Plugged in to a morning power
walk, the eternal question
buzzes through ear buds:
“Where were you
while we were getting high?”
Caffeine and endorphins
and the usual road-
side distractions: packet of
Zig-Zags, Trojans wrapper,
Mickey D container.
A landscape co-opted by
product placement.
No man
is an island, but every
myth is an oasis
delivering a real-life
litter of karmic detritus to be worked
off. Short
sharp steps zig around
problematic past lives and zag
behind futuristic cloud formations
where the road’s final grade,
while merciful
on the knees, signals
a variation on the playlist’s
soundtrack to ask, How
low can we go?
♦
Steven Mayoff was born and raised in Montreal, lived in Toronto for 17 years, then moved to the bucolic splendour of western Prince Edward Island in 2001, where he writes full-time. His fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals across Canada, the U. S. and in Ireland, Algeria and France. His story collection Fatted Calf Blues won a PEI Book Award in 2010, was short listed for a ReLit Award and was a Top 5 Finalist for the CBC Cross-Country Bookshelf (Maritime Division) in 2011. Our Lady Of Steerage, his first novel, was released in June 2015 and he is currently working on his first poetry collection Red Planet Postcards.
He can be found at www.stevenmayoff.ca
The Litter I See Project 