By Eva Rachert – Contributor

bark

Before stealing Canadian Classics from strangers outside bars

watching spiders climb the telephone poles

and waiting for you in the street 

and before walking home with aching feet and sore eyes

before the twitching of my fingers and the spasming of my lungs

the wrinkling of my forehead and the weaving of our hands together

and the taste of soot on my teeth

I wake up in a bed I used to think I would outgrow. 

I learned myself from mimicking you — 

I am loud when I need to be. 

I am dreaming about getting lost. 

Let me slide into your skin and wear you,

let me be tall enough to see the tops of picture frames

and I can check for the accumulated dust of the last 20 years. 

We will never part.

We will have a heart with arteries springing forth like spider’s legs,

creeping through our chest, the veins twitching through our bodies. 

Have we not always been interwoven? 

That dust has a home here too.

bite

It would be easier to list the names I don’t have. 

I am not a sunset over a midwestern plain,

I am not a frequent flyer,

I keep the bedroom cold.

I pray for rain;

The drought eats all I grow and all my patience.

I am a farmer of manufacture:

short of breath and short of stature.

The railroad bisects my land, 

and travellers look out of grey windows at my lonely fields. 

I do not harvest —

I bury all the names that nobody knows I was once given,

and when I churn the soil, I call out to my neighbours and nobody comes.