Dalhousie University Libraries Hosted Journals

Knowledge management is traditionally underutilized in law firm environments, owing to a perception of it not being useful despite evidence to the contrary. In fact, knowledge management, if used properly, can contribute to increased profits for a firm. In contrast, attempted knowledge management is occurring amongst self-represented litigants, though it is hampered by a lack of interest in participation by the legal community. Open access may provide a solution to both problems: for lawyers, freeing up time for more clients, and for self-represented litigants, in helping to destroy the perception of their presence as a problem

Johnston, Maddy

English

Legal Loss? Self-Represented Litigants and the Need for Cross-Aisle Knowledge Management

  This article provides a brief history of the high fantasy sub-genre.

Lynn, Hart

YA Fantasy: Where it all began

This creative writing guide provides a list of questions and things to consider when crafting your own vampire story, using examples from popular vampire books, TV, and movies.&nbsp

Frenette, Hailey

A Guide to Writing Vampire Fiction

Padhi, Bibhu

BIBHU PADHI
TRIBAL VOICES
They should be here somewhere,
their invitations to all of us
to join them for the final time.
They left us while we lived—
our minds full of insignificant things,
our bodies lethargic and dull.
It is night, and the fireflies
are everywhere, like thoughts
and dreams, our messages of love.
The voices have joined our
own voices, the choric songs
dissolving in the night air.
I must surrender my voice
to the ancestors, their songs
enfolding my voice’s rise and fall.
Look, how the voices are playing
in the middle of a story of return
and love, of words of compassion.
A little further away, there are the trees,
listening to the voices and feeling
comforted, the breeze carrying
192 The Dalhousie Review
our words of thankfulness
to the remote voices, our songs
merging into the night.
And now the fireflies have
moved away to other zones,
other, more dear needs.
At the end of it, it is the distance
of the voices, our voices falling
on the earth, its subconscious
loneliness, its eagerness to see
and hear me, when I am forgotten
by the world and its dark floor.

TRIBAL VOICES

Gaur, Arun

ARUN GAUR
GANDHI OF ZODIN SQUARE
Gandhi of Zodin Square was
a smudge.
Truncated flotsam in air.
Jetsam while it rained.
Tall rusty piece.
It was gritty. Self-composed.
Almost grim.
Teenagers sniffed snuff on night vigils.
Smoke ascended to its nostrils.
Tellers counted coins at RBI windows.
Metal clattered.
Riflemen rehearsed. Their starched
pantaloons crackled in celebration
of his birthday.
Of late I noticed
Its pince-nez slipping down bit by bit.
I could have borrowed a ladder
to set it aright.
But why would I bother?
It made fun of all my accidental failures
presuming them to be my potential pitfalls.
196 The Dalhousie Review
Drizzle or harsh rain
it persisted in its mocking stance.
It irritated me.
I missed my train.
It kept smiling with its sticking frothy lips
curled up. Masticating. Chewing gum.
It irritated me.
One day it flung aside its walking staff.
It started slowly—
hands creating vibrant chiaroscuro.
Then picking up its pace it offended
with impunity
my puritan upbringing
leaving me distraught.
Ruined.
On a deserted track Toofan Mail thumped
through venerable rattle of golden autumn leaves
in splendid isolation.
This dusky exposition of magic blue hour
left me ruined. Utterly. Frankly it is
an exposition not any sort of disclosure
he hinted.
Did he somehow overhear my 2004
Derridean lectures
executed in Rosiama Building?
Did he manage to catch
some ambiguities some unintentional nuances?
A moral question exasperated me:
How could a simple act of masturbation
be so ridiculous?
Gandhi of Zodin Square 197
(Before my very naked eyes!)
What end did he intend to reach
through this excessive unwarranted articulation?
Would he be ready to face
the moral repercussions of this unholy act?
And that too
before my very naked eyes?
My exposed self?
One rainy evening daily wage earners came
to prune him for his birthday,
throwing swathes of white paint all over him
boisterously turning him into
an expressionless dud white swan.
Dandy. I don’t like you anymore.
If only by this time next year
rain could once again turn him
into rust.
He can still be his older usual pleasant self
with his pince-nez slipping down.
Maybe then I would borrow a ladder
to clamber up and set his specs right.
Then with a little thump on his hunch-back
I would loudly applaud:
I can see.
You have certainly made your mark
even in this torrid North-East.
You look tough smart pert rusty once again.

