by Lauren Carter

By the long lip of the lake,
distending into speech,

you took the link of wind
and bent it, broke it open

until it was lost to us,
scattered,

rattling with the leaves
and my sense of the memory

that the moment would be,
years later, now.

Defeated,
my spells lay skinned and fleshy,

swollen
with the importance of their own death.

Nothing, really,
but time catching up.

We walked away,
holding hands.

The flesh of you
trapped, there, in mine.

Nothing left but hard nature.

Sun and its shadow,
my eyes, seeking both.

Lauren Carter writes: My work has been published in unherd, Another Toronto Quarterly, Grain, Event, CV2, Adbusters magazine and other publications. I was short-listed for the 2001 This Magazine Great Canadian Literary Hunt and the 2002 Best New Writer Creative Non-Fiction contest. Recently, I've been completing a collection of poetry with funding from the Ontario Arts Council and will be presenting some of that work as a feature reader at the Art Bar in October 2002.