Two Poems

17 BENSON AVENUE 1 Quicksand: the word my mother’s home chose for itself. With three floors, the foundation sinks South to Davenport Road and its buried river, five degrees each year. She chose the basement for her bed, should the house slip away, after two years aboveground by the window. She hauled the dog kennel down four flights, bruised her shins. She had a shower stall down there, the ebony tile submerged in her smoke. She draped walls with Batik slips. Spider plants, from which fine chains hung, swung above the toilet. Basement walls were hung with Billy Corgan’s face sixty times over. Everyone wants a cool mom before the fact, but sometimes she snaps apart. Screams about acrylic paint on my clothes. She recounts dreams of sighting his profile from a half-open door. She wakes at two a.m. to paint the kitchen, dripping chartreuse brushes into the dog bowl: one wall every four days. She stops midstroke, stretches as if to itch her ankle, catatonic and still dreaming. The dog circles her three times, settles in the same corner. And my dad, his Volvo climbing past her driveway on days he doesn’t have me: I thought the sound of his engine cutting issued from the cemetery behind the backyard, or the dead river. Mediums visited the house: a team of two convinced a spirit lived upstairs. She left them alone in my room to work.   2 They left the house with deep scratches down their backs, “From the Potato Famine Ghost protecting your daughter. A woman,” they said. She told me this, pacing along the hallway, my fresh-shorn braid wet in her right hand. She said the dog rolled off the roof, scratching slate, unharmed. One morning my dog was gone. She left a warm spot in the laundry room for weeks after. Benson shifted South, her house the line and sinker. Soon, the Sadowski’s stopped talking to us. Their sons left Tonka Trucks in our garden, their cabins filled with earth and dogtooth violet. There’s not much to say: Flyers spread across the porch, wetted down. I walked along Regal Road by myself to school. Parents stopped me on the way, even the Sadowski’s. I never accepted rides. She left me in the basement one morning. I slept, then flipped through the books beside me. My scalp teemed with lice and close heat. She assembled a bag of clothing and Indian jewelry. Left no note. She slept in the cemetery, left the back door gaping. I’m not sure of her timeline, where she went after: perhaps the Brickworks, or the Scarborough Bluffs, to kick up driftwood and broken china.   Joaquim Phoenix in a Dream Honouring Roberto Bolaño Joaquim was sent to escort me, in a black Peregrino, to a triple-tiered desert complex. It rises from the sand, he tells me, like a periscope of smoked glass, and inside a South American paradise fit for a business man: many chandeliers of kaleidoscopic resin, an open bar, young women with caviar and soft roe painted across their naked breasts as a delicate offering. The appropriate music always. We’ll both get paid. I’m the only girl in the car, snapping chicle with my teeth by the minute; unfolding someone’s lost Jacob’s Ladder toy at each Exit. I’m still struggling to understand how I got here. I wonder why I’m the only girl, but I understand his instructions never to leave the car. Despite the Peregrino, he looks awful. Joaquim Phoenix’s head sits above his shoulders on a dull pivot. Like a man in a bear costume, he has no neck. I can’t imagine him naked, even abandoned in dreams, instead wrapped in his waist-long dreadlocks, felted into moldy flannel. As we drive, I see teenaged rancheros exhume a grave. I see chunks of toilet bowl strewn across the shoulder. I see empty Industrial Parks. I can name them on my fingers. I see Joaquim aim two fingers at a passing car and shoot. I close my eyes, and open them again to a grove of clouds miming a treeline. I see an arch of amber lights blink at the car; beyond that, the low tower.