ditch,

Kelly Rose Pflug-Back, originally from rural Ontario was first published at the age of fourteen as a winner of This Magazine's Great Canadian Literary Hunt. She began her career as a writer performing in bars that she wasn't yet old enough to drink in. Since then she has won awards from The Elora Writer's Festival and The League of Canadian Poets well as having been featured in Leaf Press, Up The Staircase, Tongues of Fire and various other chapbooks, reading series, and journals.

A Cure For The Water Trapped Inside Your Body
 
Death will not undo the frayed seams that cinch my waist
or stand above me in the light
to better watch my mouth slacken;
the ceiling fan revolving in my damp eyes,
their pupils like an axis for the turning spokes.
 
I remember the weight of those small, brittle bones
like broken eggshells in my hands–
something that can’t withstand even the force of being fit back together:
the window box flowers collared in white eyelet cotton,
 
pleating to foetal buds again when the sun starts to set
and the scarecrow casts the shadow of the cross–
cutting across my path
as though what was seeded in this plight could never rise above it;
my stomach a globe of tears,
 
the room’s reflection frozen in the mirror of a clean knife
 
curved like a scythe
to fit the hollow of the swell.
 
We made graves for each of your sorrows in the folds of my abdomen once,
buried too close to the surface
so that in years of famine the small mounds rose up,
embossed like braille across my stomach.
I didn’t think of it for years,
pacing unlit rooms flicking my butane lighter
to watch the shadows break up and scatter like insects,
disappearing into cracks in the drywall
or shivering in corners,
waiting for me to put it out.
 
Sometimes I traced the planes of those hard, formless things inside me
and wondered if I’d stayed with you too.
If the shame that spread over everything I touched
still coats your body like a milky thrush:
 
your hands braced forever in the doorframe;
 
every thrash and heave of the dog-toothed sea
still rolling in the whites of my eyes. 
 
 
 
 
Words To Chart Elapsed Time
 
Flourescent lights hum and flicker in the gas station bathroom
where you raise the hem of your shirt
to show your body to the mirror–
mortar grinding in your joints
and white skin pocked red with insect bites
slightly raised in places where the pins are still embedded;
 
life clinging, interminable
under the place where you rest your hand
kicking with frog’s legs against the walls of your stomach,
it’s pulse ticking
like the mechanism inside a wind-up toy.
 
Bird-song overlay the highway’s distant sighing
in the morning that found you awake together
curled like parentheses
in your cradle of dead leaves and green-rot,
condensation dripping from the pillars of the overpass
where decades of graffiti overlap.
 
Blisters have risen
in the light of what flared inside your body once,
the seam of your ribs cracked and open
for the world to rush in through–
the rain-wet concrete
 
and the glitter of broken glass,
the force of the wind
and the pieces of torn paper and leaf debris
that circled above you,
caught in it’s currents.
 
All that you have will slip like water
through the cracks between your fingers
eventually–
 
leaving only the ripple
of your body’s last tremors
for time to blot out:
 
sunlight filtering
through poplar leaves
to dapple the ground at your feet,
spotted like the gums
of a snarling dog;
 
the lights on the other side of the Fraser Valley
blinking through the darkness
while cold wind scalds your face,
 
something inside fizzling out
like a cigarette butt,
dropped into half an inch of cold black coffee.
 
 
 
 
Seams
 
These stars are less durable than the ones I remember;
sharp and loose in their sockets,
pinning your small hands to the window pane.
 
Crush your bones to this holiness, Rebecca–
pirouette your dim satellite.
Every night you must dream of some place
where the dark can’t reach it’s burning fingers:
 
the monster’s shadow trailing black objects in it’s wake,
rattling like small bones–
moths drawn to his eyes and teeth in the half-light,
their feathery appendages leaving dust
in the seams of his collared shirt.
 
Your sky is a dirty blanket,
lashed all over in strands of your hair.
Faerie-rings of rust-coloured stains wink at you
from nowhere,
the passing years never aging you
like they age the wooden rafters of this house
and erode the stones in it’s foundation.
 
Bricked up in walls and buried under floorboards
you wait exactly as I left you: still drowning,
slowly and without resistance.