by Carolyn Smart

My 11 year old self is walking on the playing field
towards the rhododendron woods, the edge
of my boarding–school grounds.

To my right is the single swing where the Lady Caroline
explained to me how her mother was a Countess, dark hair
parting open then closed on her freckled, anxious face.

Why do you not go back to America,
the girls ask, that place where the President was shot,
is that not where people who talk like you should be?

But that is not where I live, nor do I live in Canada now, for
my parents have sailed away, taking their arguments with them.
They do not write to tell me of our future. They do not write at all.

Inside the rhodo woods the older girls build shelters.
We sweep our tree house spotless every day,
brooms of leaves, bent boughs as seats.

It is only children here and we are kinder
in a way to one another, in the woods.
We are a sort of family, and briefly unafraid.

It is important who we let inside our shelter.
This small one standing eager at the entrance:
she might change everything.

From time to time I glance behind to
the far side of the trees and the high grey wooden fence.
Beyond that is the road, the world, the sea.

by Armand Garnet Ruffo

In the yard of the haunted house, uncle broken–man
yells. His dark head hanging out the window.
I look up but try to ignore him.

Behind hedges the height of trees, entwined in a blaze
of yellow petals. Those of us brave enough
catch bees on sunny Saturdays,

snap jar lids over them, lock them behind glass,
hold their sting to our ears.
Some tire of the game

and let their captives loose, drop their jars and run.
Others forget or neglect and let
the busy sounds melt

inside behind the glass while others maliciously blow
smoke into the punctured lid,
tranquilize the buzzing cargo.

Everybody runs past the broken window, making fun
of the broken man who calls me out by name
and says we are the same.

by Armand Garnet Ruffo

Never enough love, or too much of the wrong kind.
Pitiful things we were in the tall grass running
and stumbling near the stone bridge. Wawatasi,
my grandmother’s name, becoming in an act of naming
rising from the earth, an act of acceptance and healing.

Not witness, supplicant, aspirant, participant. Not that,
the way the beads of light unexpectedly flitted above us,
around us, and finally through us. To this day I have no
explanation, no muddled speculation, for what happened
that evening in Oklahoma, and if there is one,
it is beyond me. For a moment, wearing everything
that was lost and had to be let go.

by Armand Garnet Ruffo

The pictures on the stripped walls leave behind
their ghost imprint. At the funeral, the eulogy
slipped out of me. I found the words and thought
no more of it until I returned to you, old house,
and found myself rooted to the very spot I took
my first step. Nothing will ever again be the same.

Old house, with your boxcar walls, crooked windows,
sagging floor, leaking roof. Listen: I lay up half the night
listening to you storm and subside, and storm again,
carrying me to bottles and flying dishes, cracked skulls
and silence. Then the gust of birthday candles, fiddles
and guitars, and riotous laughter of all things.

It all comes so quickly, old house. Tell me how to hold
back the rising current, how to walk through your door,
and get on with it, as they say. Little me, there I am,
pushing myself into another day where I am both here
and there, like some kind of divining rod snapping awake,
jotting down things I can barely contain.