GANDHI OF ZODIN SQUARE

Joseph, Anjali

THE RUSHCUTTERS

Sheskin, David

DAVID SHESKIN
KNOTS
MINUTES BEFORE HIS EXECUTION FOR BLASPHEMY, a brilliant Irani￾an mathematician whispered into the right ear of the guard who was escort￾ing him to the scaffold the proof of a seemingly insoluble problem in num￾ber theory that had baffled generations of mathematicians. That evening
the guard shared what he had been told with his 20-year-old daughter—an
aspiring mathematician named Paveen Jinnah, who a year later published
the proof in a prominent mathematical journal and became the youngest
person and only second woman to be awarded the Fields Medal, which is
considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics. Two years after being awarded
the Fields Medal, while attending a meeting of the International Society of
Mathematics, Jinnah lost her virginity to Arvid Thourle—an obese, bald￾ing 56-year-old Swedish mathematician, who at the age of 32 had also won
the Fields Medal when he revolutionized knot theory with his insights into
Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials. Nine months after their coupling, Andreas
Jinnah-Thourle sprung forth from Jinnah’s loins, and two decades later the
lad, who to the surprise of everyone had never displayed even a modicum of
aptitude for mathematics yet had acquired an intense abhorrence of Islam
from his mother, who had spurned religion for science from the day she
was born, took it upon himself to avenge the death of the mathematician to
whom Jinnah owed her legacy by activating a suicide bomb in the Masjid
al-Haram mosque in Mecca, slaughtering a multitude of pilgrims who had
come to the holy city to celebrate the Eid al-Fitr holiday that marks the end
of Ramadan.
Two months after this incident, Lieutenant Colonel Muhammad
Bukhari of the Saudi secret police was dispatched to Geneva, Switzerland
to interview Jinnah, who had been identified as a person of interest in the
bombing in a letter sent to the authorities by an embittered rival mathema￾tician. At the time, Jinnah, who had had little contact with her son’s father
since their one and only coupling, was a senior mathematician at the head-
Knots 375
quarters of the Large Hadron Collider—the world’s largest and most pow￾erful particle accelerator, where during her working hours she engaged in
complex mathematical analysis of data. She spent her evenings in the com￾pany of Hans Sengraum—a brooding, introspective German astrologer, who
devised complex birth charts based on the calculation of sensitive angles of
the magical moment of birth of his affluent and eccentric clients, many of
whom subscribed to dubious political and religious ideologies. As it turned
out, the focus of the investigation into the calamity at the mosque shifted to
one of Sengraum’s clients: the world-renowned linguist Hermann van Os￾trum, who had once been a lover of Jinnah and who had been rumored to be
the father of one or both of her two daughters, Haniya and Aqssa. Like their
half-brother, both daughters had rejected Islam, as Haniya lived as a nun in
a convent in Brussels and Aqssa repudiated all religion and worked as a lion
tamer at a circus in Cyprus. It came to Bukhari’s attention that van Ostrum
regularly purchased the sorts of materials Jinnah-Thourle may have used
to make his suicide bomb. After some probing, the linguist begrudgingly
admitted that he did stockpile incendiary goods, since unbeknownst to all
but a few associates, who knew him by a different name, he was an accom￾plished pyrotechnician, who when not preoccupied with the complexities
of language indulged a secret passion for combustion and concussion that
he’d harboured since childhood by orchestrating dazzling fireworks displays
throughout Europe.
While contemplating the possibility that van Ostrum might knowingly
or unwittingly have passed on explosive materials to Jinnah’s son, Bukhari
decided to continue his investigation by travelling to Uppsala, Sweden to
