WARSAW MOUNTAIN.

no title no thesis no preamble — just:

there were seven fireflies in rotting cardboard box behind 7-Eleven. pulsed as dying icons. I named them all after users who stopped posting. one was you.

we used to scream on purpose into thread IDs, until the mods started banning us. I said I wanted to fuck my cousin & someone replied: “finally, someone with taste.”

she wore a sailor moon hoodie to great-grandmother’s funeral. our hands touched over the communion crackers. she said “I hate this music” and I said “me too” but I didn’t. I lied, because love requires posture.

the dragonflies came later — mid-august, sweating tar, wings burnt plastic reflecting the sun in a nauseous way, God might be a reflective surface and nothing more.

I tried to kill one with a Bic lighter. it lived.

some nights I take sugar pills and pretend they’re bullets. other nights I reverse it —

double-blind means the ghosts don’t know who’s haunting.

I wrote a suicide note in kanji I don’t understand. posted it at 4:32 AM JST. no replies. someone saged it. I laughed, chipped a tooth. then I bit down and kept going.

the sunrise hits the roof tiles like it’s trying to wake the building up. I sit cross-legged in my cousin’s hoodie, eating pocky from a crumpled sleeve, wondering if anyone else ever confused survival with performance.

last night I dreamt the fireflies spelled out

I stand at the lip of the sink, fingers slick with lather,

dishes clang in the gray enamel basin,

forks tumbling over knives, a fork’s bent tine

like a shattered rib, the glasses fogged

with whispers of yesterday’s soup.

There are bread crumbs like freckles on the cutting board,

an apple core, browning into shadow,

and the cold smell of coffee gone stale.

There is a girl outside the window.

Her shoes are scuffed, her hair a rope in the wind,

her shadow stretches across the parking lot,

disappearing into the dumpster’s maw.

She is waiting for something, the silence

of waiting, the way rain waits

to strike glass, or how a train waits

to leave but never does, engine groaning,

exhaust curling like smoke from a dying word.

Behind me, the radio hums a song I know

from years ago, and I hate it now,

its chorus like a dog whining for scraps.

The tiles beneath my feet are cold, their grout

a river of darkness, and the kitchen light,

a dull fist, strikes shadows across the counter,

making the crumbs a constellation.

On the fridge, there are magnets,

a postcard of a desert, a recipe I will never make,

and a photograph I took of my brother,

his smile like a crack in the earth, his eyes

the bright sorrow of a summer fire.

He is gone now, but his voice remains

in my head, a bird that will not die,

its wings beating against the inside of my skull.

I think of the man I saw by the bridge,

his coat a nest of tar and sweat,

his cardboard sign a scripture in dirt:

ANYTHING HELPS. GOD BLESS.

His face was a map of loss, eyes empty,

a well dry for years, and I did not stop,

I did not stop, I did not stop.

The sink is full now, the water brimming

with the scum of soap, the steel sheen

of knives just beneath the surface,

a wet darkness curling at the edges.

I pull the plug, watch the water whirl,

a silver spiral devouring itself,

a throat swallowing and swallowing.

Outside, the girl has moved on, a smudge

in the rain, a ghost brushed off by the wind.

The song ends, and the silence

spills into the room like the scent

of burnt toast, acrid, unwanted.

I close my eyes, see the apple core,

its bruised sweetness browning,

a mouth open, whispering

what I will not say.

I touch the cold steel of the knives,

their edges wet, their handles greasy,

my reflection warped in the basin.

Somewhere, a clock strikes,

a hollow sound, like a laugh buried in earth.

I turn off the radio. I leave the light on.

The girl is gone. The man is gone.

My brother is a photograph.

I dry my hands on a threadbare towel,

the fabric rough as a field gone fallow.

The dishes are clean, but the sink is stained.

The apple core still rots on the cutting board,

and the light hums its dull hunger.

It is enough, I tell myself.

