Around a Bone-Setting
Logistics were the thing: backlog from the first
wave, caution as procedure,
locked wings and fail-safes in place. No
other family, I could only enter alone.
You were four nights waiting
with radial and ulna cracked
open as if that pothole in the crosswalk
had wanted to slurp up your marrow. Ball popped
from elbow socket too. One
in a million, freak fall, only cliches. Premature
birth,
inward
at ankles, tiny elf feet were Judases
with toes pointing up,
last link rolled in a reaction.
After you had hazed through
hours of the knife, setting, pins and plates,
we ate fried pickles and cheeseless,
meatless, pizza that was an ordeal
to get onto the ward.
Outside, things were bad
trending worse. Patients smoked
by the William Avenue entrance,
masks cupping their chins.
A month would pass
and we'd be saying, hey, at least
it all happened before the second wave.
Til
then, pain management for you;
for your neighbour those four nights
not so much. With cracked pelvis,
an old Mennonite woman screaming
for help from Mutti or Jozef or jemand
from the other side of the curtain.
Out the window pigeons taking off
and settling in their nimble formations.
Lucky the Fentanyl robbed you
of shits to give. When you came back
from the CAT scan, they spun your stretcher
round thrice, johnny aflutter
before letting you walk back to bed.
We finally got you home that fifth night
and were well fixed of COVID cabin fever.
Or, I was: you remembered little
and were glad for it.
Subletting to the University
Maoists
Gap year and The Eighteenth Brumaire.
I count the days until I can move
out. I repeat myself
the way this century repeats the
previous ones.
The Sino-Albanian split is
re-litigated
and the dishes stack up
like they always do.
I am not unsympathetic, but
keep your mania for categories, the topoi
of memes, anhedonic jokes about
struggle sessions,
revisionists, unpersons, the
half-hidden
tether of suburban parental
wealth.
These are no shining paths; just
ask the accordion man
who plays Bella Ciao for change as you march
through the Metro
station on your way to class.
When the landlord finishes his hot
yoga session
he’ll be by with the papers. Make
your mark on them,
I’ll make mine on this.
Kunstlerroman
Rather than another grad school struggle session
about the poetics of NOW, I went
to the Old Port. There were rowdy children
in pea coats which
they would soon outgrow
who spun circles
on bar stools the moment
the parents stopped hither-thithering them;
Otherwise all was still. I tried to
buy a chicken sandwich in a doorway
full of boxes and planks.
Late November,
dray-grab still
a possibility, though the horses and top-hatted
functionaries
were few.
the store selling
"Indian" tchotchkes
had gone into
hibernation.
The guy who danced
in a loincloth and
headdress out front
on summer weekends to draw
in the visitors
was nowhere
to be seen. Roadwork everywhere:
a reign of torn-up pipes and cobblestones.
The past was being refurbished for the next
tourist season while the locals looked to their phones.
Life Poem on the Occasion
of cracking open a friend's first book–
Look, I see the printed touch
in the hands of lovelies, from the backwards-
facing bucket seat of a 24
Rocket Richard-ing down Sherbrooke,
sunlight thru the initials
carved into the window, the flash
of low-hanging progress. You are close
now in this text, ad hoc, generative
and risking me to miss my stop
with all.
Joel Robert Ferguson is the author of The Lost Cafeteria (Signature
Editions, 2020) and is a recent recipient of an MA in English from Concordia
University. His poetry has appeared in various publications, recently including
Arc Poetry Magazine, EVENT, The Honest Ulsterman, The
Malahat Review, Riddle Fence, and Queen's Quarterly. Having
grown up in the Nova Scotian village of Bible Hill, Ferguson now lives in
Winnipeg, Treaty 1 Territory, with his partner and their three cats.