talk with Thourle, who according to Jinnah had had only sporadic contact
with their son over the years but who might have met with the young man
only a few weeks before the mosque incident. Prior to leaving for Sweden,
Bukhari declined Jinnah’s offer of a free astrological reading from Sen￾graum. If he had accepted, the astrologer would have told him that accord￾ing to the angles of his birth chart it would be best if he returned to Saudi
Arabia and put the affair at the mosque behind him.
Bukhari and Thourle eventually met one chilly and overcast afternoon
in the mathematician’s study, where they shared two carafes of Thourle’s
homemade apple cider while discussing his son and related matters. After
ruminating about local tax rates and noisy dogs, the now aged knot theorist
revealed that as a younger man he had often gone to Saudi Arabia because,
376 The Dalhousie Review
and he hoped the lieutenant colonel wouldn’t be offended, he found Saudi
women especially appealing. He went on to say that he no longer travelled
because of a myriad of physical ailments and that aside from keeping up
with topology and other esoteric mathematical topics he spent most of his
free time fly fishing along the banks of the Fyris river, which in addition
to being relaxing afforded him opportunities to tie exotic knots for fishing
lures. After rambling on a bit about the paucity of sunlight in Uppsala and
the laziness of the younger generation, he suddenly changed the subject
and, to Bukhari’s utter astonishment, confided with not the least bit of em￾barrassment that all during his adult life he had been a devotee of sexual
bondage, as it allowed him to blend his knowledge of knots with his sexual
urges, which he’d had great difficulty controlling. Somewhat taken aback by
this unexpected shift in the tenor of the conversation, the lieutenant colonel,
who earlier in his career had worked in the sex crimes division at Inter￾pol, recollected an unsolved series of bizarre sexual assaults in Europe and
North Africa, in which the assailant had employed sophisticated knots that
even experts could not untie to restrain his victims and impose all sorts of
sexual indignities. Could it be that after all this time the guilty party had
serendipitously been delivered to him during an investigation of a suicide
bombing? And of all the possible culprits, could the perpetrator have been a
world-renowned mathematician? For a fleeting moment it reminded him of
the case of Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek—a brilliant pediatrician, virologist, and
anthropologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1976 and
who was later revealed to be an unrepentant pedophile, whose misdeeds
were not brought to light until 1996. Was it possible that another scientific
genius had also descended into the depths of sexual depravity? As he con￾sidered these questions, Bukhari, who it should be emphasized was both
a worldly man and savvy investigator, started to feel drowsy and within a
matter of minutes lost consciousness.
If an authentic history of all the relevant events surrounding the inci￾dent at the mosque is ever written, it will record that Thourle spiked one of
the carafes of apple cider he shared with Bukhari with the date rape drug
Rohypnol—a compound with which the mathematician had more than a
passing familiarity. Hours later, when Bukhari became semiconscious, he
found himself tied up like a ball with nylon rope that had been intertwined
with a potpourri of stubborn knots, among which were the almost impos￾sible to disentangle Palomar and clove hitch configurations. One week later,
Knots 377
on the island country of Cyprus, Jinnah’s youngest daughter Aqssa fed a
fully sedated Bukhari to three famished lions, who hours later would enter￾tain an audience filled with excited adults and laughing children. No arrests
were even made with regard to the suicide bombing in Mecca, and the dis￾appearance of the lieutenant colonel remained a mystery.

