by Kim Poirier

montreality

A light blue metro car travels down a cannibal’s throat
The Place Ville Marie searchlight swivels
Leonard Cohen’s look of faint play adjudicates
the cold and hookery street.
I am so vanishingly small beneath the hot, perfervid red shadow
of the Mt Royal crucifix;
My cry in the concrete,
My cry in the bottleglass,
My cry in the frost:
Not the gestalt of the thing,
but some slice.

greening

There is a green wildfire of mint in a terracotta pot
and there is a sheath of summer-smelling parsley woven against the ground

There is a you—on the yellow seat with wine.
You, who gathered african violets in her arms and stole them,
with rushing, nervy steps from their greening-golding continent,
and there is a toothpick tilted against your lips, inert levantine wood, droll and unassuming.

Your body screams yes god and your the-irish-were-oppressed-you-know green eyes are zambian-mined and dollar-minted and your Fashion Nova clothes come from nowhere all.

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Kim Poirier is a Montreal-based writer, poor person and globally-recognized eater of spaghetti. She was the 2021 recipient of the Dawson College SPACE Award for Short Fiction, and her work has appeared in OFIC Magazine, Soliloquies Anthology, Oranges Journal, Beaver Magazine and others.

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