in parentheses

L. Lois lives in an urban hermitage where trauma-informed themes and personal exploration flow during long rainy walks. She is pivoting through her grandmother-era, figuring out why her bevy of adult children don’t have babies, nor time. Her essays have been featured in Canada’s leading newspaper, The Globe and Mail.

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It’s a Curiosity

if you live in Vancouver
you might have lots of time
and four blue disks
of plastic

two and a half inches
in diameter
with a post in the middle of each one
protruding

on the end of each post
is a whirligig with three blades
like a ceiling fan in the tropics
but in miniature electric blue plastic

the base of each
is flat (there is no motor)
a tiny wind catcher
without any turbine

and four neat holes drilled
for screws
which you brought because
you had time and plastic and screws

in Vancouver
you packed them to the beach
the secluded one, out to the west
and you remembered your screwdriver

to attach each blue disk in randomly
picked locations on the side
of the dead tree root system
washed up in a storm
 
the log is massive but
moves slightly every winter
on blustery high tides
settling into a new angle

for summer’s bleaching
a whale of wood rotting
with none of the smell
and all of the looming majesty

you thought this whale needed
miniature propellers to catch
the wind on these warm nights
and through next winter’s waves

just because you had time
and this occurred
to you
to do

Knights of Fire(works)

climate crisis
heat wave
fires burning the province down

let’s celebrate
put some explosions
in the night sky

puny, armed efforts
forced over the water
for our safety

while nature
roars across open hectares
pushing the truth we flee 

Merton

the quiet wasn’t enough
he longed for more

absolutist solitude and silence
in the abbot’s hermitage

he found what
he was looking for

and gave it up
because of what he already understood

her name was Margie
the deepest meaning of his search

revealed as two kinds
of eternal and competing love

Grooming

there is a greed that runs
deep
and is completely charming

a wolf that devours
the friend he’s spent
the early years disarming

Psychological Double Speak

you wrote me
such horrible things
my counsellor
said I needed special
domestic violence protection

your self-righteous invocation
bizarrely sprinkled with language
of therapy
informed me that
your boundaries forbid

me
from caring
or talking
from loving and being
all these things cross your line

and if I protest
that your boundaries
cross mine
we would have to go
to border mediation you have also denied

I could rationalize
if we’d already undergone
mutually respected
therapy and failed,
but you forbade us that, too

all against your rules
and if I say it isn’t against
mine
you calmly lacerate me
in your casual and cold abuse

it is your cruel laugh
at the end
that gives away
something much deeper in you
amusing yourself with straitjacket boxes

Smiling Dagger

if we put you on a plane
and send you to a warm place

are you a tourist
or our slave?

a tourist wants to go
and saves up to pay the fare

a slave is told what to do
packs no suitcase as he’s moved

the crux of this issue
aside from our horrifying willingness

to command another in our luxury savings,
claiming everything including his sweat,

is that we deny one man
a travel visa due to his poverty

while sending another man where we will —
we only welcome those who pay

no longer considering hospitality for the lost wanderer
as we focus on castle fortification

Don’t Take This Personally

on a spectacular day like today,
I love this city,

this ocean
this shore
this hill
this sky
these mountains
those boats
that golden shadowing on the south side of the bay as the sun dips low

it puzzles me why
you aren’t living here
but if I write too well,
describing what
I see right now,
I’m afraid you
will come
even though,
in theory,
I would love
to share

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