Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/4/2016 (2260 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
National Poetry Month: Sue Sorensen reads Folding yourself into the car you drive
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.
