BY RENA MEDOW
Electroluminescence
Last night I felt like watching a thriller
taking in someone else’s damages for once.
I collect all your pale thank you’s
more transparent than a moon.
I prefer to think of others’ lives
lived in a series of miniature rooms
in a grand solar in some far away museum.
I am growing so tired of mine. I fall asleep alone and wake up alone,
but always another rustles around in the middle hours.
Their phone light not a lighthouse, no electroluminescent beacon home—
The trees without leaves service only northbound crows.
This is how it always ends, a love stripped bare and planted in
cold soil.
My mouth sings a song of itself, for itself, dying at its own pace.
I pull corpses from their roots and toss them to the curb.
Across the road, donkeys graze the pasture. In the road,
two yellow lines parallel extend towards nowhere, which
is near here, I hear. The tree I’m beneath is the descendant of trees.
That donkey there, the descendant of donkeys.
I forage for kindling with bugs in my hair,
a gymnasium of wet curls. It takes two matches to light the fire, six
in the rain. An illusion of self-sufficiency. Here, I only save
caterpillars from barn cats, not love from
thrown objects and raised voices.
No, even when I enter the orchard
to pick windfalls off the ground, and strain my worn
body, there are four bushels at the end.
Three to give back, one to take home. If only the heart could get a quarter
of what it gives, to munch on later. Worm and all.
The trumpet of day flat-tones against the trees,
and I savor this bland life, forever a matter of too much or too little.
Rena Medow attended the New School for poetry, Emily Carr University for painting and the Langara Certificate program for Journalism. Her first poetry chapbook, "I Have been Packing This Suitcase All My Life So Why Is It Empty?" came out in the fall of 2017 from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press. Her poems, essays, articles and illustrations have been featured in a variety of places, including The Vancouver Sun, Langara Voice, VICE, LunaLuna Magazine and The Minetta Review.