The first time I heard about the Clandestine room I was a child. We spoke of it in reverent whispers during sleepovers and what the room might hold. “Treasure!” said one boy who’s name I’ve long forgotten. “Or a monster!” Another piped up “Don’t be stupid, its probably videogames and candy and stuff”

You and I
were once the two separate sides
of the same electrical cord;
often tangled between each other,
building knots and kneading bundles of bridges
on top cedar, oak and birch floorboards.

There are old journals on my bookshelf
blank pages at the back
filled with unfinished poetry
similes with no synonyms
metaphors with no meaning

Snow forts built of packed wet flour
in a big orange plastic bowl,
S q i u s h
and unfold like an origami fortune
of milky dough and chocolate chips.

When Carmen Callaghan finally woke up, she felt as though the world was spinning. Probably because she was actually spinning. Suspended by thick mariner’s rope, Carmen faced a bleak, concrete wall, then part of another bleak, concrete wall, a man standing right in front of her, and back to the walls again. Her head hurt. It wasn’t the usual cerebral grudge against all the cheap booze and cheap skunk Carmen used to blot out the realities of living, but this was sharp and boiling.

In the winter, the prairie sky is elongated. The tilt of the earth stretches the end-of-the-day into a perpetual blue hour. Shadows lengthen early, harbouring the past. The wooded creek behind my childhood home, just a few blocks away from where I live now, darkens to a chocolate dim before the sun even nears the horizon. When I first moved to Calgary, I ended up in the neighbourhood of Killarney, a block away from 17th Avenue.

They just keep coming.
No matter how broken I feel,
No matter my pleas,
They just keep coming.