Cottage Country
Last night I saw your name on a grain of rice. Today, I’ll open a can of pop for you because your nails are too precious to risk, swipe the icy side of it against my thigh like a supermarket checkout aisle; you’ll touch my pinky as I pass the can back to you and I’ll flinch. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.
You told me once that if I asked nicely you’d give me anything I wanted. When you appeared in the doorway tonight my heart stopped. I heard you pull into the driveway, gravel shifting under your feet – I kept looking at the door and still I didn’t believe it until you were there. What do I want? Sweet somethings without sunlit afternoons, sticky clementines without the peels; want to split your rib cage open without hurting you, live in our multitudinous possibilities without having to pay for them. Want you, my cold creeping king of the sky, to stay for a while, to sit with me on the dimming dock. Want a future like a row of fish scales, headlights on the highway, a twenty-car pileup waiting to happen. You told me once that if I asked nicely you’d give me anything I wanted. I am asking you now to stay but you’re halfway out the door again. Love, I think you were lying.
And tomorrow morning you’ll take the 117 back west, keep left when you merge onto the 323, the mountains of the Québécois countryside rising and falling beside you like the jagged peaks of my pulse; you’ll crawl across the bridge downtown where the signs shudder back into something you can read without thinking, you’ll slide onto the 417 unfolding for you on the horizon, and it’ll feel like you’re home already, this asphalted beast, this roaring river, all four wheels pointing to your front door, the right exit pulling up any minute now, any second, any heartbeat – and I’ll still be here, with all this love and nowhere to put it down.
Cover photo by Bernadetta Watts
