CompetingBy Erin Kirsh
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After work or maybe it’d be better
to call it a gig, we peel heels off blisters, throw pretty pinching pumps into balding backpacks and head for home. The bus from North Mountain Highway back to the city smells like moldering bananas and something less distinct, something hungrier. This bus of hopefuls returning from Set (where we sat packed like cave bats into an auditorium playing parents though most of us feel mostly like children) is a clubhouse of tired satisfaction, of smug commiseration, of close enough, of some people never do this, don’t even know, some people never take even this thin-as-shadow chance. We exist heavier here than we do on camera where we were sucked in like models’ cheeks and wary breath the waft of us weighty on this raft through the traffic, the breeze a soft whisper through the windows all of us competing for that fresh draft of life. Career Event CoordinatorBy Erin Kirsh
The arrangements are made, blossoms
and moss top tables in glass vases. I lay out lists on clipboards: names of accomplished monied people who may yet attend fashionably late, people of means, leisure, and time. Behind me there’s applause in the theatre. I don’t know who is currently speaking, don’t have the programme I copied page by stubborn page, but the response is mannerly and well-behaved. Applause belongs with dignity like new shoes belong with dog shit. The night I saw Zac Jackson speak I clapped until my palms stung, until I learned all the bones in my hands. That night nobody made centerpieces and no one hired a band, the sound girl was drinking from a margarine tub. I dove tongue first into pitchers, stout then sangria loosening my limbs like oilcan! and afterwards there was dancing. I lost consciousness on a bed of cocaine in a stall rife with Sharpied ennui, one purist used Wite-Out to pass on their message, capitalism sucks. A clever respondent: YOU suck!!! and I came to in the Pacific, pants crumpled on the shore, purse probably somewhere. Today I command caterers for an atrium reception, smooth black tablecloths, soothe wrinkles flat with unstinging palms. In the theatre they clap again, a short sound, like surf rolling up. When is the last time I skinny-dipped, let salt nibble shaved legs cold and prickling in the tide? How long since I have been moved to applause, or at all? BeaconBy Erin Kirsh
Between beers stolen from strangers, breaking nug
over a sheet of paper on the coffee table Greg tells me I am the only person he knows who is doing what they want in life. I’m not sure what to say my speech eats itself my wallet vomits laughter into the pockets of jeans I’ve had since high school that fit, kind of, still give me muffin top. The premature crows’ feet are a few years old, too, will blow out fourth birthday candles in June. The perfume of good green releases and I mellow, brain purrs like a cat who’s been left well enough alone. On the balcony, overlooking Yonge down to the tower, the bong bubbles beats above the hip hop. He is looking at me with admiration maybe envy. He is proud that one of us is “making it,” is brave, this is his perception and I don’t know if it’s kinder to dispel it or say thank you. A red-eyed man I must have known at one point comes in off the balcony shedding snow. It twinkles in his hair like crystals, like he’s put them there for Burning Man. Greg takes the glassware I think of telling him that if I were really doing what I wanted in life, I’d be doing this, here, forever all this wasteful and disappointing nothing, an inner tube in a lazy river running the quiet course until my alleged accomplishments are behind me, just lights blinking in the chlorine. Erin Kirsh is a writer, performer, and funnyman living in Vancouver. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been published in The Malahat Review, EVENT, Arc Poetry Magazine, Cosmonauts Avenue, subTerrain, Geist, QWERTY and more. In her spare time, she complains about the existence of cinnamon raisin bagels. Visit her at www.erinkirsh.com or follow her @kirshwords.
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