Suzanne Chiasson Writer in Vancouver

Logically a fedora

Worry is lodged just below my sternum. A walnut.

Opinions come in rows. Faces I know. Lined up in comic strip. Noir. I wish someone would sketch my eyebrows thicker. And give me more thoughtful bubbles.

I prefer seasons. The rain is beating us. For no reason. It doesn’t matter that we were good this year. It doesn’t matter that we were right. Or that our analysis was sound. The rain will beat us anyway.

The crow uses bits of my argument for a nest.

Could you teach me how to speak in rows? Could you show me how to hook one idea to the next so they line up like train cars all headed in the same direction? To Avignon.

I smoked my last cigarette at the Gare de Lyon. Without reason.

I might be happy with a wig. The squirrel seems happy with the nut.

xtended version of a life or two or more

We believed in our generation

quiet pride

dreams held close to our chest

cardigans the colour of rust or mustard

buttons that didn’t line up, didn’t matter at the end of the night, bed

floor, chair, anywhere tossed aside

dreams undeclared

swallowed year by year

by pool halls, by fear.

The driver does not want to take me across the Bay Bridge tonight

he wants to say no, tries to say no, squirms in his seat

my hand on the door, I’m ready to get out, doubt

is what we hold on our tongue

but he doesn’t say no, he says yes, cursing, but yes

cursing the bridge, the fare zones, city behind

changed, he says, full of money, he says

he leans into the wheel shrugging the habit of no

and with the volume low, spits rhymes to records

everything could fall into the Hayward Fault at any moment, he says.

Everything could fall in but we

dove head first, cursed ourselves

now see it

in each other

no secret handshake for loss

no shame in dreams.

a place to read some of my work

Suzanne Chiasson

writer