I take a sabbatical here in this cold blue hallway,

false cube, white and black artery of nothing,

limestone grid hung like a crucifix of someone else’s design,

a mockery of wind, each tile polished like a prayer polished raw.

My brother’s in Waterton, pouring whiskey for the unweathered,

wind-struck against the green glass mouth of the lake,

while I fold like a letter never sent, couch absorbing my weight

promise broken by its own softness.

I don’t touch the land.

I have no land here. Only white walls sharp as treaties,

counters sanitized to the point of erasure, black tiles

that reflect my feet but never remember.

No aspen trees split the air, no prairie dogs bark like prophets.

The sky is an uncut wound beyond the balcony glass,

I can feel it press against me, feel the bruise the curve of my breathing.

the mirrors don’t know me.

reflection a box, a mannequin speaks when I try to sleep.

Roku television feeds me strangers’ faces, reruns,

Lifetime movies, blonde women escape husbands

who all look like their fathers. It should be comforting, this drama,

this repetition of threat and resolution,

it’s just an exit wound

looping back into the same story, static dressed as survival.

I want to leave. I want to leave the balcony door open

and let the wind shear my skin to something real.

I want to call my brother and tell him to come home,

glittering corpse / grand hotel,

to watch the green mountains wilt like old mapsz

But I am moss growing over a buried cathedral, darkness with upholstery.

I tell myself this is temporary, practicing breathing,

but each breath is a raw wire drawn across my chest.

The corn holders bite my palm, two yellow tusks in the junk drawer's jaw.

Behind the baking soda fossil, a carrot with a spinal twist— dirt still dreaming in its root hairs— presses against a souring lemon.

"Don't throw that out," you say, toothbrush between your lips, pointing with a wet hand at the jar of something that might’ve been jam once but now pitches gray spores like a battlefield flare.

The fridge light buzzes like a streetlamp over wet snow, the kind that layers like a lie.

I dig out the cheese with a fork handle. It peels like skin from a blister.

Two potatoes kiss under the drawer's plastic groan, wrinkled, freckled, sprouting thin white tongues.

"Do you think it hurts?" you ask, rinsing the spoon that’s bent at the neck like a question.

The milk jostles. A clot swims up. The jug is a lung. It wheezes as I lift it, glugs an answer that I don’t write down.

I toss a lime, calcified green. It clinks off the sink. We both look.

“You could paint that,” you say. I can’t tell if you mean the lime, or the silence it made.

The celery splits like a ribcage. Cold leaks from the door, wraps around my ankles like a dog we buried in September.

I tell myself the quiet is a kind of work, the stillness a ledger filling, the page looks blank to everyone.

I build small altars— half-burnt candle, dog-eared chapbook, old river rock gone smooth. Left on my desk, for God I no longer know how to pray to.

healing must be like that: slow gathering, scavenger hunt in half-lit forest, finding splinters of yourself tucked between the pages of a thrifted novel, in the bruised petals of prairie clover, inside a soft answer you give yourself at 3AM.

The land holds grief It doesn't rush. It doesn't apologize. Lets the frost come, lets the berries wither, and then, somehow, still begins again.

I saw my grandfather's hands, my mother’s sorrow, my own tender rage. I told the river I’m sorry I was ashamed of you once. The river answered back: you are the apology, and the forgiveness, and the prayer.

Blue ceramic mug forgotten since Tuesday spores bloom like tiny planets, universes of green velvet against porcelain white—I find her there, no larger than my thumb's nail, wings transparent as the windowpane sweating with morning. The room tilts sideways, my brain still swimming in last night's poison, the concentrated oil that cracked my consciousness open like an egg against the kitchen counter.

I remember amber, the way streetlights used to pour honey onto sidewalks, how we'd walk through pools of it becoming insects caught in time. Now everything is LED white, clinical and exact. Nothing preserved in that glow.

Fairy blinks at me with obsidian eyes. I wonder if she's real or if the shatter has crystallized my thoughts into hallucination. She climbs the mug's handle like a monument, tiny hands gripping ceramic ridges.