Knots

Heighton, Steven

STEVEN HEIGHTON
FROM REACHING MITHYMNA: AMONG
THE VOLUNTEERS AND REFUGEES ON
LESVOS
THE CAMP IS ALL BUT EMPTY THIS EVENING—my third shift as a volun￾teer and second here at OXY. For hours the volunteers have been gathering
refugees into groups of sixty, issuing tickets, managing lines, filling seats,
and waving as the buses rumble out of the parking lot onto the highway.
Just one extended family will overnight here, in a shelter where last night
hundreds of people slept. (On the day’s final bus there were a few empty
seats, but the rule is never to split up families to fill a bus.)
Besides the ten Syrians now sitting on straw mats and eating a meal
prepared in the mobile kitchen by cooks I haven’t yet seen, only a handful
of volunteers are present. The camp would be silent if not for the chugging
generator and the soundtrack being piped through a small but Napoleoni￾cally assertive Fender amp. Tonight the playlist is a medley of crooner tunes,
“New York, New York,” “Fly Me to the Moon,” and now “Mack the Knife.”
Since the last bus’ departure, the volume has been dialed lower. When the
family bed down in their circus-sized tent, it will be turned off.
The sound of a large vehicle gear-grinding into the parking lot drowns
out “Mack the Knife.” The bus is arriving from the north, Mithymna, the
beaches. A second bus shudders in behind it and for some reason its head￾lamps—high beams?—are much brighter, as shocking and invasive as heli￾copter searchlights. The bus doors huff open and refugees emerge and stream
downhill into the camp. Volunteers scramble to their stations: the men’s
and women’s clothing tents and footwear tents, the canteen, the sleeping
shelters. The camp is understaffed because—as on my first night—the word
from certain “contacts” on the Turkish side was to expect no more arrivals
until morning. So a number of volunteers have driven south to Moria to help
out there overnight, while others have gone back into town for supper.
From Reaching Mithymna 403
The remaining crew is instantly overwhelmed.
One of the rafts that just landed was repeatedly swamped and barely
made it ashore, so its passengers are drenched to the skin. In front of the
men’s dry-clothing tent, under a string of light bulbs, men and boys are mill￾ing, some so cold they move with a spastic jerkiness, their teeth audibly
chattering. No trace of the patient queues I’ve been seeing until now. Many
of these people can’t and won’t wait. Behind fold-out tables at the front of
the army tent, two volunteers—Klaus, a Buddhist in drawstring yoga pants
and Biblical sandals, and I, on clothing detail for the first time—have braced
for impact. There is no impact. Men simply flow past on either side of us.
They’re careful not to brush against us, meet our eyes, notice our raised
palms, hear our pleas. Nothing aggressive in this incursion, their body lan￾guage signals; nothing personal.
“Please, one at a time,” Klaus keeps repeating in a sort of resigned sigh.
I glance over my shoulder, thinking maybe a dozen refugees are behind us.
The dim light bulbs dangling in the tent now show at least twice that num￾ber, rifling through the cardboard boxes and plastic bins, writhing out of
their sodden things and hastily re-dressing. A teenager—balanced on one
shivering leg—topples as he tries to wriggle into a pair of too-tight jeans.
A skinny older man is pulling a second wool sweater down over a first. I
walk toward him, saying, “Please, no, just one sweater!” Feeling invisible
and inaudible, I’m surprised when he seems to understand me, removing
the surplus sweater without protest.
From the women’s clothing tent I hear Pilar in her heavy accent calling
for the translator, Asim. Somebody yells back that he left an hour ago. Now
Dieter and Oskar—the brusque, fussy German couple who usually super￾vise the men’s tent—appear, towering above the crowd as they push toward
us. They’ve returned from a restaurant in town to help. Dieter takes in the
chaotic scene behind us. His Adam’s apple bobs as if he has swallowed a
golf ball. “You have not understood my instruction?” Spiked platinum hair,
a rainbow patch on his coat shoulder. He directs a curt German phrase at
the unprovocable Klaus—who nods mutely as if accepting a temple master’s
edict—while Oskar tells me coldly, “I think Omer will be needing you at the
canteen now. We take over here.”
Kanella, a stray dog who has made a home in the camp, yammers and
growls from the door of the canteen hut. She is slender, skittish; floppy ears,
cinnamon fur, white socks. “It’s all good, girl,” I call as I approach, though
404 The Dalhousie Review
from a canine viewpoint there can be little good in crowds of strangers en￾croaching on your territory day after day. The canteen may be the first se￾cure food source and warm shelter she has known. Yesterday I saw her pac￾ing the camp perimeter, mining it with drops of urine, a hormonal frontier
invisible to us but real enough to any dog—and in fact chemically detectable.
Which in a way makes it realler than any number of unmarked human bor￾ders, those figments that we kill for or risk our lives to cross.
