Taunting August
by
Aris Keshav
Aris Keshav is a writer and teacher living in Montreal, Quebec. After living in Santa Barbara, California for a few years to study sociolinguistics, they are now studying English literature at Concordia University. Their poems and essays have appeared in CV2, The New Quarterly, Canadian Notes & Queries, and elsewhere. This is their first chapbook.
from Taunting August
Saturday
and the neighbourhood's annual redistribution of things.
Inside-out houses spill pink and gently steaming people onto streets,
leaning on other innards, expelled: sofas, old televisions, porcelain.
On the other street,
skeletons idle next to empty skins,
lingering, eyeing the neighbours newly white and ribbed.
Laid lovingly on the card table there's a row of kidneys, spare,
six slippery hearts (two broken) and a bin of red shiny miscellany:
uncovered for hours of morning sun, it's one long layer of jelly.
More, the block over.
Memories, in heaps and seeping rows, cells of runny honeycomb.
Some carry blackened stripes and scissored eliminations.
Others are hand-embroidered, or inherited from mother.
Some are strongly scented: twenty-five cents for everything about Andrea.
Saturday night, and the houses swivel convex again,
sweeping, sucking, gathering in.
There is space for almost everything, and space between space for
everything else.
Shards curl, edges melt and disappear.
Seams, unsewn, reseal.
