Expanse

By Terese Mason Pierre

Each beach trip
is a time.
 
You are the rocky landscape
I pick my way across.
 
I want to go to the water,
but you insist we won’t
 
spend long here. I go anyway.
The wind is hot
 
and welcoming. I see the ocean
change its mind, fold
 
in and over itself with
the sound of punishment.
 
By the truck, you are
a black pebble, within
 
pelting distance, surely,
but my back is to you
 
to bare small shamed skin,
for a moment, so the sun
 
can see it. I have always
envied nature
 
for its expanse,
but we are the same.

---

Bow

By Terese Mason Pierre

Look past first face
There is colour everywhere
 
contours curve and crack to reveal
new layers, further objects of awe.
 
This is what you asked me
to do after our first fight,
 
I, heaving with heat, high
with godlike wrath anticipating
 
I don’t remember what
I said, only how pale
 
you grew
how transparent.
 
A generation later, my eyes
adjust to find
 
my hair devoid of hue,
and your hand still deep
 
in my investments, as natural
as the arc in
 
the sky
after a storm

---

Growing

By Terese Mason Pierre

There’s a fountain flowing deep and wide,
you sing, waiting for the bus.
 
It is late. More importantly, the song is about
God’s love, not yours.
 
You do stretch wide. At the
Christmas party, we made a nice show
 
in the clothes we bought each other.
You put mistletoe
 
in my back pocket
and pulled it out to kiss me.
 
I loved the tree. It was
green, but it was mature.
 
Nothing deeper than that.
When we got home, you
 
went to the bathroom and
didn’t come out for an hour
 
I sat under my sad lamp. The sun
has gone. God wouldn’t do this.
 
Love languages are fake, you say
when I ask you to tell me
 
you love me more, I buy
you all this shit
 
The pine needles fell to the ground
in the year’s opening weeks
 
They didn’t worry as they died,
the tree loved them, gave
 
them what it could, even as
it saw the sunset of its existence.
 
We can’t grow together here
in acres and acres
 
of wide and not deep
We are green, we cannot be like trees

---

Terese Mason Pierre is a writer, editor and organizer. Her work has appeared in the Hart House Review, FIYAH, The Longleaf Review, Train: a poetry journal, and others. She is the poetry editor for Augur Magazine and a co-host of Shab-e She'r, a poetry reading series in Toronto. Her first chapbook will be published with Anstruther Press in Fall 2019. Visit her website.