Moth fought his last fight in the basement of a church forty miles out of town. The crowd was polite and applauded after every round, but made hardly a sound while the punches were being thrown. None of the overhead lights were extinguished and there

In his hotel room the director took a mouthful of Scotch, swallowed a Viagra and then headed off to the gala.

They felt comfortable in their resemblances, too comfortable to note that the resemblances contained differences like tripwires cunningly laid and hidden.

The phone rings at 11:30 at night and as soon as you hear your father’s voice you know something bad has happened.

Here is your rickety wooden poem. Here is your red, peeling paint poem, your weather-beaten and abused poem. Here is your hands-full-of-slivers poem, knuckle-broken and arthritic.

At first the sound was like a raw stropping of steel on steel although we had little such heavy stuff along...

My old pal Chuck asked me and my sister Stella to drive down east with him. We weren’t doing anything else at the time and so we jumped at the chance.

You’re certainly not doing itfor the money: that becomesclear when you imagine the weightof two quarters in your palm

My beautiful old ones are disappearing slowly. They simply leave, without rules, without a farewell.

In the line (three abreast) that stretchedfrom the dock into the Baggage Roomup the steep flight of stairsto the hall of the Registry Room

‍

After last call at three a.m. the sunon the horizon like a giant lodestarwould guide us over uneven boardwalks and dirt roadstoward the George Black Ferry, acrossthe mud-fed Yukon River to where our hidden worldof tents lay inside a maze of birch,where branches knocked and clacked in the windlike the restless bones of ghosts,where someone always screamed blue murder backat the landlocked sled dogs as they criedand howled at the lingering seasonand stunning lack of darknessinside the night...

Was it fever or was it the heat that made Antonia perspire so heavily?

I can’t blame youfor claiming this place as your ownpersonal theme park. For you,there is only summer when every curvein the road brings a new photograph—red cliffs climbing out of the sea, field upon fieldof white blossoms, a wharf where boatschristened The Maggie-Mae and Aurora Dawndepart for the fishing grounds.

Insane, adieu. It's summer; there are letters every week. Soft petitions, loud refusals, the usual prayers and prophecies, weather reports, prose in several styles.

i know hate, its line-mates. believe me. you kids have, i’m sure, wasted—all early morning anxious and weak-ankled—their first impatient shuffle-kicks and curses on me.

i sd lovinglee can yu  not yell at me  n call me

Limericks written at The Great Canadian Limerick Caper at Word on the Street, 2008.

From Lemon Hound, a poetry collection published by Coach House Books in 2006.

...it seemed the scent of lemonswas rising off the river but it was just theSunlight dish soap on our hands fromdousing the fountain on the police stationlawn a couple hours before smoking herstepdad’s weed twisted tight inside ourreport cards cause

His wallet’s stuffed with currency from allmanner of countries not in business now;his camera aches for discontinued film.

The last interview of Crad Kilodney, as written by Crad Kilodney.

Mousey is dead—but perhaps you saw that coming. I was told after the fact, by a friend who’d heard something.

louis riel liked back bacon & eggs easyover   nothing’s as easy as it seems tho   when the waitress cracked the eggs open louis came to his guns blazing   like dissolution like the fingers of his hand coming apart as he squeezed the trigger

On th train, back from th Empressdining car, snowing woodlands,pulling thru Manitoba, recallhow sum yrs after th second centenaryof th founding of Halifax, whichdate i commemorated with signabove my father’s street door