Poetry By K.R. Segriff

      Tim Brennan CC



​
Back Roads 
(for Rosanna, 1973-2013)
 
 
In fifth grade you burned
down the back roads, pumped
pedals against a loose chain, skidded
on bald tires, arrived
uninvited
to my back-porch door.
 
You awed me with your audacity
but less so with the yellow glow
of the teeth you bore just before
you sent your saliva to sail upon the faces
of my mother’s azaleas.
 
Your giggle was a growl & I longed
to paw you, roll and roar
in the raw earth of the yard, nip you
-but just barely-
with my perfectly, orthodontically
aligned incisors.
 
I never intended
to feast upon you.
I had only wanted
a taste.
 
I was not easy enough to love you,
or to consider what might wait for me
in the broken house obscured
by the tall pines of your winding drive.
 
But I am easy now,
 
in my insignificance,
in the knowledge
that if I had skipped double-dutch beside you
while the whole class was watching,
 
you still would have taken that fentanyl 
on the corner of Jarvis and Gerrard.
 
& if I had admitted aloud
how I fancied your knee-scabs & the way
your tongue hissed serpentine as you hurled
your litany of shits across the schoolyard,
 
they still would have found you side-lying
on the sidewalk between the Krispy Kreme
& the Filmore Hotel.
 
& if I had ridden my shiny Supercycle
through the dusty ditches, pounded,
uninvited, on your window behind the pines,
and stared down all the scuttling things in its shadow,
 
you still would have waited eight days
in a Coroner’s cold room
for your brother to claim your remains.
 
There is comfort in these small deceptions, Rosanna,
 
in holding you beneath the hard-packed soil
of my twelve-year-old mind,
where you ride,
unbrushed & sweaty, through 
the hot winds of an unending summer
 
never slamming your handlebars against my gate post,
never descending open-jawed
into the tender flesh of my neck,
never making a meal of me,
 
never demanding 
that I claim your remains.

​

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K.R. Segriff (she/her) is a Toronto-based writer and filmmaker. Her work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Greensboro Review, Prism International, and Best Canadian Poets, among others. She won the 2019 Pulp Literature Bumblebee Prize for Flash Fiction, The 2018 Wilda Hearn Prize for Flash Fiction, and the 2018 Connor Prize for Poetry. She is working on her first poetry collection.