Secrets Poetry: Deflected

We're launching Secrets, our 22nd issue, on October 21, 2016. Leading up to the launch, we're publishing a series of poetry & prose pieces that feature unconventional lives and secret histories.

Analog collage: “Untitled (2015)” by Jordan Westre

Deflected
by Rachel Lallouz

That’s easy, she said. Write a poem about the geometry of the universe. Tell me about fractals. Tell me about the symmetry of a spider’s web. Tell me about the circumference of a circle. And don’t bullshit me! Tell me why the rings of Saturn love each other. Tell me where a rogue wave comes from. But don’t go back to that gray space where you went when you left me. You left me once, remember? You left me and you haven’t been the same person since.  What happened that summer?

There are questions that exist just as questions, I said. They exist without needing an answer. There was a crick in my neck at that moment.

So tell me how your parents met, then, she said. Tell me fucking something.

Okay! Okay. My parents met on the outskirts of Honolulu. They met when my father was a server at a nice restaurant along the seashore. My mother sat at the table with her best friend Patricia. My father walked up to them in his stiff-penguin-fine-dining-rich-fucks-

uniform and he proceeded to serve their table. He served them and he didn’t think much of my mother. But when she signed her bill at the end of the night she tilted her head just so, and her hair fell forward just so, and her lashes made fine shadows on her cheek, just so. Her eyes were cast down so he could not see their colour.

Later, when we lived in a boxy little house miles and miles and an equator away from Hawaii, my father named our green and blue parakeet Tee-fi. And I asked him, one day, what that name meant. And he said, table five.

Rachel Lallouz’s creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in alternative and social-justice focused publications in Canada and the United States. She writes in Victoria, B.C.

Jordan Westre is an analog collage artist who was born in Regina and is currently based in Vancouver, BC. Westre draws from the tradition of surrealism, sci-fi greats, and the history of advertisement to create unique interpretations of life experienced in the modern age. Her work will be on display as part of a group show at Remington Gallery from October 14 to November 13. You can find her website here or follow her on Instagram.