“We will put her inside,” Omiros calls to me as the two of us converge on
the canteen. “The refugees, I think they fear dogs.” His open leather trench￾coat flares behind him as he stalks along. His black boots crunch in the grav￾el. No one is sure of his real name, but the Greeks call him Omiros—Homer.
He’s six-three and brawny, but—unlike Anglo-American alpha males, who
hulk and lumber as if chronically stiff from the weight room—his move￾ments are light, fluent as a soccer star’s or salsa dancer’s. Nor does he squint
or harden his soft brown eyes when addressing you. Yet his sympathetic
gaze is offset by more conventional male markers: a balding head shaved
bare, a black goatee nattily groomed. Syrian on his father’s side, Spanish on
his mother’s, he has the tragically dashing looks of an Othello, or—in that
oxblood trenchcoat like a villain’s cape—the scene-seizing baddie in a film
thriller. He would be the enemy with an anima and a backstory of depri￾vation: some galvanizing early grief. His order-restoring fall and death we
would mourn more than we realize—though the film’s backers would realize
it and commission his resurrection in a sequel.
“Steve,” he calls, “Stavro, come help me now!” Volunteers run past us,
some toward the mobile kitchen, some returning from the supply room with
thermal and wool blankets. Long shadows cast by the floodlights above the
bus-loading lanes streak across the compound. The wind has risen and the
high walls of the UNHCR tents ripple and snap. A sense of terrific animation
fills the scene.
I follow Omiros behind the clothing tents, where another bus has just
arrived, and we intercept a party descending toward us—Asim; a squat,
bearded bus driver; and a heavy woman sprawled back in a wheelchair,
her scarved head lolling. Asim and the driver are struggling to restrain the
wheelchair on this grade. As we meet them, I realize the woman is uncon￾scious.
“What is wrong with her?” Omer asks, raising his voice over the wind.
“We don’t know,” Asim says. “She disembarked from the raft, but then
From Reaching Mithymna 405
on the bus . . .”
“What is ‘disembark’?” Omer asks.
“I must return,” the driver says in Greek. “Others are waiting.”
“I’ll go back, help Lindsay,” Asim mumbles. “I’ll stay here once we bring
up the rest. Iraqis.” His lips barely move, like a ventriloquist’s. They say he
has hardly slept in weeks.
Omer and I take the wheelchair, one handle each. We too struggle to
restrain it and then—the slope levelling out—to push and steer it over the
gravel. Finally we shove in through the door flaps of the military field-tent
that serves as medical clinic. A single light bulb dangling by a cord sways
over a table. A few unoccupied cots. A portable radiator, searing to the
touch. The Médecins Sans Frontières nurse must be off helping somebody
who has collapsed or grown hypothermic.
Omer and I consider trying to lift the bulky woman off the wheelchair
onto a cot but decide it would be too difficult and risky. We leave her slumped
in the chair, which we park and brake beside the radiator, in the corner far￾thest from the door flaps. “Wait with her,” he says. “Check her signals.”
“Her vital signs?”
“Her heart, her thermature.”
“I’m no paramedic,” I say.
“I will find the nurse, Stavro. Until the nurse comes, you are the
nurse.”
He ducks and rushes out through the door flaps. I glance around. Under
the table, a stack of folded grey wool blankets. I kneel and grab one, shake it
open, drape it over the woman, up to her fleshy chin above the scarved part
of her brown hijab. Her head has tipped back but remains stable, presum￾ably supported by her sturdy neck. She is motionless, unresponsive. The vic￾tim is unresponsive. Mentally I hear the phrase; I hear dispatchers radioing
the phrase on TV medical dramas; I know the phrase means, as often as not,
dead. Her waxen lips are parted, but when I lean close I hear no breathing.
I see no rise and fall of her bosom under the wool blanket. Something leaps
to mind: a young undertaker at a bar in Detroit telling me that our eyes, not
used to seeing unbreathing chests, will always project slight motion into the
chests of the dead. I do the math, get a double negative: if she were dead, I
would see movement; I see none, she must be alive.
Her round, plump face is unwrinkled, though she must be in her fifties,
maybe older. Expression not pained or stricken but serene, as if she is at
406 The Dalhousie Review
home in her own bed, in dreamless sleep, somewhere back in Iraq before
the wars. I hold my fingertips close to her lips. Is that a faint feathering of
breath? I cup my hand over the pale band of brow showing under the edge
of her hijab: no fever, no obvious chill. Could she be hypothermic and not
chilled at the brow? I doubt it, but I’m not sure. I feel for her hand, fumbling
under the edge of the blanket. This of course seems even more of a trespass
than touching her face. I glance at the tent flaps, hoping to see the nurse
push through, yet fearing I’ll look like some pervert. And what if her family
