2022 Don Gutteridge Poetry Award

2nd Prize

Title: Wait, What?

Author: Richard-Yves Sitoski

ISBN: 978-1-989786-83-3

Publisher: Wet Ink Books

Purchase copies at – www.WetInkBooks.com or Amazon.ca or Amazon.com

Conception

Does it not make sense that I remember the moment of conception? I was there.

Did I not start off as a slurry, the grey-green of skies before a tornado— one that tears the roof off without disturbing the china?

Escape

Mother drags me by the collar into playgrounds but I escape. I’m hidden, like writing on a face-down sheet of paper. What?

Haven’t you kids ever seen a boy who fears erasers?

God

I draw a space shuttle bound for the station where God lives.

God’s been in orbit so long he’s lost all bone mass.

Look at him, floating there. So small I could put him in a jar.

Father Ignore him? Tonight he’s being a glove lined with fish hooks.

Uniform

A name tag, an apron, a polyester polo, black pants, and customers who add “just a” before your title.

Work

On a good day work can be enjoyed like eating alone in a restaurant when stood up on a date.

Essential

As in most jobs I feel necessary but ignored, like the text on a fire extinguisher.

Dismissal

By the time I got fired I was Ouroboros who had reached the end of his long body and had flipped himself inside out. I didn’t believe the hawk circling the parking lot, who reassured me I was no more damaged by my job than numbers are by arithmetic.

Valentine

I meant it when I said that in a firing squad one guy is issued blanks, and if she found herself against the wall, I hoped that guy was me.

Uh-oh

Of course I’m upset. There’s a radio on in the next apartment, and I can’t stand it because I know what the announcer will say before he thinks it.

Bipolar

I ask myself how I can power a lightbulb with my bare hands yet still remain curious about the taste of nightshade berries.

Relief

Smashing things is a matter of life and death. Relief is trapped inside and suffocating.

Sometimes I’m not even mad. I just break plates like Greeks at a wedding when they set free arguments resolved in advance.

Morning

This morning an Irish setter barked at me and I’m crying again because I’m clearly as ugly as a strip club with the lights on.

Plans

Look! says the day. I have plans for you! The day has plans for us all.

Including June bugs, who come with orders to die on windowsills.

Allergic

She couldn’t take it any longer. She said that every day we were together was like re-learning the hard way she was allergic to shellfish.

Puzzle

The call informing me of mother’s death comes while I’m doing a word search.

I’m no good at those, or Boggle or Scrabble. I can’t make sense of random letters.

It’s like when you stop chopping carrots to stare at your thumb, not sure what it’s for.

Aiting

In hospital the seasons work in silence. Here is winter, now on night shift, gingerly applying a gauze of snow to a patch of burn-coloured leaves.

Home

Just once, could I come home to an obsequious bellhop waiting to walk my luggage through a voluminous lobby, one with a jubilant chandelier and a fountain of koi that are gentle and forbearing like retired parish priests?