in parentheses

Stephen Grant is a Toronto poet and writer, the latter on art. His poetry reflects his search for meaning through love and loss.

S. Grant has been previously featured by In Parentheses.

AT THE ELM STREET DINER

No nightmare here.
Old-fashioned aluminium, tubular-shaped,
like a railway car, encasing rickety wooden booths
and a Formica countertop in front of spinning
stools. Open morning until late in the afternoon,
offering the usual coffee, eggs, toast, hash browns,
griddle burgers, clubs, beans, and other classic diner food
for the regulars coming at their regular times
at their regular tables, notably one with his blue collar
and regular five or six sneezes at the
appointed hour, 1 p.m. This was after I headed over
to snag just one thing that was often
gone when I got there–the cherry pie,
the lard-based, flaky crusted cherry pie,
with the pale, sour cherry filling, and almost
no cornstarch, not gooey, just pure,
succulent, tangy flavour, worth whatever
I could afford to pay. Even after
pleading to save me a slice, it usually didn’t
happen, while I remember the taste and
texture these too-many years later, trying to
recapture it ever since, hence these questions:
Where is the Elm Street Diner cherry pie of yesteryear?
And where has the Elm Street Diner gone?
Likely the way of all things good and real,
smashed like the burgers into
the now-wistful past.

GRAMPS

         Of the old school, Gramps carefully cleaned his double-edged razor blades after shaving. They were Gillette maybe, or Wilkinson Sword blades, whatever was most affordable.  I never knew what good the cleaning did. He used a shaving brush in the old-fashioned way as I do now when I’m not paying cheek-service to the scruffy look of today’s hipsterdom. In fact, Gramps still had nicks and scrapes and left-over patches of greyish-white beard after shaving, but it suited his conciliation with life.
         It made me sad then and sadder now.
         It wasn’t that Gramps could hone these blades like a straight razor, unfolded and ready to slit the throat of the innocent, Sweeney Todd-like, on a strop to make them sharper, to make them last longer. Instead, it seemed to me an effort without appreciable effect. Cleaning the razor Itself I could understand but as I see it now, I must have missed the point. The point was chance, the chance, that somehow it would make a difference. (For the next shave, perhaps?) But it was the meticulous taking of that chance that is surely the meaning, the takeaway in today’s parlance.
         Naturally, economy, and reluctant disposal played their part, unlike these last, all-too-many years of our collective discarding of everything once the new, improved thing comes along. Having worked as a tailor all his life, he chucked only that which was truly at its end and ultimately, irrevocably disposable.
It made me, shall I say, respectfully sad?
         As we lived with him for a time, I knew him best of all the grandchildren. He was gruff in a charming way, not without repetition or temper. He walked across Kew Gardens every week or so to retrieve a new library book, not that I saw him read much, but he wasn’t a character, just a man from somewhere in some old country who made Canada his home (as I was then doing) and at peace with his place in the firmament, surviving the Great Depression and raising two children, my stepfather being one of them.
Why didn’t I learn more or remember more?
         Still, day after day, I can’t stop thinking of his cleaning those blades; indeed, day after day. And whether he knew it or not, I missed his funeral for some lame reason. I regret it now, fifty plus years later. Maybe he’s forgiven me (which he ought not to do) but maybe not. Who is to say? Who is to know?
He wasn’t really my grandfather, but it didn’t matter.

KNIGHTS-ERRANT

Early snows halted nothing, no eternal quest for the holy arpeggios,
         dashed off mindlessly, jousting and seesawing with the violins.
They were to take those seeking spiritual liberation, brothers of the cloth,
         on marathon trips, to the smugglers’ haven, hauling slack along
the way. They were obsessed with atonal chords and dissonant runs, often
         sounding in scooped, sibilant tweets, like nightingale chitters
flown into random meaning, scampering whims of mournful vein,
         cadences unfolding like dewy rose petals, surging in starkly
exposed notes of wind, filigreed vines climbing ever upward like beanstalks.
         They couldn’t help but see the shimmering gowns in the distance,
abounding even as they careened and cascaded towards the inevitable end,
         all on one page as if there were no white space to breathe.
Their worlds came unbidden, as did ours in that distant, rainbowed time,
         well past the fug, only to be thwarted by nonsense, random noise,
unfiltered and unrefined, ultimately discarded by the vandals, leaving cold
         conventionality in their rear-view mirror, painted silver-chrome.
The medieval tunes had all the trappings of a sonatina or madrigal, dedicated
         to our lost love, but the knights-errant could never recover
                     their traction nor could anyone else.

In Parentheses Literary Magazine (Volume 10, Issue 1) October 2025

By In Parentheses in Volume 10

48 pages, published 10/15/2025

The October 2025 issue of In Parentheses Literary Magazine.