Pamela Mosher
How to prepare for the bed and breakfast
lavish with tajines and import rugs, absurd
with Québecois music and Americans
who couldn’t afford Paris?
We couldn’t believe our room of roped curtain,
in-suite fireplace, and crystal wine glasses
(we filled with cheap depanneur red)
We walked barefoot on dark hardwood
reclined on sofas to eat roasted almonds
and local peaches
while the city rose up around us,
while the locals
spoke too quickly for us to understand
and the St. Lawrence pulled furiously
beyond the town, into what lay after
I felt myself subsumed
by that churning body of the river’s insistence, felt us both
pulled forward that we might
emerge into our marriage
changed women
new women
Pamela Mosher‘s writing has been published in literary journals such as Poetry is Dead, CV2, and The Antigonish Review. She has won the Young Buck Poetry Prize and been a finalist for The Writers’ Union of Canada Short Prose Competition. She lives in Ottawa with her wife.
