Poetry by Cara Losier Chanoine

              ClickFlashPhotos / Nicki Varkevisser CC




Nightlife
 
doughnuts
cookies
whatever you call it
when you pull the e-brake
in a fast-moving car
on a stretch of snow
in an abandoned parking lot
and spin out in the circumference of a messy circle
 
we were fifteen
and sixteen
and nineteen
and there was never anything much to do
especially in the winter
when the darkness ate up all our hours
and called for mischief
like a junkie’s thirsty veins
 
it was the best we could do
the most alive we could feel
in the closed-down dark
after all the businesses were shuttered
and we were left alone
with all our young blood
insatiable beneath our skin


 

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Your Own Accuser
 
Have you ever woken up feeling like a knife fight
because all the people you used to love
came to you while you slept,
bringing with them
all the ways in which you failed them?
Is the taste of it
like a battery leaking in your mouth?
Does it make you mourn
the lives you used to live?
In the half-life hours of the morning,
do you yearn for absolution?





​Green Monday
 
there is a bomb
that blooms green in the street
rips up the asphalt and settles,
like the green pallor
of death-rattle sickness
like a green day in April
built from runners’ tangled legs
and Jackson Pollack vomit stains
green like spoiled, severed limbs
like the tarnished fixtures
of tea chests in the harbor
 
this is the shrapnel
that the skin heals over
green like when you open your eyes
at the bottom of a pool--
and it burns like that, too
whenever someone puts their thumbs
in your scars
pinches the pale of your bruises
as a reminder
like you could possibly forget
like that busted-open street
isn’t branded onto the insides of your eyelids
green paint on red canvas,
red blood  tipping green leaves
in April
 
this is how some people learn
what to hate
it greens all the villains
and paints the heroes in
red white and blue
and it must be simpler for them
but there is no logic in chaos
no formula for safety
and sometimes maybe we’d like a world
with more certainty
but we cannot separate it
back into primary colors
this precarious green thing
balanced upon the precipice
of two extremes
 
now
a green dusk sets
upon the street
and the ghosts of amputees
lurk in the long, green shadows
but people walk here
like they can’t see the scars




Cara Losier Chanoine is the author of 'How a Bullet Behaves' and 'Bowetry: Found Poems from David Bowie Lyrics' (Scars Publications). She is a four-time competitor at the National Poetry Slam and her work has appeared in DASH, Red Fez, The Threepenny Review, and other publications.
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