The expectation
of gratitude had
long given
way to uncertainty’s
dull resignation before I
finally squeezed tubes
onto palette, tested
colours against each other,
coerced the daughter to sit
still for two
goddam minutes.
But here on our side
of the canvas
the unprimed you sinks
teeth into my breast
like a suckling cub.
The fading
light of you siphons
this lifeblood
from my brush into your raw
fibrous veins just when
your sister-flesh breaks pose
to light a “coffin nail”
from my pack of Marlboros
lying on the nearby
glass table.
Steven Mayoff was born in Montreal and now lives on Prince Edward Island, a province on Canada’s east coast. His fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals across Canada and the U.S. as well as in Ireland, Algeria and France. His story collection “Fatted Calf Blues” was published in 2009 by Turnstone Press and won a PEI Book Award in 2010. His novel “Our Lady Of Steerage” was published in 2015 by Bunim & Bannigan Inc. and his first collection of poems, “Swinging Between Water And Stone”, will be released by Guernica Editions in 2019.
Leonard Fligel was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. As a teen he studied art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art with Arthur Lismer, who was a member of the famous Canadian art collective, The Group Of Seven. As a young man he worked in Alaska so he could earn money to travel and live in Mexico, studied in Florence, Italy and settled down in Glasgow, Scotland. Leonard now lives in a nursing home in Glasgow where he is struggling with the late stages of dementia, although on his lucid days he still picks up pen and paper when the mood. strikes him. and draws.
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