arrives? (Where is her family?) Some people, I’ve heard, feel titillated and
licensed when left alone with an unconscious, helpless stranger. I feel scared
shitless. I find her hand, soft but solid, larger than my own, and warm. Now
I’m certain she can’t be hypothermic. Hypothermic bodies siphon blood
from the extremities to the core . . . don’t they?
I lift her hand clear of the blanket and feel for the radial pulse under
her sleeve. Her wrist is thick; I have to pinch hard. Still holding her hand, I
crouch down beside the wheelchair. I locate the pulse, half-surprised to find
it where I knew it should be. It seems steady, neither too heavy nor too faint.
I check my watch. Hard to make out numbers in this light. Twenty-one beats
in fifteen seconds? Still no response, but her signs seem okay.
There’s nothing more for me to do except stay with her until the nurse
returns. So I take up her hand again and simply hold it. “It’s all right,” I tell
her. “Nurse will be here soon. You’ll be all right.” I assume that she can’t
hear me in her stupor and won’t understand me if she can. I try to recall
other moments in my life when I was thrust into a role of serious responsi￾bility for which I felt unequipped. Maybe waking twenty years ago in a bed
beside a wife and a four-hour-old daughter, the midwives gone home, the
two of us improbably entrusted with this new life?
Over the next month, I and the other volunteers will repeatedly wake to
find ourselves entirely unqualified but forced to act.
Greek was my mother’s mother tongue, but not mine. Little by little
now I am teaching myself, long after her death, as if the effort might span
the chasm steadily widening between us. My limited grasp of Greek—overall
the most difficult language I’ve tried to learn, including Japanese—is my
lone qualification for volunteer work on Lesvos, besides a willingness to
lend a hand however needed.
Her final decline and death of brain cancer, on a medical cot in my par-
From Reaching Mithymna 407
ents’ living room, was backlit at times by news channel reruns of the recent
World Trade Center attacks. The sound on the television was turned down
or off. That footage, when she could see it—fleeting, peripheral splashes
merging with her delirium—must have seemed even more dreamlike than
it did to everyone else. I would sit beside her cot or help my father in the
attached kitchen while the videos looped like trauma flashbacks in a single
sleepless brain. America’s response was going to be severe, anyone could
see that, although it was hard to predict exactly what form it would take and
impossible to foresee the eventual fallout.
Sooner or later something is going to jar you out of your slumber, if only
for an hour. The question is, what are you going to do when it happens?
Sitting beside her after her death on Christmas Day, I let my head sag
forward and come to rest on her impossibly still bosom, the way some peo￾ple press their brows to the cool earth in prayer. We remained like that for
an hour or more, the room dimming into dusk. I heard my father enter, flick
on a light, and fail to contain a violent, convulsive sob. Then, all but howling
with grief, he fled the room.
The winds have died. Moonlight on the big-top shelters, the smaller
tents, and the prefab huts. The midnight camp might be a travelling circus
in the respite between evening performance and morning tear-down. With
Omer and Asim I stand outside one of the shelters, its front flaps slightly
open for air. The hum of space heaters and the sound of several hundred
people’s sleep-breathing fold into a drone as peaceful as collective chanting
in a temple, mosque, or monastery.
Someone’s loud, panicked blurting shatters the meditation. After a mo￾ment I ask, “What did he say? Do you know?”
Asim nods yes but doesn’t translate. This is the first time I’ve seen him
smoke. He exhales by coughing. His sunken eyes stare up at the moon. Omer
says, “I wish I can understand. My father left when I was young. I wish I can
speak some Arabic.”
Now a girl’s piercing scream, followed by the hushing of a mother, aunt,
or grandmother. Muted singing in a minor key—a lullaby?
West beyond the canteen and the highway a causeway of moonlight
links Lesvos and the Turkish coast. That shimmering span, ten kilometres
wide, more or less marks the crossing. When all is well and the sea is calm
(tonight it wasn’t), when desert people not qualified to steer a vessel man-
408 The Dalhousie Review
age to steer one (tonight they couldn’t), when the overpacked dinghies don’t
flood or founder (tonight they did), when the disposable clip-on two-stroke
engines don’t seize up or run out of fuel because human traffickers versed in
the basic maths of capitalism don’t bother with oil or enough gas for more
than a direct crossing in textbook conditions (tonight they weren’t)—when
all goes well, it’s a two-hour journey.
From up here, the passage looks safe and easy, straight across waters
moon-mapped as benignly as in a child’s picture book.
“I know it,” Asim stammers—“the one she’s singing. My boat carries
sugar and milk and tea. And we’ll drink together at dawn.”