Morning breaks open against the window, spilling yolk-yellow across the kitchen floor. It reminds me of sunset on Murphy's Pond where my father took me fishing when I was seven. The water held the sky upside down and I couldn't tell which was more real.

Ducks know things we don't. They feel the earth's magnetic pull in their bones like an ancestral memory, a compass wound into muscle and feather. They don't question the journey or doubt the destination they've never seen. They simply go.

On the takeout menu magnetized to my refrigerator, Peking duck is item #88 lucky numbers promising prosperity to anyone who orders. The crispy skin glistening like caramelized future.

I watch the fairy stretch gossamer wings damp with mold spores and wonder if fortune is just this—finding magic in forgotten places while the world spins and spins and spins

Morning light catches dust motes swimming where you've disturbed nothing for days. Your glasses smudged beyond seeing, you wet your thumb with spit—an animal gesture, this cleaning that leaves streaks anyway.

The kite drags behind you across empty field, a weight you refuse to put down though the air holds nothing that could lift it. Still you run, hoping to manufacture wind from pure want.

Your friend's phone last pinged near the lake three weeks ago. The map shows a blue dot frozen in time like those old photos where someone's caught mid-laugh, already leaving.

The penny necklace he gave you has turned skin beneath it green—the small price of carrying someone close. Some chemistry between you still happening even in absence.

Hard drives fill with movies you'll never watch— perfect people finding each other in impossible ways, their faces rendered too clearly, showing all the makeup meant to hide their ordinary skin.

You check the mailbox twice before noon, hoping time might bend around your need for one envelope, one message proving that somewhere someone has written your name.

Your apartment gleams with terrible order. Everything in its place except whatever might make this clean box feel like home— fingerprints, coffee rings, another voice.

The keeper says it like a period at the end of a sentence:

*The cub is gone.* No exclamation, no question.

Just a wet hand on my shoulder and a radio hissing static.

The cub is gone, and the trees don’t lean any different.

The benches still hold the same chewing gum prayers.

A crow cleans its beak on the barbed wire

like nothing new has happened at all.

I want there to be a trail,

a small betrayal in the dirt—

a paw print half-filled with rainwater,

a sliver of claw caught in the splintered door,

something to make this loss measurable,

something I can hold against the light and say:

*This is where it happened. This is where I last saw it breathe.*

But there is nothing.

Only the lion still sleeping in the wrong part of the cage,

only the sound of you picking at the sticker on your water bottle,

peeling it off in slow dissolving strips.

And maybe it was always going to be this way—

this quiet removal, this making of space,

this strange, clean absence.

When the sun goes down,

the keepers lock the gates behind them.

The vending machines hum in the dark.

And somewhere, beneath the careful architecture of rock and glass,

a mother bear turns in her sleep,

adjusting her body around something

All night the lake refuses to sleep, rolling over, groaning, a body restless in sheets too thin for the weight of it—

and I walk where the wind cuts the sand into fine striations, a Braille no one stays long enough to read,

where the gulls are not symbols but living things, bones hollow with hunger, screaming for the next torn-off scrap of a world too cheap to last.

Once, here, my great-great-grandfather might have stood barefoot in the dark loam, not as metaphor, not as memory—

just another man made of callus and obligation, standing where the land swallows the land, where the water pulls at his heels like a child that doesn’t know how to ask for what it wants.

And I think of the arcade still lit at 2 AM, the flickering fluorescence keeping the ghosts warm,

how the roller coaster skeleton rusts in the sodium light, ribcage gaping at the sky,

I mind-compost these syllables scattered without purpose across whiteness thoughts not-yet-thoughts muscling through earth before they tongue into language the pen winters along margins where grammar hasn't legislated yet words fracture into splinters of unplanned meaning errors prairie the landscape

I forget how to sentence correctly and the forgetting fields new possibility unfollowing all paths the hand rivers without permission from the thinking part

words strange themselves into configurations nobody taught me to expect or respect

I returned to the salt-crusted coast daily, cages rusted in silence, fingers calloused checking cold latches that never sprung, boots worn thin from paths where reeds cut against ankles. Sea air corroded metal; rain-filled footprints I'd left yesterday.

