The film is heavy. While moved into a neat stack, it sounds like sheet metal. Before they were moved to computer files, all MRI images appeared on large sheets of film that doctors forced into slots to hang in front of a bright white light. It is a swift, impatient gesture.

The doctor explains this landscape of dark and white pools using words that turn in on themselves. What he points to I cannot see. Let’s try it this way, then, he says… Read more

She dropped him off at school and kept going, driving north through the city, past the suburbs, the farms, and up into the mountains. She came close to crossing the Canadian border to look out over Burrard Inlet, but she couldn’t drive over the Lion’s Gate Bridge without him beside her, counting boats in the harbor, the eagles surfing thermals overhead.

Filling the gas tank, she sped back south, pulling into the school parking lot half an hour late … Read more

In the heralded fresh bright blue sky
of day you can’t see a single star,
unless it’s tenancy of memory, or
sparkling
from the end of a sharp pencil
against a lined page. Ripeness is
what our lives stand in line for,
make lines out of, not the spring of youth
long before the juicy harvest. Scars
are the ladder-rungs of desire. Lived-
through, our complete instructions
from first breath through the last in large
sweet type. We’re never so young
as before… Read more