Asbestos Heights. David McGimpsey

red,

      and healthy foods taste either red or red.

      Steak, cherry popsicle, red velvet cake.

      Full of such health, I stayed up all summer

      sketching a fringe play called Dangling Apricocks

      and collapsing somewhere near Jolicoeur.

      When somebody looks over their glasses and says,

      ‘Look at it this way, m’sieur, you have a scar

      but at least you still have most of your face,’

      what can you say but ‘D’you like daiquiris?’

      Healthy red medicines, or even those blushed

      Pepto pink, die in the Canadian cold;

      you can’t keep Diet Cokes at home for fear

      the deliciousness will dull you to God.

      Yarrow

      There’s the country somewhere outside the car.

      The country where the elm fucks the maple

      and the elm broods as if auditioning

      for a new PBS miniseries.

      There’s a poetry where trees don’t have sex,

      when the yarrow observed from a car seat

      can stand in, plain image, plain symbol,

      and not be you observing me as overweight.

      Outside, as the yarrow whips by, are towns

      where Canadians happily live their lives,

      unperturbed by who was excluded

      from the Can Lit? Can Do! anthology.

      Inside, the steady beat of country songs,

      coffee with diet hazelnut creamer.

      Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything

      about the maple who gets so leafy.

      Queen Anne’s Lace

      My therapist looked over her glasses.

      ‘I hate it when you say that nobody cares

      if you live or die when I, for one, am

      quite excited by the idea of you dying.’

      I stared at her desk bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace,

      wondering when we would talk about drinking.

      How happy I was to know I’d leave there,

      go to my pub and tell jokes to Cakeface.

      I told her about the walks in the mall,

      how happy I was just to sit and read –

      except reading Frank Norris, of course –

      I mean, who on earth could be happy then?

      ‘Why are you telling me this?’ she said,

      tacking back to more analytical words.

      ‘No matter how devoted to my job,

      I would never read one of your books’!

      Sunflower

      Like a foul-tempered baseball manager

      observing the bumbles of his hapless nine,

      I obsessively ate sunflower seeds.

      Chewing and spitting. Spitting and chewing.

      In winter, as I walked home from college,

      roughed up by the hilarious comments

      about my appearance, my strategy

      was soon limited to ‘eat lots of seeds.’

      Of course, it didn’t help I had the pride

      of Richard II. It didn’t help I switched

      from sunflower seeds to popcorn chicken

      and from popcorn chicken to popcorn steak.

      I didn’t need another reviewer

      who hated ‘frivolity’ to tell me

      I was losing all Bunyon Review cred,

      and that all things from Kansas made him sick.

      Basil

      The discovery of the basil plant was not

      made by British actor Basil Rathbone,

      but by an ordinary guy from Boston

      who was just still Basil from the block.

      It was, as they say in the plant-birth biz,

      ‘licorice-y.’ Not really your kind of thing,

      you confessed, after saying I ‘made up’

      that ‘stuff about humans needing affection.’

      You can’t hate someone for saying ‘We were

      together for a long time, but were we,

      like, ever, really together?,’ but it sure

      helps you appreciate arena football.

      I learned to hate basil, called it buttfool,

      delaware parsley, poor man’s toback,

      while I sat weeping in Old Navy pants.

      It’s hard to hate wearing Old Navy pants.