HIBERNATION
A
fox stood in the icy road,
its
eyes tiny bonfires.
I
held my palms close
for
warmth. Cars wove
around
us, spewing smoke
out
their windows.
I
couldn’t tell who
the
fox was thinking of
but
its ears were so pointy
they
punctured the frigid
air,
and a great hiss
flung
me into
a
neighbour’s bushes.
I
lay there till spring.
I
wondered if I still
had
my job. I craved a variety
of
small mammals, plus
nuts
and some fruits.
A
letter arrived, addressed to me.
I
ripped it open with my teeth.
This
is to inform you,
it read,
that
the Beth Radom Temple
has
accepted your application
for
membership in the Shabbat
Poetry
Club. Please bring
your
pointy ears.
HANS
ARP & OTHER MATTERS
I
instructed my left eyeball
to
read everything it could find
about
how the Dadaists spent
their
leisure time, and to my right eyeball,
I
said, “Watch out for that dark-haired
girl
I loved in Grade 2, the one with
the
flaring nostrils and the lavender
Hush
Puppies, who once
helped
me up when I tripped
in
the schoolyard, whose lips
turned
bright red when she chewed
emergency
gum, whose wild-haired mother
she
hid from her classmates, and who,
for
Halloween, dressed as Petunia
the
Duck.” I hadn’t seen her
for
forty-eight years, and now
she
is a lawyer, a painter,
a
scriptwriter, or living in Ptuj
under
a new identity. I wanted only
to
hear, once more, her voice, her
slight
lisp; to gently touch her
shining
black hair with just one
of
my seven-year-old fingertips; I
wanted
to say I remembered her
and
remind her of my name and
the
time she cupped my elbow in her
tiny
palm to help me to my feet
as
blood dribbled from my knee
and
tears from my eyes,
including
the one that, forty-eight
years
later, would turn to me
and
say, “Hans Arp
liked
playing solitaire.”
CAN’T EXPLAIN POEM
after Lisa Jarnot’s “Tell Me Poem”
I can’t explain cartoons
that feature dolphins then I can’t
explain why I constantly check
if my headlights are on and
my stove is off plus I can’t
explain your poetry my
actions the concept of grief
the shape of my mother’s
face so I walk along the sidewalk
and wait for someone to walk
along the sidewalk alongside
me carrying a broken umbrella
or maybe a paper bag of snap
peas plus an extra head for
when the first one gets tired
and a trail of cartoon animals
both black and white and
colour struggling to keep up
with the science of the brain
FIREBALL XL5 AUBADE
I pilot a ship, deke missiles, take
brutal abdominal strikes, nodes
waving in my stomach like
seaweed in that other Super-
marionation world, the one where
Marina plays Ladyfish to
Troy Tempest’s Mr. Limpet.
Each
night I return to Space City,
where
I’m pumped full of morphine
and
made to run through the same
room
over and over like an actual
Flintstone.
Every time I gaze
into
your starry eyes, you draw
a
small tick on your clipboard. At night,
the
groans from the other beds
drift
like ghosts through the hallways.
The
air is sucked from my cabin, and
as
I lie dying, I hear my mother cry,
O
Absalom my son, O Steve Zodiac,
O
Stuart Zalman Nehemiah, O Seth,
and
I shrink into her warm arms
that
no longer live, but still
she
is my mother. The cat cries
to
go out but it’s way too cold.
I
promise to decompose
quietly
as I can manage.
Stuart Ross is the author of over 20 books of fiction, poetry, and personal essays, as well as scores of chapbooks. His most recent books are the memoir The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, winner of the 2023 Trillium Book Award, and the short story collection I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub. Stuart won the 2019 Harbourfront Festival Prize, the 2017 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry, and the 2010 Relit Award for Short Fiction. Since 1979, Stuart has run a micropress called Proper Tales. In the 1980s, he sold over 7,000 of his chapbooks on the streets of Toronto, wearing signs such as “Writer Going To Hell: Buy My Books.” Stuart lives in the tiny town of Cobourg, Canada, on the north shore of Lake Ontario.