric chair charming vegan Amy came over brought really amazing corn and tomato soup Talked about her experience at the John Water concert where she learned the Name for an anus that is so very thoroughly used it is all you know, altered, stretched—"It's called blooming," Amy said. Latet that year Amy went to the Gwar concert and wore a black lace bra to the art show I was a maniac always was a maniac lace bra maniac my maniac sistet in law all week lone over breakfast: 56 PRISM 50:4 she wore it for you Nathaniel / she wore it for you Nathaniel / she wore it for you Nathaniel / Lauta! Why do you keep saying that Laura? Because she did prismmagazine.ca 57 I DID NOT BRING HIM THERE TO HEART-STAB ANYONE, LEAST OF ALL YOU // Okay listen: you and I aren't going to date. Or have sex. But I'm not friend-breaking-up with you, so then you'll have to break up with me with vivacity and frankness. Also, beardo was the only one of the dozens of friends I invited to the show that actually showed up. I didn't bring him there to heart-stab anyone. Least of all you. I was and am very proud of the event you put on—with vivacity and frankness, a copper glint of pride fountained from within me. Please Nathaniel: Don't get coral reef and deep cut, sad shut-in seaweed salad choke-a-thon. 58 PRISM 50:4 A lexander Weinstein MIGRATION