From Reaching Mithymna: Among the Volunteers and Refugees on Lesvos

Shidmehr, Nilofar

NILOFAR SHIDMEHR
DEATH OF A LABOURER
It was a stunning Labour Day Weekend—
sun shining and the sky
blue as the man’s eyes,
had they been open.
He was lying on his back in the middle
of the waterfront path, his chest
heaving like the waves.
The Pacific waves were unusually high
that day, hitting against the seawall—
we noticed them before seeing
a small crowd standing over the man.
One finally called for an ambulance,
but the police arrived first.
A female officer ordered the onlookers
to leave the scene. My companion was about to,
but I tugged at his sleeve to stay.
The policewoman rolled her eyes
and waved at us to stand back
while the other bystanders dispersed,
went back to jogging or biking.
Up ahead, someone was playing music
on Second Beach. My partner said
Let’s go. But I wanted to know
what would happen—if the man survives.
Death of a Labourer 75
He was Caucasian but ordinary—
like us and out of shape—
donned in a sun-faded T-shirt
and worn out two-strap sandals.
Upon the arrival of an ambulance
I kept my partner in place
by his shoulders, waiting
for the paramedics to descend
from the stairs up a cliff side.
Two squatted beside the man and checked
his vital signs. The policewoman gave me
a dirty look, but I was not going
to move unless the man would come round.
During the chest compression, breath caught
in my throat, staring at the man’s bony legs,
which didn’t stir. After a while
the paramedics lifted him on to a stretcher
and moved him out of sight.
My partner was very much disappointed;
he didn’t understand why I was so worked up
about a stranger and his destiny.
He grumbled the entire way back home,
arguing that after all
Labour Day was one day we
immigrants shouldn’t be sweating
over life, death, and survival
in Canada.

Death of a Labourer

Borson, Roo

ROO BORSON
SCENE IN SILVERPOINT
Indoors
a little girl lies between sheets
in the smoky light of a room
at 10 o’clock
when the cat turns
strangely adult and escapes.
Outdoors
the man in his lawn chair
smokes, his ears full of words,
the silver tangle threading
upward from his fingers.
In the grass the cat
slips past in its curtain of flesh.
The leaves stir sharply
like small birds.
The girl watches from her window.
Night arrives, birds rise
and the tambourine moon
shakes its silver into the dirt.
Behind the house
night is a mountain
where the cat has gone
and the wind comes down
from it and slides against the dark house
full of footfalls, whips.

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