by Stephanie Yorke

Near express checkout four,a bin of MULTICAT kitten-farm-caliber cat litter rose, levitated,like a pelvically-nested swami ascending on the steady elevator of his proverbs. A discreet miracle. So I poked the woman ahead of me, who carried a baby with muffin cap ears. The lady flinched, turned away,and smashed the Interac keypad as if she were phoning a prized and furious lover,to sing him the worst of Andrew Lloyd Webber in apology. I hope their quarrel ended in french toast. Still the litter rose, like the soul of a dead balloon. Bashfully slow. The other checkout standers smelt of chloroform. We were dilapidated teens and amnesia-stricken men and unimaginative mothers with misaligned hips. Why all this litter? Some for cats, cat families. Some for icy driveways. Some for sopping must-smell in wet basements. Oh! The saturated human eyes! Liquid paper faces. We sweat. Can none of us open our jackets?And on each arm, MULTICAT litter,and in each cart, MULTICAT litter, a special-purchase-maximum of five pails, though one had transcended. Telephone Lover turned to the cashier, pummelling my face with her baby. But the blow was eased by the coiled pastry of his ears. No tears. And the child’s brain was forked. He pulled a coiled scroll from the ass of his snugglebyes, steered the paper to my hand.I unscrolled: In the year that the Elm trees died, I would have read on, but the checkout girl was asking for my cards. I fumbled them like amateur tarot.

Stephanie Yorke is an English student at UNB in Fredericton. Her poems have appeared in QWERTY, The Fiddlehead, and PRISM international, and her plays have been performed in the NotaBle Acts Theatre Festival.