folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets
When
Your Hometown is No Longer Home
It’s a collection of familiar trees,
old houses puffing woodsmoke,
good intentions collecting
in nooks and crannies like pocket lint.
Incessantly present.
Your hometown is a place you drive through
on the way to somewhere else.
Which must be what it always was
—
that place that formed you, that sheltered you
in
its cupped hands —
though you didn’t yet feel it as such,
standing ankle-deep in the creek as a child, skipping
stones along the familiar surface
of the tannin-rusted water.
Now the landmarks and foliage blur
into a single unknowable mass in your peripheral.
And the woodsmoke, accumulating,
drifts out over the dark expanse of forest canopy,
seeking a place to settle.
Axolotls
Strange salamanders patterning
my son’s socks, their external gills waving
as he charges through the house. They are
nearly non-existent in the wild, but here
their tiny pixelated likenesses will smile
on polyester-spandex blend indefinitely.
Their juvenile forms so adorable
no one would suspect the carnivorous
appetites lurking beneath. And
my son’s face, too, is so sweetly blank.
I think they live in Mexico, he says.
He doesn’t know about their drained lakes,
their invaded habitats, their battered bodies
fried and served on crisp greens.
He knows they are named for an Aztec God.
He knows they can re-generate their limbs.
And some day he will know
not all losses are so easy
to recover from.
Pamela
Mosher (she/her)
was born and raised in the Maritimes, and has called Ottawa home for 15 years.
She works as a technical writer, parents two young-ish children, and spends her
extra time engaged with poetry, engaged with the outside world, or both. Pam’s
writing has been published in journals such as The New Quarterly, Event
Magazine, Arc Poetry, and in Biblioasis’ Best Canadian
Poetry anthology.
Right now Pam is working on a few pieces for a poetry contest, and is in the
beginning stages of putting together a first manuscript.
