Pearl Pirie | Ottawa, ON | LCP member since 2011

Sandwiched

i)
Tick tock is small. Swing load, sweet bladderette; bus is comin’ for to carry us home. Words from his prime are prime numbers dividing me against myself decades later. I love you— (emphasis on the unspoken “anyway”). A heated floor. His foot bones feel safe enough now to complain that, before, they were cold. Glasses on bedside, bokeh city night. Grainy shoulder sways snores.

ii)
Among the incontinence, a double-caned eagle watches the security keypad for his break to The Street. Piebald pigeon is missing one orange leg; the other with string tangled among his toes. The roads keep getting washed out by my seeing them. Limbs are insurrections. Ledge’s sparrow, do I overload your wings with the hopes of my gaze?

iii)
Jeopardy music of debate and negate. Must. can’t. must. Can’t. Body makes an x of itself, arms crossed. One leg plays hero in front of the other. Left eye’s tic become the entire ocular implant of leather pleating spasms around the button of No. Thumbs into shoulders, into scoops along the spine, into the filet mignon of my aching. If there were more of you, I’d collect the whole set.

***
Pearl Pirie has run the Pre-Tree Poetry Workshop series in Ottawa since 2009. Thirsts won the 2011 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry; the collection will come out with Snare in 2011. Her first trade collection, been shed bore (Chaudiere, 2010), and chapbooks including over my dead corpus (AngelHouse Press, 2010) are available on her site (among other places): www.beenshedbore.com.

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