We Have the Eclipse at Home

By Andrew French

All my Ontario friends are talking
about an eclipse, but it’s too rainy
               in Vancouver to know
               the moon by its image.
 
We’re even in a way – it doesn’t know me
either, couldn’t draw me if it tried.
               The closest I’ve come to drawing
               the moon is the period at the end of this line.
 
I once drew three eclipses         
in one ellipsis and was so excited
               I could write about it
               that my thoughts trailed off…
 
A snowboarder goes off trail
on the news, prays all night
               to the moon. I pray too
               from my basement suite
 
just to see if my desires move
the moon, if it can move me.
               I moved back to the suburbs because I wanted
               to be near mountains and family.
 
I moved back because you can see the stars
maybe five percent better from here on a clear night.
               Everything I own shuffled across the city
               for a clearer view of rays from millions of miles away.
 
Mom would say the move was pointless,
               that we have light at home.
 
In this case, she’d be right.

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Cultus Lake, 2002

By Andrew French

​Chris puts his wet hands against your dry back
yanks the dock from beneath you. Magician’s tablecloth.
 
Glint of silver tableware. Wet handprints on shoulder blades.
Angel wings daring to glimmer against a fading August sun.

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Basho's Memorial Garden

By Andrew French

​Haiku courtyard. Concrete, concise. Bamboo
overlooking stretches of current
waving back in short syllables. Phantom frogs
splashing into long-dry ponds
down the thin street where the poet once lived.
 
Misty air, all Tokyo’s motor today. Rumbling
to unite the Sumida and Onagi. Small boats
crawling like tadpoles through rivers
written into a city too large to understand.

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Body, Palimpsestic

By Andrew French

​Coffee in the Ontario mall, a family pushed shopping carts
filled with plastic limbs, manufactured mannequin
torsos. Sometimes, you leaned in to tell me, the poems
just write themselves. This week’s return to my college town
 
becomes a study in form. Body changed, recited in hotel
mirrors. Refracted visions of a former self, clavicles buried
like a first draft metaphor beneath a decade’s bulk. Muscles
defined, enjambed. Voltas for shoulders, I was a sonnet
 
in my early 20s. Lines under strict structure, rules
of where to begin, turn, end, written into being
by the cursive curl of slow-growing dumbbells.
This body, palimpsestic now in the airplane
 
window. Warped reflection, old self overwritten in round
abstract font. Hybridity overtaking concrete structure.

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​Andrew French is a queer poet from North Vancouver, BC. They are the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Buoyhood (Alfred Gustav Press, 2025) and Fists You've Called Home (Pinhole, forthcoming 2026). Their work has previously appeared in Event, PRISM International, long con, and a number of other journals across North America and the UK. Outside of their own writing, Andrew has hosted Page Fright: A Poetry Podcast since 2019. They are on Instagram at @andrewwfrench.