TAKE PHOTOS OF CHERRY BLOSSOMS UNTIL THE MEMORY OF WINTER RECEDES

City song timbre melts at the speed of glass. Excuse the radiator’s cough. I fish for pride in a pond, carry bullfrogs bloated in a bucket with a snake my sister caught. What would RobertBateman do? He’d say milkweed is the monarch’s home and the least you could do is plant some in your backyard but O, you’ve only a fire escape so stop your best friend from smoking off of it when he visits the coast. There’s a whole city waiting to not notice me fuckup. I offer my guests cream even though I don’t have any. The umbrellas I stole from bars will keep them warm in this split season of white pepper and grease. A zinc rattle in the hallmarks days and mail I haven’t checked. I water aloe I can’t give to butterflies.

Adèle Barclay’s writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, PRISM, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 Lit POP Award for Poetry and the 2016 Walrus Readers’ Choice Award for Poetry. Her debut poetry collection If I Were in a Cage I'd Reach Out for You (Nightwood, 2016) won the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She is the Critic-in-Residence for Canadian Women In Literary Arts and an editor at Rahila's Ghost Press. You can find more on her site or on Twitter.