My sister cares for her dying friend.
Between chemo appointments
they watch Netflix together,
my sister perched on her friend’s walker.
She can still make her laugh
with gag gifts and teasing.
And when, worn out by suffering, she weeps,
my sister rubs her feet with lotion and love
more fragrant than pure oil of nard.
Marianne is a former teacher at the Thunder Bay Christian School and the author of eight books. Her novel Maud and Me (Crossfield Publishing), about the imaginary friendship between the late L.M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables and a minister’s wife living in Marathon, Ontario, won the 2022 Best Fiction award from The Word Guild. She lives in Thunder Bay with her husband Reg. Together they have two daughters and three granddaughters.
Claire Keegan’s quietly devastating novella reminds me of many of my favourite, long-cherished books – and I find it as captivating as many much longer books. Although Foster’s young and neglected protagonist is not an orphan, her displaced and lonely situation makes me think of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne Shirley and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (like…
I grew up in a small town about a hundred kilometres from Vancouver. Surrounded by hobby farms and forests, I spent much of my childhood swimming in lakes, building forts and riding my bike. Gay people were barely spoken of in my family, and were rarely, if ever, encountered. It’s hard to overemphasize how culturally…
I have been reading a lot of letters these past few weeks, letters stored in an archive. Hand-written letters, letters typed on type-writers, postcards. Some are written on airmail sheets, but often original envelopes are preserved as well, with stamps I recognize from long ago. I used to love writing and receiving letters before email…
“Ave, ave,” soar the stereo boy-voicesas I hang the blue-robed Virgenand her naked Niñofrom the top of the tree.A cubit below the fatherless Holy Family, I tethertheir tin burro to a branch.The mother and child are all of a piece,a single piece of cutout hammered metalwrought by the peasant handsand fingers of the Oaxaca women’s…
I know it I know whose sweat irrigates our plastered floor like a field. Gethsemane is a place I don’t struggle to picture in my bed since Father’s groaning is enough, a longing sample of Jesus’ night of arrest. I know how he bargains to dodge his cross before the cock crows. I know…
Sometimes it takes your glasses getting dirty to remember that they’re even there. I learned that I hold a pretty stunted view of hospitality from a woman named Marie Issaka in Bamako, Mali.
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I appreciate the poem’s direct analogy. Short and incisive. Thank you.