E.G.N Lafleur

Dropping into the lake, the peat, the brackish water

precedent-haunted.
Cottage country,
the things we put there docked.
There are no new words, only the jungle-heat of High Park in June, the glacial stones of the

glacial lake
waiting for you to drive north, south to meet her,
the green thing of the shallows who misses the rice,
who goes hungry for diesel and pine needles and bass.
Here are lakes, old land, mountains worn down by molars, three days when you are close enough to someone else’s reality
to know what to long for.
Obliteration and the car. Truckers killed by moose, and turtles by tourists.
Ungulate angles not primeval, though swampy.
The bus climbs wildfire smoke that belongs to my other home.

We huddle around the winter, drinking pints of it in saloons. 

Study economy, study taxidermy, study a moral man, a murderer. 

The limestone portico is melting.
There goes that white longing; it is grey now and no one can remember what it was supposed to show its devout pupils.

The Lord Reverend Doctor waits and melts under his high altar. He has to preside in the earth now. The water laps around his wrists. He sits up.

E.G.N. Lafleur is a poet, essayist, and street Anglo Catholic living in London, Canada. She has poetry in Feed Lit Mag, Pinhole Poetry, Wrongdoing, Deathcap, Sage Cigarettes, and Psaltery and Lyre; and essays in Earth & Altar and forthcoming in The Hour and Monk Arts Mag. She writes to work out the questions raised in her academic work on medieval English history and literature. You can find her on Twitter @egnlafleur and her essays on Substack at egnlafleur.substack.com.