Don’t miss this Thurs. Aug. 10 from 12-1p. where cat mac & andrew kelly will serenade you with some originals & covers. cat’ll also read from her new book ‘emily & elspeth‘ at the Gibsons Public Market to kick off the Sunshine Coast Art & Words Festival!!

Ella closes up the fishbowl. she thinks about her sister. “if her sister’s things are gone, she’ll die.” she cocks her thirty-seven pound head. thinks about the element she left on tonite. how could she do that? she lost her car yesterday. left it at the bank. how could she do that? last night she dreamt she was swimming. the jellyfish of her dream did not appear & today, she swam. how did she know she would? at Armours Beach, she couldn’t breathe. she couldn’t let her stomach out in public. she ran to the can. breathed deeply for a few minutes. though

this morning she wants to hear “good men through the ages, tryin’ to find the sun.” she pops into her van. guess what’s playing? she thinks about those electrical shocks in her neck that come while sleeping, clenching her mouthguard or while reading outside, holding on to Elliot Page’s memoir.

& at the Swingle clinic. Dr. Hinglebottom spoke so tenderly. perhaps the silver lining of the pain in her neck is receiving the love she so rarely feels. maybe it isn’t 5G after all? just another algia. neur. algia. maybe the mercury is leaking out of her fillings. anything’s possible. remember driving through the town of Mercury in Nevada? not a soul in sight. all the houses boarded up. & that lone girl sobbing in the bathroom the day after the shooting at the concert in Las Vegas.

now they’ve put her friend on a dementia drug. her uncle on prednizone. they want her on gabapentin or carbamapazine when hypericum for ten dollars is giving her her life back. her sister doesn’t want her to go all half corked on her again. her mother can’t hear about her new friend Liz. “i ‘ve never heard that name before.” it’s a good thing Ned’s six year old daughter Tory hugged her so tightly this week. for five whole minutes. then she dreamt she was hugging a baby elephant.

fly by night moths, cats, earwigs in the fishbowl. always the neighbours, two floors up oggle. they want someone living above her. in the claustrophobic space. she went up a ladder through a squishy hole to the roof to a crawl-like space. they wanted her to live there, right there where that girl was suntanning. she has been looking for a home for three months.

heart breath of the world on her wall. the breath of god. a carmine river in her mind. desire for no reason. no one is putting that out. there’s a cougar on the bike path in Roberts Creek. a coyote sniffing out Lavender, her cat in the front yard. poor little four lettered forlorn four legged.

they killed two hundred bears in 2022 in BC. she has her bear bell. her bear spray. her neighbour calls their bear Leroy Brown. & there’s a cub in the poplar outside her backyard, right now. but the bushes have stopped crackling. the border patrol confiscated her pepper spray. she’s flagged by ties & equities. she had to prove she didn’t want to live in the states (but she did) so she got Nexus and got to use it once, then the pandemic came. and a tree fell and killed her friend Kathy Nemis recently.

she heard that there have been three hundred & fifty-five mass shootings in the states this year since Christmas. Joni Mitchell & Brandi Carlile have been flying through Princess Louisa Inlet, catching the day’s last rays. the Canadian dream, it’s a fiction.