Folding yourself into the car you drive

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This article was published 28/04/2016 (3442 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

 

Folding yourself into the car you drive

 

Folding yourself into the car you drive

wherever you are supposed to be. Through

windows see lights, families, warm colours, plates.

These days you are only keen on coffee,

in what can propel you from alarm to

alarm, boy’s meal to boy’s storytime.

It is still dark; you turn the car down unknown

streets, your city’s large urban forest

 

obscuring the signs. You look with dim eyes

at lit houses that once you would have rushed

past, certain your blue own was all, the most

beautiful, most everything. This is a

city with streets not always named: people,

or so it now seems, just understand the

 

way. Still, you never envied their knowledge

or big, bright homes; even now it doesn’t

feel like envy: it is bewilderment,

or maybe awe at the size of the wound

now opened. The pre-dawn sky is split by

December lightning, or that’s your guess, but

thinking back, it could have been a traffic

camera capturing swift, careless purpose:

 

poor malefactor, to be up early

and punished for having somewhere to go.

In another part of town, one man wakes,

in pleasure or in pain: there’s no way now

to ask about it. You cannot see, cannot

kiss or hold. Can only try to breathe.

 

 

 

Born in Saskatchewan, Sue Sorensen is a writer of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction and also an English professor at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg. Her novel, A Large Harmonium (2011), won Best First Book at the Manitoba Book Awards. Her poetry has been published in Room, CV2, Prairie Fire, and the Oolichan collection Desperately Seeking Susans (2012). She is the editor of West of Eden: Essays on Canadian Prairie Literature (2008) and author of an academic study, The Collar: Reading Christian Ministry in Fiction, Television, and Film (2014).

The Winnipeg Free Press will be running poems by Manitoba poets every weekday in April to celebrate National Poetry Month. The NPM in the WFP Project was edited by Ariel Gordon.