folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets
Welcome
Home
We live in the woods
in a house made of trees.
Sometimes I worry
it reads as a threat to nature:
don’t fuck with us
or we’ll
make a house
out of you. Or: I love you
so much I want to kill you
and live in your body
forever. That’s serial killer stuff
and I don’t want nature
to get the wrong idea.
I am inside our house
made of trees, in the woods
in the shelter of the summer
night’s arrival, my head reflected
over my husband’s who
is on the dark other side
of the window, balancing
a wobbly reading lamp
on the outer sill to beam
light into the gap between
two logs where a wasp colony
is headquartered in our wall.
Their tunnelling leaves little dunes
of wood dust on the floor behind
the baby chair.
Outside of our house
made of trees in the woods
I watch over my husband
his big gentle nose his exposed
wrists. He’s still wearing
his orange coveralls smeared
with the black grease of a long day
but has newly donned a netted hat
shaped like a paper lantern.
A steady hand tows the heavy
drum of soapy water sloshing
into place, holds the mouth
of the shop vac hose over
the door to the nest
and flicks the switch.
Winter Driving
Brake slam slowdown
on a February highway
in childhood, Dad said Don’t look
when a pickup spun out ahead
hurled a black lab from the truck bed
into the blurry red glow of taillights
and spray of white wafers tread-cut
from the dough of the ground. I looked
down. When my eyes lifted again
we were moving. Snow streaked
past the windshield
like stars. Older, I paid to practice
losing control, sloshed coffee from styrofoam
into the cupholders of my parents’ car
tore around an ice-covered raceway
to accelerate then wrench the wheel
slide then recover, slip then right.
The instructor said to steer out of a skid
the most important thing is to look
where you want to go.
Hope makes demands, takes
training. There are days
no car should be on the road
and wherever I look
I hear yelping.
Currently being tormented by a query letter for my first full-length manuscript, otherwise light journalling and reading and adding fancifully obscene non-groceries to the Costco list. Absolutely unready to exit winter’s cozy dread cocoon. I thought I’d killed an inherited houseplant but after late-hope watering its dry brown remnants, a new green appendage shot up two feet and then bloomed, seems to be an amaryllis, two red flowers as big as my face. My 9-year-old son and I are trying to learn to juggle (using balled-up socks to prevent smashing things). Aspiring to a baseline level of usefulness to my neighbours and enchantment where I can.
Tamsyn Farr lives in Wakefield, Quebec, a village by the Gatineau River on the unceded territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin Nation. Her poetry placed second in Grain Magazine's 2022 Short Grain Poetry Contest and was longlisted for the Poetry Society's 2023 National Poetry Competition and the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize. In 2025, she was mentored by D.M. Bradford through the Quebec Writers’ Federation mentorship program and published her debut chapbook, Crime & Ornament, with phafours press.