Like Abraham scanning horizons for promises still unborn, or Penelope unwinding each night's weaving by candlelight, I collected absence as evidence—not of failure, but of persistence. 

In your small bedroom, dozens of opened JSTOR and OpenMuse tabs, you puzzled together fragments of Fukushima's fractured communities— how radiation warnings never accounted for those without family shelters, how evacuation plans assumed a belonging that some were never granted.

Transwoman denied shelter, gay couple separated by bureaucratic forms Queer youth returned to already-exiled families. The young man who traveled miles to avoid the public bathhouse. The couple who heard of their partner's death from neighbors, not officials

Remember Martinaise at midnight? How we found only twisted reeds and the clicking of distant buoys against dock wood?

Faith is the archaeology of the possible— excavation of spaces where evidence should be. Preservation of emptiness, refusal to abandon the dig even as funding runs dry.

The long silence of evidence, the years of nothing, nothing, and then the Phasmid standing before us, patient as history, having waited all along for someone stubborn enough to believe.

Your research stands recognized, your name etched in the academic record. The committee never knew how many nights you deleted whole pages, started again, how often you whispered: this is beyond me, I cannot make this real.

The horseradish sits underground, pallid and unassuming in the earth's dark pocket, a hidden totem of prairie resilience. Grating it releases invisible violence. The chemical warfare begins—sinigrin converted to allyl isothiocyanate, mathematics of pain translated into bodily experience. I watch my father's olive-skinned hands work the root against metal, tears forming constellations at the corner of his eyes. Player's Original cigarettes sit forgotten on the counter. This sacred transmutation from dormant to volatile requires sacrifice. The airways open suddenly as if pried by desperate fingers, lungs blooming painful awareness of every atom of oxygen. Memory rushes forward—my Mémé, arthritis-knuckled hands passing small jars across the checkered tablecloth, saying something in Michif I couldn't yet comprehend. The root of horseradish runs deeper than its literal earth-bound tendrils, stretching across oceans and generations, connecting Wasabi japonica to Armoracia rusticana through a shared evolutionary defense.

Morning spills across the kitchen tile like lost milk.

Six fingerprints on the refrigerator door that weren't there yesterday.

The neighbor's dog barking in three-beat rhythms against the fence

while a plastic bag caught on the telephone wire twists itself into new alphabets.

I count the seconds between thunder and its light.

Seven.

My father's work boots by the door still hold the shape of his feet,

mud-crusted galaxies trapped in the treads.

The copper pipe beneath the sink drips every fourteen seconds—

I've timed it with the clock that runs four minutes fast.

Three spoons in the drawer with bent handles.

Nobody remembers how they bent.

The window frame swollen with summer rain

refuses to open without shoulder and curse.

Each day the mailman delivers someone else's electric bill.

I keep them in a drawer with other people's discarded promises.

Two house sparrows build a nest in the rusted chimney cap,

carrying bits of a receipt from the hardware store.

Across the street, a child with skinned knees learns to ride

on training wheels that catch the light like spinning coins.

I cut an avocado and find the pit has already sprouted,

pale root reaching through brown flesh toward soil it will never touch.

Eleven cracks in the ceiling arrange themselves into constellations

I've been mapping since winter.

My hands remember your shoulder blades—

geography I traced with fingertips until the skin became terrain.

