No such thing
Woke up to snow
piling my car.
Someone left the radio on.
It’s an empty apartment
but the smell of tea lingers,
and I don’t even drink tea –
I’ve always been a coffee kind of guy.
The perfume I bought her
for Christmas
three years ago
lingers in the bathroom,
so I turn the fan on
to clear it out
and eat a bowl of raspberry yogurt
at the kitchen table
listening to the old man next door
rolling around the floor
with his dogs,
laughing to kill himself.
I keep my eyes on the window:
the snow,
the darkening sky,
the traffic,
there is no such thing as ghosts.
Mandarins
I’ve been shut in my one bedroom apartment
for three days. The cupboards are empty, and I'm
drinking a can of Coke I opened three days ago, flat
like the world before Columbus came along
and ruined the dream of dropping off into oblivion.
I stuff mandarin oranges in my mouth,
one spoonful after the other, believing they will kill
whatever sickness lies dormant inside of me.
When the doorbell rings, I answer. I compose
what I hope is a smile. I lead her to the bedroom,
and nod at the envelope, stuffed with four fifties.
She stands over me like an airplane tower.
I lift her shirt above her head, and fumble
with the clasp of her red bra. We kiss. We lie down.
We move like robots. Nothing means anything, not now,
not ever. I close my eyes and think of the Northumberland Strait, the
washed up jellyfish that burn the soles of my feet, until the feeling
commences, until my body breaks
and I am stained with sweat and the expensive perfume
the lonely allowed her to afford.
I listen to her tiny feet on the stairs –
one comely step at a time, and then, nothing.
The familiar sound of my heart.
I stumble into the kitchen,
taking the empty can of mandarin oranges from the sink
and lifting it to my mouth and tilting my head back. I feel strange
in the room by myself, the combined scent of mandarins
and sex, reaching from the floor
to the ceiling, wanting to fold the past forty minutes in my hands
like paper and drift it through an open window.
Tyler Bigney lives and writes in Nova Scotia, Canada. His work has appeared in Pearl, Poetry New Zealand, The Meadow, Neon, and Iodine, among others.