SurVision Magazine

Sufficient Evidence, Opus 19

after Barbara Guest's "The Knight of Sun"


My feathered enemies
lurk by the foaming flames,
their foreheads damp
in the winging breeze.
My thoughts are concave
like your ragged tooth
that trembles in the archway
of your pitiful gob.
The instruction manual
explains that I am a loser,
puffing in a monsoon of ginger ale
and shivering sand.

Night arrives.
It has curves
in all the right places.
The night's language melts
with the snow, revealing
creatures of armour
and sundry wacky farm critters.
I occupy my shiny hands,
rock like a leaf on a rock.
I gather sufficient evidence.
I give myself a tetanus shot.

          Next thing you know
          thin streams of light
separate my toes.
I give each a name.





Itinerary


I was riding backwards on a train
when I started to roar, and
I roared till my brow turned roric,
and everyone else on the train
roared with me. (I mean, I didn't
actually walk up and down
the commodious aisle to take
inventory of who was roaring
and who was not, but by the general
din I could judge it was pretty
unanimous.)
                       When I woke (or maybe
it was when I slept), I was splayed in a
rust-covered tub filled with swampy
water, reeds poking out around my
spindly corpus. I tried to let out
another roar to see if the rust would
roar with me, but my efforts were
feckless, devoid of feck, feck-free.
What did, however, transpire was
that a flock of delicate poodlejays
descended from the skylight above
me, their feathery coifs (I'd thought
at first they were yarmulkes) rustling
as the birds circled the tub.
                                                 The poodle-
jay who was clearly in charge
landed upon my bony, blistered knee
and proceeded to declaim on a topic
I found obscure, the pith of which
appeared to be that I was dead. This
thing of being in a rusty tub in a
dank and magnificent house I only
now realized I had never seen before:
this was death.
                            A frisson of ecstasy,
though it might have been grief, navigated
its way through my shattered spine, and
the poodlejays roared, and I roared
with them, and my train pulled into
its final destination.





My Life as a Cartoon


I became a cartoon
depicting a tin of tuna
whose lid rolled back like a tongue.
My parents chose not to prolong
my suffering and woke me, crowing,
See, we put you to bed in a crinoline
netting, and told you not to crinkle
your thoughts, to focus on a single freckle.
Behind Yosemite Park in Fresno!
I reached into the snow and formed a snowball,
Beaned them, and out into the world did waddle.





Stuart Ross is a Canadian writer, editor, and writing teacher born in Toronto and currently living in Cobourg, Ontario. He is the author of 20 books of poetry, fiction, and essays, most recently the poetry collections entitled Motel of the Opposable Thumbs (Anvil Press, 2019), A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent (Wolsak and Wynn, 2016), and A Hamburger in a Gallery (DC Books, 2015), as well as the novel-in-prose-poems Pockets (ECW Press, 2017). He has taught workshops across the country, and was the 2010 Writer-in-Residence at Queen's University. His micro press, Proper Tales, is now in its 40th year.