Cascadian Nocturne (Dim.)By Erin Kirsh
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The rainforest rains a lot. The rainforest is a city
the city has a perpetual motion sky, the city is a snow globe where tiny figures drive tiny cars through tiny puddles, from time to time, tiny cars hit tiny squirrels that tiny city workers scrape from cement grudgingly, and no tiny people mourn the tiny squirrels in the tiny snow globe city that is a rainforest that rains a lot. The tiny people carry tiny umbrellas and walk under tiny awnings of struggling businesses that all look cozy in the city that rains a lot. The tiny people working in the tiny shop fronts make tiny salaries and have tiny worries that look like the other tiny peoples’ tiny worries and if you look closely, you will notice a cloud like 600,000 tiny thought bubbles with even tinier winged dollar signs inside them. The sky is adamant. It rains a lot in the city. The tiny people slouch over bottles in the tiny nighttime they clink together the tiny coins from their day’s tiny tips and decide on tiny bowls of pasta with butter for their tiny dinners. It is tasty, and the nutritional value is tiny. They go to their tiny beds and dream ferocious dreams that, though they won’t be remembered in the morning don’t feel tiny at all. The sky quietly facilitates. It rains a lot in the city. The city is a rainforest. It can be easy to forget that. DisparityBy Erin Kirsh
I
The flea market stalls are all run by the elderly selling off historied clothes, ugly water damaged best sellers, small fonted art vases, tchotchkes, and more for mere dollars. One lady is selling her personal art nobody stops at her stall. My stomach twists. I wish I wanted those bright paintings more than everyone else here, but I don’t. I turn to the booth across, bare the scarcest glance, and the white haired woman latches onto me like a leech sensing an opportunity for conversation, lists the medications she must feed her small dog who is reposed, grotesque, in a baby carriage. I ask after a teapot I don’t need, lovely, gilded like ceilings of hotels in the roaring twenties but I can’t justify spending $5. Yesterday’s tips were okay but the first of the month is marching like a hideous parade toward me and I have nothing to celebrate, no confetti to throw. On weekdays, high schoolers from the local secondary come in and have lunch. Every day they pay with a new $100 bill I can barely make change for. They leave negligible tips. Order extravagantly. Leave half over. It is hard not to think about them looking at these lined faces manning their stands hoping for a sale the way their parents hoped for rain. Income for dog medications, or their own. My stomach threatens vomit and I can’t ignore it. I am eight days late, every gurgle is ominous, a signpost babies ahead, do not enter. I want to leave. I want to buy the old woman’s art I don’t like. I want not to be a pregnant waitress in my twenties. I stay and stay, but I don’t buy anything. II
I often think about eighth grade graduation not because it’s a frivolous, unnecessary milestone, nor because that was my first slow dance, held loose by a boy who smelled like string cheese while Elton pounded out tender keys, but because the only teacher who was never impressed with me congratulated my parents on having a child who could be anything she wanted to be. I think of this at least once a week as I fold my server’s apron into my dirty backpack, scrounge together change for a float, apply braggy taglined moisturizers to stern, unwavering smile lines. Mistakes Were MadeBy Erin Kirsh
“To err is human, to water, fish.” – Tyler D’Souza
I wear them like a shroud of mourning
or twist them like balloon animals into something amusing, something I can give away. Statements of FactBy Erin Kirsh
My son threw up tarantula legs, which is odd because I didn’t serve him any.
There are rolling power outs in the neighborhood, but if I sat on the rooftop, I could see lights glimmer in unknown windows, illuminate odd inhabitants and their odder habits. The dark makes strange and even though the space isn’t really different it heightens my senses, I count steps between rooms. Outside my window in grey light I see that water has pooled in the hollow where the earth reclaimed the mouse my son hunted, took back its fur and brains and bones. The divot is deep enough that a passing raccoon dips sharp little hands in and drinks, deep enough to drown bugs, everything can danger. I still think about that video of the raccoon going to wash cotton candy in a puddle so as to clean it before eating, then watching in hurt confusion as it dissolves. I think that video was so popular because it feels like a metaphor. The universality of the metaphor might speak to the failure of the nation state. When I don’t like to think about things anymore I make to-do lists. I need to buy more surface cleaner, for the tarantula legs. Erin Kirsh is a writer and performer living in Vancouver. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, The /t3mz/ Review, EVENT, subTerrain, CV2, The Maynard, QWERTY, and Geist, where she took second place in their postcard short story contest. She recently made strawberry banana bread that didn't give anyone indigestion. Visit her at www.erinkirsh.com or follow her on twitter @kirshwords.
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