Well another day spent boot-walking through my allotted patchwork of registered burns and cutblocks. Rototilling circles around piles of slash and struck-by-thunder trees. In the heat of the day, I sweat through dark coveralls. Here I am: picking up skulls of birds. Woodpecker feathers, horsehair. Regurgitated owl pellets, but with sea glass where the mouse skeletons should be, wound together by threads of clothes I don’t love anymore. Without gloves on, I dig with my fingernails through dry soil to recover halves of friendship necklaces. On my knees, I push at large stones to expose beetle colonies nesting in the chewed-up pages of books I’ve pretended to read: Anna Karenina, the King James Version, my favourite professor’s memoir. I trip over a headlight from my now-dead blue minivan. My feet bounce over hundreds of brake pads. I have lived so long. Ex boyfriends drape like Salvador Dali’s clocks over mushroom-sprouted logs. Brunette, blonde, soft, selfish. I take their watches and chains and put them in my pockets. I will melt all of these together. Under a large brown pile of leaves, over there, is a girl with hair like crinkle-cut Old Dutch chips. Beside her, my first IUD is wedged into a stump like a throwing star. I lift these things. I drag these things from where they were, and I put them down in different places: sorting, sorting, chronologizing. I mop my forehead for all this work I’m doing in the heat of summer. I’m so much older than I thought I’d be. If I find my childhood diaries in this mess I will tear out the suicide notes and plant them in straight rows between each plot of land; see if I can grow sunflowers to subdivide these years into lessons. A lifetime of pets emerge dusty from gopher holes, crying in sync: you forgot me. You forgot. My mom perches in one of these charred trees, sipping an espresso. She drips a little onto my head when I pass underneath. Reframe, reframe, she chants. Thoughts create neuropathways. My dad snoozes on the far edge of the property, in patch of cool soil. I can’t hear him from here, but I see him whispering sweet encouragements to a fiddlehead sprouted in front of his face: the only green that grows anywhere in these blocks. I will plant more ferns in here. I will plant more of many things. When the love of one of my lives left me, oh, years ago now—he said he hoped I’d find myself. Well, he would eat his words if he could see me now, excavating.
Carlee Bouillon is a wildlife rehabilitator and poet. She lives on Vancouver Island with her best feline buddies, Crow and Magpie. Her poems and stories have been published in The Malahat Review, Grain Magazine, CV2, Riddle Fence, The New Quarterly, SAD Magazine, Plenitude, PRISM international, and Existere.
