Asbestos Heights. David McGimpsey
Читать онлайн книгу.
red,
and healthy foods taste either red or red.
Steak, cherry popsicle, red velvet cake.
Full of such health, I stayed up all summer
sketching a fringe play called Dangling Apricocks
and collapsing somewhere near Jolicoeur.
When somebody looks over their glasses and says,
‘Look at it this way, m’sieur, you have a scar
but at least you still have most of your face,’
what can you say but ‘D’you like daiquiris?’
Healthy red medicines, or even those blushed
Pepto pink, die in the Canadian cold;
you can’t keep Diet Cokes at home for fear
the deliciousness will dull you to God.
Yarrow
There’s the country somewhere outside the car.
The country where the elm fucks the maple
and the elm broods as if auditioning
for a new PBS miniseries.
There’s a poetry where trees don’t have sex,
when the yarrow observed from a car seat
can stand in, plain image, plain symbol,
and not be you observing me as overweight.
Outside, as the yarrow whips by, are towns
where Canadians happily live their lives,
unperturbed by who was excluded
from the Can Lit? Can Do! anthology.
Inside, the steady beat of country songs,
coffee with diet hazelnut creamer.
Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything
about the maple who gets so leafy.
Queen Anne’s Lace
My therapist looked over her glasses.
‘I hate it when you say that nobody cares
if you live or die when I, for one, am
quite excited by the idea of you dying.’
I stared at her desk bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace,
wondering when we would talk about drinking.
How happy I was to know I’d leave there,
go to my pub and tell jokes to Cakeface.
I told her about the walks in the mall,
how happy I was just to sit and read –
except reading Frank Norris, of course –
I mean, who on earth could be happy then?
‘Why are you telling me this?’ she said,
tacking back to more analytical words.
‘No matter how devoted to my job,
I would never read one of your books’!
Sunflower
Like a foul-tempered baseball manager
observing the bumbles of his hapless nine,
I obsessively ate sunflower seeds.
Chewing and spitting. Spitting and chewing.
In winter, as I walked home from college,
roughed up by the hilarious comments
about my appearance, my strategy
was soon limited to ‘eat lots of seeds.’
Of course, it didn’t help I had the pride
of Richard II. It didn’t help I switched
from sunflower seeds to popcorn chicken
and from popcorn chicken to popcorn steak.
I didn’t need another reviewer
who hated ‘frivolity’ to tell me
I was losing all Bunyon Review cred,
and that all things from Kansas made him sick.
Basil
The discovery of the basil plant was not
made by British actor Basil Rathbone,
but by an ordinary guy from Boston
who was just still Basil from the block.
It was, as they say in the plant-birth biz,
‘licorice-y.’ Not really your kind of thing,
you confessed, after saying I ‘made up’
that ‘stuff about humans needing affection.’
You can’t hate someone for saying ‘We were
together for a long time, but were we,
like, ever, really together?,’ but it sure
helps you appreciate arena football.
I learned to hate basil, called it buttfool,
delaware parsley, poor man’s toback,
while I sat weeping in Old Navy pants.
It’s hard to hate wearing Old Navy pants.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.