folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets
For weeks I walk
the wooded path
and wonder why
the men who wait
in parked pick-ups
look away
from each other
in the numbered lots.
One morning, the news
reports a discovery:
unexploded bombs
in the bog. The land
once served
as a military
testing ground.
I understand
how “test” descends
from the Latin
for an earthen vessel
when I startle
a small herd
of deer. They flee
the glade like
shards
from a dropped deer
figurine. Their gaze
left in the eyes
of the spent young man
departing the woods
with a slack mouth.
Dear heart? Deer,
hart.
The men who wait
in parked pick-ups
wait for me.
“Greenbelt” is from my manuscript-in-progress, which collects poems, in part, about crafting a queer domesticity in suburbia. I’m interested in these liminal spaces where different meanings are made or imposed simultaneously, and often in conflict or competition. Ottawa, in particular, feels like a city people think they’ve already figured out—staid, polite, boring—yet that very banality throws its stranger corners into relief.
Kevin Shaw’s poems have appeared in The Malahat Review, CV2, The Fiddlehead, Grain, and elsewhere. He won Arc’s Poem of the Year award and the Grand Prize in the PRISM international Poetry Contest. His essays have been published in magazines such as The New Quarterly and The Literary Review of Canada, broadcast on CBC radio, and included in The Best Canadian Essays anthology. His debut poetry collection, Smaller Hours, was published by icehouse poetry (Goose Lane Editions).