Yusuf Saadi

At metro Joliette with my jolicoeur,

we walked to the depanneur,

discussed dasein while buying

a Perrier and a block of beurre.

Outside, minus twenty-three,

with windchill it’s real fuckery,

your back pockets warm my fingertips,

your cherry ChapStick so summery.

Take me to the everglades,

a place where flowers never fade,

but pans inside your basement wait

to fry us scrambled eggs, real buttery.

Blue sunrise on my palms, a peignoir,

a neighbour grows peonies in a baignoire,

I dreamt a homeless peintre

revealed Hochelag in a Renoir

Make love inside these old maisons

until condos sail across the St-Laurent,

The vieux-accent is extinct,

And the cordonier’s window plein noir.

Morning flurries, très légère,

someone’s shovel scrapes fragile air,

a chasse-neige is herding cloud,

The hunched man salts his spiral stairs.

We were busy worshipping

words. Shipping worlds

through string. We held eardrums

to heartbeats to confirm

we were still alive. Someone unchained

the sun from its orbit. We watched it drift

like a curious child beyond the Oort cloud. Dimming

until it was another star in the night’s freckles

and even the day lost its name. We looked

at our hands with unfamiliarity. Trying to understand

the opaqueness of texture. Our moulting bones

discarded. Our new elbows reptilian.

The latest language stripped of meter,

rhyme, beauty. We were warned: there are no straight lines in nature.

Women sang new myths. Men planted

numbers in the soil to see if the fruits

could solve our problems. We invented

new gods and crooned when we remembered

how to brush each other’s hair. Music played

in a distant never. Insects danced

in a different hemisphere of our brain

or of the earth. We often tried to look up,

but we could only see our feet,

alien and hairless.