The hammer I use to hang pictures has someone else's initials

burned into the handle.

my mouth a yellow beak, teeth gone.

i spit out pinions, wondering the wait:

the challenges of being the challenger.

the engineers assured the o-rings would work

in our temperatures but i was too hot

maybe too cold

the sky a thick orange soup, swirling,

one hand on my harness, one on the release,

i shut eyes tight trying to remember 

what it felt like to fly

harsh untouchable & blue freedom

but all there is

is a fertile ground getting closer & closer

& fear in bone marrow as gravity consisted

maybe this is punishment

for wanting more than what was meant for me

or the natural order of things.

sun baking me alive, 

to think about the long fall of lucifer

& disintegrating in the sky—

i thought i was already dead, but no

there is still so much left to lose

i hadn't even realized what was mine

floating in darker endless ocean.

once for a brief moment

Standing atop the Calgary Tower, I can almost glimpse the Golden Boy perched on Legislative Building,

his gilded torso gleaming like the stolen gold that paved the railways, connected our concrete hearts.

Rivers flow through my veins, ancient arteries carrying the silt of history,

River current during the spring thaw, bursting its banks.

I trace the lines on yr palm, a map of the Wapiti Valley

the hoodoos of Drumheller rising

In the shadow of the Saddledome, we two-step to heartbeat

Buffalo Hunt pounding like pistons

Watch the prairie crocuses bloom in defiance of winter's grasp,

lay down in the grass by the Leo Mol Sculpture Garden, bronze faces .

Drive across the Prairie provinces,

stop at the Inglis Grain Elevators, once-mighty Prairie Giants standing sentinel

I want to take you to The Forks,

walk across the Esplanade Riel, the bridge a stitched scar across the flayed skin of the Red River,

wander the streets of St. Boniface, the cathedral bells, a rebellion song.

Stand on the corner of Selkirk and Main,

Climb the stairs of the Peace Bridge, a steel ribbon

watch the sun set fire to the Rockies, the city skyline a jagged jaw rising from the jut of yr collar bone.

I want to take you to Nose Hill, trace the outline of your body in the prairie grass, wildflowers blooming in the hollows,

the whole wide sky watching as we make love, the land itself rising up to meet us, the force of our union.

Drive Icefields Parkway, past glacier-fed lakes turquoise

Plant Saskatoon berries in the back forty of our spines, wild chokecherries in the creases of our thighs,

build a home in the aspen parkland

Canopy filtering the light, dappled across our faces.

We are two Red River carts hitched together, ruts of our passage marking the land

I could traverse the Trans-Canada a thousand times and always find my way back to you, my true magnetic north,

Let's make a blanket fort in the Turtle Mountains, stitch our stories into the fabric of the land itself,

embroider a new constellation to guide the lost and weary travelers home.

Forget the railroad, forget the Stampede, forget the Hudson's Bay Company, forget the colonial measuring of our love.

We are the Red River Rebellion, unstoppable as Prairie wildfire

Let the wheat fields bear witness, the canola a sea of yellow sighs, the endless blue sky our cathedral ceiling.

This love is a land claim, a reclamation, a declaration of sovereignty in the face of all that seeks to diminish us.

In the buffalo grass and sage, in the corners and coulees, in the river valleys and Prairie sky,

I will love you with the ferocity of the land itself, our hearts beating to the ancient rhythm,

until the day we return to the soil, two wild crocuses sprouting from the earth,

The can sweats against my palm, aluminum kissing skin—

dewing.

Memory slicks between fingers like condensation,

childhood's cold mouth

a metallic teat where beer now flows.

Short.

Grass.

Burns.

Behind the gymnasium where teachers never walked,

I flicked grandfather's zippo, its casing worn

by jungle sweat and Mekong rain that fell before my birth.

I thumbed the engraving—Saigon '68—

and wondered if he loved her.

The playground field cremated under careful flame,

smoke threading skyward like prayers

I never learned to speak.

Somewhere

a half-blood relative

grows

without my name.

Calgary's mountains frame my trailer park existence,

teeth against horizon.

Aluminum cracks open,

its hiss

an inheritance of absence.

Rust-colored dirt beneath fingernails.

Coal town dying slow.

Pickup trucks sleeping in yards where dreams went to rot.

The can empties but weighs

more

with each

swallow.

I tongue the metal rim and taste

what grandfather left me—

distance.

The zippo's flame licks darkness,

a tongue that speaks

the only language of belonging