What Now

By Elana Wolff

In the darkest month, I walked the dog offroad,
down the ravine.
                          Masked like sinister Santas,
a pack of coyotes
sprung from the brush— 
moving their muzzles in unison, mewling
the seasonal tunes.
                                       I hadn’t counted on this.
Nor on the placards tacked to the trees, the dis-
embodied jingles.   
Mystified by the presentation, 
the dog re-
coiled and whimpered; 
                                       I drew my Ruger LCP.
The pack deduced the rules,
removed the masks, but stood their ground.  
 
             What now of the gun?
The “promise” to the audience— 
that once it’s drawn and cocked,
it’s gotta go off.

---

Light From Water Where We Bothered It

By Elana Wolff

Unlike books,
sky can’t be remaindered—big as it is.
Tundra goes on, too, for miles and miles; I side with miles,
                                                                            not klicks.
Overseas,
P.M.’s still writing vanishment
in every book; he does it better than well.
Like Cézanne painted apples, Monet
lilies, Turner seas.
            Like Thomson painted northern trees,
Hockney
California pools,
Barnett Newman The Stations of the Cross. 
 
My hair is whiting—badger stripes— 
                                                    I cover them with pink. 
Skin dimpling,
arches fallen,
knees & femurs
groaning bone.
                          What gives?
 
Light from water where we bothered it,
 
thermostats exactly where we set them.
 
Openness, refining— 
                                      work that’s filigreed
                         to fit. The big steal,
quick switch, the ever-
                                      aching wait— 

---

Gloss

By Elana Wolff

Blue at the back of the trees— 
the tarp that never has to be fastened, 
 
air on air.
The chariot that crossed the sky on wheels in wheels— 
 
a fugitive
to every revolution.
 
Every new one
knows the mother’s voice from in the dark, mother-
 
pulse within the womb,
father in the /y/. Parrots—their electric cries
 
& siblings in the s/wings.
Jackals crying through the night
 
like corybantic cousins. The city
I take to bed, like kith,
 
on my skin. The flinty, sticky city,
its quotidian things & mysteries. 
 
Blues beyond the pines and pine-
cones silent overhead,
 
like thought—the kind of thought
that’s prayer, for thought is prayer enough,
 
unuttered. If you lose the words,
just think in pictures. If you need a tune, 
 
just pick one up.    

---

Beam Me Up

By Elana Wolff

After winning a prize, says Souv,
the pressure to be nice,
              not tired,
is high.
And titles start haunting the text.
 
Like all the loves who ever left—ghosts as old as Ur Kasdim
put their stock in metem-
psychosis and got it.
 
I wish I were a better spectre. Damage
undermines me every time.
The bruising at the neck has passed,    
the rest of me is next.
 
Maybe I’ll fly;
                      I’ve got the sheets. 
Or maybe I’ll make an angel in snow,
                                                               blend in.
(Once I would have thought that meant
I was giving in to influence.)
 
Moonlight’s
sliced to lines tonight
by tines of the neighbour’s gate.
             What if I have one beam me up?
 
I’m low on breath, so tired,  
and they’re playing the exit tune.
 
Holy Mo— 
“A Little Night Music,”
                                    again — 

---

​Elana Wolff lives and works in Thornhill, Ontario—the ancestral land of the Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat First Nations. Elana’s work has recently appeared (or is forthcoming) in The Antigonish Review, Arc, Best Canadian Poetry 2024, DUSIE, FreeFall, Galaxy Brain, Juniper, The Nashwaak Review, and Prairie Fire. Her collection, SWOON, received the 2020 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry. Her cross-genre Kafka-quest work, FAITHFULLY SEEKING FRANZ, was released with Guernica Editions in fall 2023.