Tuesday poem #71 : Sarah de Leeuw : Outside, America

i

Once, slugging Kentucky Bourbon

from these impossibly

thin-walled clear plastic

glasses             4:13am in an LA

McDonalds’ parking lot

our knees touched.

Somewhere along

the Drive Thru curve.

Freeways evaporated.

ChevyFordHondaBuick

everything on four wheels

decomposed, a new

thick moss.

Satellites clapped for

every metal becoming fog.

ii

Then, somewhere in the vicinity

of four years and 31 weeks later.

I am alone now watching out

my living room window.

These two Flickers

land in the Engelmann Spruce

across the road.

If it weren’t for the three feet

of snow, they’d have landed

on my lawn, the damp

soil easier to pull insects from.

Watching me from the same

branch, mated for life.

Sarah de Leeuw is a creative writer and human geographer. A two-time recipient of a CBC Literary Prize for Creative Non-Fiction, she is the author of three books including Geographies of a Lover which, in 2013, won the Dorothy Livesay Award, a BC Book Prize granted annually to the best book of poetry by a BC author. With a PhD in cultural-historical geography from Queen’s University, de Leeuw is an associate professor in the Northern Medical Program at UNBC, the Faculty of Medicine at UBC, where she teaches and undertakes research in the areas of medical humanities and health inequalities. She holds an endowed research fellowship through The Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (the first in Northern British Columbia) and in 2007-2008 was a Fulbright Fellow with the University of Arizona. Her literary and academic work appears widely in journals, anthologies and textbooks. She lives in Prince George, British Columbia.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan