for & after John Barlow
The saddest poem is an empty hospital bed in the middle of a parking lot at the corner of Dundas and Bathurst. Clouds hovering like giant floatation devices. Summertime - the spitting image of your face – nothing more than an oil stain. And I’m pulling on my tights against this strange and terrible wind. There is a giant hole in the airspace filled with ideas and I think them, and I think them and each idea is a Saturday so sad.
But the saddest day is always Sunday. Whether we’re talking about love or reincarnation, tastes like a mouth on LSD, you said.
Last night we had enchiladas rojas and pie and beer. Later, we stepped outside to look at the night sky and there in the middle of our lives was a tiny Lawrence Welk, like a promise, conducting a miniature orchestra of atoms. And we told each other stories of toasters and our younger selves in motorcycle jackets and the shadows rippled into commas and ampersands and ellipsis. And I kept thinking of that market kid and his lemonade stand, the saddest poem you wrote, and all the libraries closed, all the city pools, the barber shops, the zoos, the subway, infinite space, closed. And I thought, where does a kid like that go to cry hard?
But the saddest day is always Sunday. Whether we’re talking about hydrogen or flipflops, you only have to want to live and you live. That’s what you said.
The saddest poem is a piece of turquoise glass at the corner of Augusta and Nassau, 2 x $5 tax churros. The girl at the pickup window, hair the colour of condensed milk and somehow your eyes, smiling. But really, the thing I came here to tell you is how easily the skin breaks when one of us is gone. And that a city is held together by nothing more than the routes we walk in tandem and that the saddest poem you will write is the one you write from heaven.
Lillian Nećakov is the author many
chapbooks, including, The Lake Contains
and Emergency Room (Apt. 9 Press; shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook
Award), as well as the full-length collections il virus (Anvil Press; shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial
Award), Hooligans (Mansfield Press), The Bone Broker (Mansfield Press), Hat Trick (Exile Editions), Polaroids (Coach House Books) and The Sickbed of Dogs (Wolsak and Wynn).
Her book, Midnight Glossolalia, a
collaborative poetry collection with Scott Ferry and Lauren Scharhag was
published in 2023 (Meat for Tea Press). Her book, Duck Eats Yeast, Quacks, Explodes; Man Loses eye, a collaborative
poem with Gary Barwin was published in May 2023 by Guernica Editions. She has also published in many
print and online journals in Canada and the U.S. Lillian lives in Toronto.