Tuesday poem #515 : Dessa Bayrock : Another problem with pie

 

 

You wait all day to write a poem about pie
because there are other things to do, and besides
a poem about pie isn’t going to save the world. In fact,
nothing is. So why worry? Write a poem about pie. But
the cat limps into the kitchen and Reace says it might
be arthritis and you say even so, and I’d better call
the vet and all this while your toast sits on the counter
getting cold. Some things wait. Certainly you
were not meant to, and yet here you are; sitting
patiently on a cracked vinyl chair, Scout rooting
herself under the towel at the bottom of the carrier
and you are nothing but patience, filled with a pungency
of patience. It is a new flavour, one that always was
missing from your pies, and you put that into your poem
when you finally sit down to write it. Scout loses her limp
just in time for the vet tech’s appraisal, squints at you
on the way home as though she can’t blame you
but does anyway, curls back up on the couch
with her miraculous paw outstretched. Still, you worry.
You sift your worry like sugar, peel it like apples, open it
like the wire door on the cat carrier. Write the poem
you want to write, the toast whispers from the garbage,
soggy under too much cream cheese and stale, besides.
Write the poem about pie before no one else will. 

 

 

Dessa Bayrock lives in Ottawa with two cats, one of whom is very loud and almost always nearby. She used to fold and unfold paper for a living at Library and Archives Canada, and is currently a PhD student in English, where she continues to fold and unfold paper. She has two chapbooks with Katie Stobbart: The Trick to Feeling Safe at Home (Coven Editions 2021) and Worry & Fuck (Collusion Books 2021), as well as one with just her poems about bad dreams (Is It About Ruins and Ghosts?, Ghost City Press 2019). She was the editor of post ghost press for nearly three years and was the recent recipient of the Diana Brebner Prize. You can find her, or at least more about her, at dessabayrock.com, or on instagram at @dessayo, where she reviews books and posts anticapitalist memes. 

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan