thatfellowgoosepelo

[thatfellowgoosepelo]

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At the end of all this I hope there’s more. Like an ironic catharsis.Kind of like heaven, but it’s just more of this instead. Less romantic than rebirth, less incredible than eternal bliss No angels (we already have those here!) but instead: Clothing Store managers! “No sitting at the cash register!” “Someone clean up the clearance section!” English Teachers!“Turn to page 37!”“You’re telling…

[thatfellowgoosepelo]

Cliches

I’m getting old and I’m forgetting how to feel anything. It sucks. I used to feel so much. Like, for example, last week.My wife, three months pregnant, and me, three months anxiouswe found out it wouldn’t actually work. A disaster! So many people said sorry, or,they felt sorry, or,it’s not the end, or,don’t worry it’ll be okay. What do you say to that? Thanks?Thank you for feeling sorry. I…

[thatfellowgoosepelo]

Is this the end of the world or do I just need a different haircut?

I have a bald spot in the back of my head and everyone is staring at it. I can feel it when I walk by. As soon as they’re out of my sight my bald-spot is in theirs. I can feel them staring at it, searing the skin around it with their attention. Look at me! it says every time a newcomer enters the room. Watch me grow! It says every time it feels a look. I have no control over the outcome of this…

[thatfellowgoosepelo]

Back to it, I guess.

Back to it, I guess.

It was a lot easier to write when I was younger. I remember sitting in the quad of the University of Toronto’s King’s College, a tiny courtyard that feels like it was pulled out of another city. Another century, even. I remember sitting on the little stone wall with my notebook open in front of me, a full story bleeding from my pen over the course of a few hours. A story that has at this point…

[thatfellowgoosepelo]

Prose

The alternative is always poetry and everybody knows it. I read a poem a few years back, almost ten now, back when it was all still poetry. It said “the brave never write poetry, they die and then they are dead”, and I loved it because how fucking facile, how fucking empty to just write and hope that it’s something, and then it is something for someone at some point, but that’s the nature of…

[thatfellowgoosepelo]

Will my children write diaspora poetry?

Will my children write diaspora poetry?

Will my son write about the pain of not knowing the terror of the police asking him where he’s been?

Will my daughter write about not knowing how cold the winters are, how not walking to work at 5 AM at -45 degrees Celsius has distanced her from herself?

Will my children to mourn the loss of something they’ve never known (but are expected to know)

[thatfellowgoosepelo]

Anxiety

I have a particular way of writing when I feel like I want to be profound but have nothing to say. Lots of words. Lots of big words. Lots of big words and long sentences and a comma where there really should be a period and an argument where there should be nothing at all. Sometimes, when it’s late at night and I want to feel poetic, I’ll sit in my work-room, drink a glass of gin, and make up…

[thatfellowgoosepelo]

Thoughts in late May

Thoughts in late May

Memory is a film best directed by Miklós Jancsó; exciting, visceral, random; a seemingly endless plot of random occurrence; re-occurring characters and noteworthy folk-songs. Sometimes I wish my company could hear my memories. but when I think on them — and I mean reallythink —  I begin to wonder if the audio is authentic or if those scenes are strips in the editing room, victims of a perpetual…

[thatfellowgoosepelo]

Pantoum: That time I adopted a dog.

Pantoum: That time I adopted a dog.

We freed him from his cage into the backseat. He curiously sniffed around at first. He laid down, vomited, and fell asleep, Mechanical vibrations his berceuse.

He curiously sniffed around at first, His new home, free to roam in open space. Mechanical vibrations his berceuse, He turned his back, and slept, and farted.

At home, he’s free to roam in open space. We took him to the vet to get checked…

[thatfellowgoosepelo]

Vignette: Pacific passage

We found Kendall in the middle of the street in the middle of the night staring into the sky. “The stars changed, Yu-Jin,” he said unblinking, like a statue on the perch of those moss-covered historical sites we’d visited earlier in the day. It was his first time out of the country, out of the four-block radius that encircled his home, his school, his life. “The spoon is all the way over there,…

[thatfellowgoosepelo]

I ran over a cat with my car and I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself.

She was scared. She, I think. Maybe I’m projecting. I don’t want her to be a she, and that makes it hard to think otherwise. I can’t forget her, skittering back and forth across the middle lane of a three-lane street. The bus in front of me had obscured her from view before pulling over to the side at the last second to pick…

[thatfellowgoosepelo]

I don't want to die in a hospital alone

I don’t want to die in a hospital alone

death, or something like it, headless on cracked earth scratching sand-smudged fingertips unfeeling (by anyone with a brain, at least). Burn them on a flame to kill them,

nobody will get hurt.

open sores prepped to welcome little bugs like hairy dotted messengers of a sharp cough, maybe,

coma, maybe

something worse. But we’re already

gone. Nobody’s

home.

Everyone’s out for a

walk.

[thatfellowgoosepelo]

I used to be a creative.

After graduating university all I wanted to do was write. All I wanted to do was put words on paper in a fancy way to make people think I was smarter than I was, more interesting than I was, more creative than others, just more in general. Four years of Tennyson, Yeats, Auden, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Asimov, Hubbard, Heinlein, Orwell, Woolf,…

[thatfellowgoosepelo]

Flash Fiction: In the hours when you fall asleep

Flash Fiction: In the hours when you fall asleep

But I was never good at dealing with loneliness anyways. On my best days I could push the feeling downward; only ever so low that it was a light thrum against the back of my throat and not the haunting spectre that filled my lungs and made my tongue swell. A younger version of myself might have believed that enough of the good stuff could drown it out completely, but it’s in the very nature of…

[thatfellowgoosepelo]

Fish.

I will never mistaken the scent of a fish being fried, scales and skin flat on the pan until crunchy or in a puddle of hydrogenated vegetable oil floating or on the edge of my mother’s spatula inches from the paper-towel laid on eighteen-year-old plates to absorb the runaway-grease.

“Fried fish smells too strong,” she would say as she opened the screen door to the backyard and the front door to…

[thatfellowgoosepelo]

Quick Poetry: Changes

Everything changes so fast so slowly. Just yesterday we were a rocket, dog faced, wind flapping jowls at 150 Km/h.

Remember that? Flash in the pan that was.

Temporary high, that was. That was. That was everything to me, and you know it.

Ripped from “this is nice” to “holy shit” to “holy shit” to “nevermind, I guess.” This is fine, I guess. Feeling fine is fine, I guess. Enough for me. Better than…

[thatfellowgoosepelo]

Carla Crowe: Home

On the third floor of the building, behind a heavy, scuffed, Masonite mahogany door, Carla Crowe removed her coat and threw it over the armrest of the love seat near the double hung windows in the living room. She could hear Alex cooking in the kitchen, smell the over-cook on the fore-rib, smell the mixture of sweat and perfume softly emanating from Alex’s  scarf, cast aside on the back of a…