Karen Solie

Smoking in the yard two weeks before Christmasout of the wind, under Orion,inhaling anger, exhaling sorrow,which is how anger metabolises,the end product always a sorrowof remorse or failure. I would give this angerto Orion, whom I’ve only recently learned to identify,forever on his back foot, his stories gofrom bad to worse, and the benzene riseslike a prayer, arsenic on the breathcold...

Prayer in the throat of a non-believeroffered up to the absent hereafter,his two long notes and descending warbleput him at the centre of things.A partial method, he knows, is no method;but when you are too weak for beauty’sstartlement, when you desire not silencebut the peace of vague and benign

neglect, at decibels audible overthe wind, radio, tyres through gravel,through the open...

Why, after so many years, is she with me now?We who were not close in lifewalk among the caribou lichen

whose coral-like low forms, white against the mossesand wild blueberry in its red phase,seem to give off light.

She has escapedthrough the window of the body’s house of harminto the freedom of a truth that will never be recognised.

And indeed they do give off light, fungi and algaein a...

Returning home from evening massin the big car,

they were like canal boats thensliding through the loose gravel, in the back seat

she pushed my cuticles upwith a silver file not unpainfully

to expose the half-moons, she saidGod put them there, he likes to see them.

An empty bottle rolled under the passenger seatand back out again

as my grandfather droveone foot on the gas, one on the brake,

it was a...

Surprised on returning to find the flat flooded with light. Merciless, evaporative, even when overcast, and, as the solstice neared, sanctimonious in its imperative to productivity. An expert with his pen-light wondering how you let it get this bad. That tone. We were out all day in the clarity of errors that had multiplied into reality. Extra weight exposed by the indignity of...