Fiddlehead 241

From Travel Is so Broadening by Wasela Hiyate

The jeep swung through another tight curve. Chris was still getting used to the manual drive, pulling down the gear if they had to dig in and climb a steep part of the main road that clung to the island's perimeter. The brilliance of the turquoise sea that surrounded them was disorienting. Transfixing. His stomach lurched with the panic of driving, or maybe it was the hunger. That was the thing about vacation - always going somewhere without enough fuel. "I don't think we have enough food," he said.

"We never buy enough for you," said Nita, her arm leisurely resting on the rolled down window of the passenger seat.

"That's because I'm not a girl. I eat the same amount as you and Mom together."

"So we'll go to the roti stand if you get hungry."

They stopped at one of the few intersections. Another rented jeep idled just in front. Tourists in white, beige and sunglasses - the man with short dark hair pulled up in tufts of exasperation from dealing with the transmission and the wild bends in the road. Chris sympathized, noticed the woman sitting beside him in perfect composure: her sun-streaked hair smoothed back with a neat clip on one side, smiling at the view. "Pass my camera," Chris said.

"Now?" asked Nita, reaching into the glove compartment, unsheathing the thing and holding it so that Chris could take it when he had a chance.

"Okay, you're going to have to take this one. Try to get the people in the jeep in front. It's so funny - the guy's a mess and his girlfriend's just sitting there like a fashion model."

Nita took a few shots, tried to make it look as if she was focusing on the landscape. She put the camera away.

WASELA HIYATE's story "Travel Is so Broadening" is taken from an as yet unpublished collection of short fiction based on travel, the global economy, and cultural alienation. Her inspiration came from her own years of travelling and working abroad. She has published fiction and poetry in Descant, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, and the anthologies The Art of Trespassing and TOK 3: Writing the New Toronto. She currently lives in Toronto where, just like everyone else in Canada, she's at work on a novel.

From Ears by Michael Kissinger

Monday, and it is a good day because it is not, thank God, the weekend, and Ray is taking Tobe to the doctor's office for his 10:15 appointment, which is forty-five minutes later than what Ray would have liked, but what can he do when the waiting list for the procedure is already seven months longer than it was three years ago when Tobe's lobules and intertragic notches were still growing and therefore could not be altered with guaranteed lasting results, and the only reason Ray is able to get Tobe an appointment so soon is because Lorne Radcliff's son put up such a fuss at the last minute and started crying and saying he didn't even want the operation in the first place - all on account of his short-sighted vanity and not wanting to wear a bandage around his head for a few measly weeks, which is really a small price to pay considering how he normally looks, a small price for improvement and happy childhood memories for the rest of his new and regular life.

So Monday at 10:15 it is. Just to get everything checked over one last time and firm up the arrangements and make sure everything is right and ready for the big day, which is Friday, which is normally a bad day as far as weekdays go since it is the closest day to the weekend and all the unresolvable arguments and angry silences that go with it. But this Friday will be better because this is the day when it all happens, and once it is over Ray will allow himself to feel that he has finally done something right for his son whom he has always handled at arm's length with a combination of sadness and fear, and Tobe . . . Tobe, of course, will get to go home with a new set of ears.

Tobe, sit where Daddy can see you, Ray says, trying to keep an eye on his uncomfortably pale, eight-year-old son with saucer ears. Ears that jut out like miniature satellite dishes on either side of his milk-white skull and that made his birth particularly uncomfortable for Marlene who was no doubt traumatized by the whole twenty-five-hour ordeal - in terms of her internal plumbing, Ray has speculated - since sexual intercourse has been few and far between since Tobe's awkward arrival. Not to mention the fact that nasty, uninhibited sex - once the foundation of their relationship - has become so distant a memory that Ray sometimes questions if it ever really happened in the first place.

MICHAEL KISSINGER grew up in Nanaimo and now lives in Vancouver where he works as the arts and entertainment editor for a local newspaper. His writing has appeared in the Journey Prize Anthology, Prairie Fire, sub-TERRAIN, Event, and Saturday Night, among others.

Conurbation by Emily Davidson

They carried his body in a tarp down Main Street,
strung low between four men like a picnic blanket.

He fell four storeys on a cloudless day in June,
keen to race the boys to the ground floor.

They say he cracked like an egg
and his brain slid sideways -
fracture, clean as a whistle.

He'd traded farmhouses for scaffolding,
a rural transplant; country manners.

The men laid him on a kitchen table,
and the women gathered round
to fix him up for when nobody would ever see him.

His wife was in the parlour, a dropped stitch in her lap,
while the baby crawled on an orange blanket
and contemplated swallowing a thimble.

EMILY DAVIDSON was born and raised in Saint John, New Brunswick, and is moving across the country to pursue her master's degree in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. This is her first published work.

Lived Experience in Clear Language
The Dream World, Alison Pick. McClelland & Stewart, 2008.

Those concerned to defend contemporary poetry from charges of effeteness, esotericism or plain old boringness may groan upon viewing Alison Pick's latest poetry collection. With a title like The Dream World, and a cover image that could have been pilfered from an edition of The Chronicles of Narnia, the presentation makes one expect fanciful poems filled with lonely clouds or, worse yet, rainbows. And, indeed, the reader for whom even a whiff of whimsy is anathema will find a few poems here that are too romantic: in "Ascent," for instance, the sky is identified as "infinite absence" (28); in "Silhouette," we learn that "loss speaks in frost" (45); and in perhaps the most romantic of these poems, "The Out-Breath," Pick recasts a river as a "ribbon of time, of longing." This river, complete with "lost children" (59), seems to find its well-spring in Wordsworth's Lake District.

But the relative importance of these pieces is small because The Dream World, aside from the few lapses noted above, is full of mature and smart poems. Whether or not memorability is the benchmark of poetic worth, many of Pick's poems develop moods and scenes that linger in the mind (which sounds romantic, I know). Most have a broadly pastoral setting, but Pick balances description of her bucolic landscapes with philosophical and linguistic sophistication. For example, "Chasing the Good Life" could be another dull river poem, but it takes on interesting depth: "A tail / breaks the surface. Thought ripples out. Sit until blackness / fills all the blanks - the far shore ripped out like a stitch" (9). This passage offers a great example of Pick's take on the transcendentalist/Romantic impulse: instead of bemoaning our inability to "see into the life of things," the speakers of her poems display an admirable willingness to accept the not-knowing ("the blanks" mentioned above), sometimes even celebrating our fallibility and frailty. This refreshing stance is articulated in various ways, as in the poem "Unsung": "light-years back, / the house of language, one round window lit - it's time to turn / your back on home" (8). In this and other poems, the explorations also involve a confident and smooth movement between inner and outer landscape.

Pick's tone is distinctive: while engaging with some deep philosophical questions, she manages to avoid didacticism. This she achieves with simple diction and with the careful control of ambiguity. Her poetry rarely sends the reader to the dictionary; instead, she develops musicality through unobtrusive alliteration, assonance and internal rhyme. "Aesthetics" offers a good example of her craft of sound and rhythm:

tide's wide blanket
thrown briefly back:
form without use, backbone
of beauty, washed up
on shore, picked clean. (57)

This simplicity of diction does not preclude more linguistically playful poems - "Touch and Go" (40) and "Disclosure" (10) are good examples of a more language-centred mode - but in general the best way to describe Pick's baseline poetics is that she conveys a sense of poise. In other words, there is composure in her compositions. Overall then, The Dream World offers well-crafted explorations of lived experience in clear language.

Jesse Patrick Ferguson
Fredericton, New Brunswick

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