Well, I'll be damnedBy Jenna Lyn Albert
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It’s a run-o’-the-paper-mill Tuesday night, and not even the cop cars barricading Main Street are all that unusual come twilight on this side of town. The pizzeria’s staff and customers gather at the neighbouring Tim Hortons, blocking the drive-thru. Plates of ‘authentic’ spaghetti congeal while they congregate around a bona fide beaver: all ginger-enamelled incisors and hunched back, its rodent-tail embossed tire-tread-like. The beaver must’ve made it through Simms Corner, which is more than you can say for the locals. We’re in no need of a dam, traffic’s jammed all the way back to the bridge and I don’t think beavers eat fish so I wouldn’t waste the tuna, lady. A good ol’ boy swears he saw a beaver gnawing on the femur of a bloated body once, a fisherman who’d fallen through thin ice and resurfaced with the thaw—freshet never frozen. They’re not predators by any means, but males are known to be aggressive. I heard on the news once that a rabid beaver bit a man in the thigh, severing a major artery and causing the guy to bleed to death. Still, a gristled cook offers it some burnt crust the consistency of tree bark, says that beavers hate the sound of running water and’ll do anything to plug it up like the city tries and fails to fix the old pinhole pipes. The mammal mustn’t have gotten the memo not to go chasing waterfalls*, semidiurnal tides too much to tame.
*Tourism New Brunswick attempted to rebrand Reversing Falls as the Reversing Rapids due to the constant confusion of tourists expecting to see a waterfall and instead finding some rather anti-climactic whirlpools. Also a popular TLC song.
Head & HeartBy Jenna Lyn Albert
Mom spent hours beachcombing my head: plucking pearlescent parasites
from my scalp-scape, then crushing them into Kleenex—the cochineal mix, blood and bug and tea tree oil, tie-dyeing tissue after tissue the colour of poppy pins come November, black cherry Kool-Aid, Dad’s ’86 Chevy to the levy. I’d sit on the toilet seat, bowed over the sink in prayer please let there be no more nits or eggs or creepy-crawlies and I swear I’ll never and after a week of supplication, Mom gave up fingering my long brown curly hair, scissoring it off into a Posh Spice blunt bob, and why they call it a bob at all is beyond me. When I hear “Hallelujah,” it makes me itch—I’ve had a few never-have-I-evers and I’m a catechism dropout, and too often it’s Wainwright instead of Cohen, but can you feel the hair in your mouth, on your tongue? I have split ends. Mounting TensionsBy Jenna Lyn Albert
Despite popular belief, lady dogs are just as likely to hump their hearts out as males. That’s how I wound up at the doctor’s, a disobedient pup who’d toilet-trained well enough, but no one expects the little scamp to be doing this. In the waiting room, I leaf through a pile of tattered National Geographics while Mom twiddles her thumbs, rehearsing how she’ll say What’s up, doc to our family physician, and I hadn’t taken her for a tattle-tale but here we are. The first magazine features a glossy spread of a not-so-mysterious naked man, penis like a Shar Pei—all scrunched up—and before Mom can wrinkle her nose at me, I flip to a page with a baby polar bear. The receptionist is snooty, voice all nose and no nicety. She tells us to go into the examining room after half an hour of Mom progressively losing her cool like the ice caps are melting. Our doctor is as buddy-buddy as a TV dad, and behind closed doors he says, “Good morning,” “Good grief,” as my Mom fills him in on my debacle: a rash from duck-down pillows … down there. The doctor’s cheeks go as pink as my punany, pupils focused on the prescription pad to avoid my puppy-dog eyes. Handing Mom the script for Dr. Watkins Medicated Rub, he tells her to buy synthetic pillows, opens the door for us to leave—his reprieve. Back at home, it’s bedtime and the ointment smells like menthol—I’m all tingly. Mom’s propped my bedroom door open, taken all the stuffed animals, all the pillows but one: heavy-petting heavily discouraged, involuntarily dismounted. Mom didn’t account for the mattress.
Solarium, SolemnBy Jenna Lyn Albert
Curved windows collect dandelion cypselae and bird shit.
The wicker’s faded from daylight, sunspots like vitiligo. If you mimic the cardinal he’ll sing back, his trill emulating a car alarm. I project to the spruce at the property line. A cab driver once recited Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” In the taxi women come and go / Talking of Maya Angelou. The floor’s an ironing board: smooth out the wrinkles of my spine. Press the collarbone, the crease of cleavage. Cosmopolitans lie on the lounger: donuts get enough bad press from the cops, let alone from being sex props. Jenna Lyn Albert is a recent graduate of the University of New Brunswick’s creative writing program and a member of the Fiddlehead’s editorial board. Her poetry has appeared in The Malahat Review, The Puritan, Riddle Fence, The Antigonish Review, and CV2. Her debut collection of poetry, Bec & Call, is forthcoming with Nightwood Editions this fall.
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