From Waiting Room. Published by BookThug in 2016. Zilm’s writing has been published in PRISM International, Prairie Fire, Vallum and many others. She lives in Vancouver.
On benedick’s retirement, or how I learned to stop worrying
and love the catholic church
It is so holy to be old.
(Virus meas ingravecente atate non iam apte esse.)
Grandma in her white carpet stanza
refuses to install track lighting (it’s tacky)
to highlight the glitter in her dying eyes.
Opa shared his final stanza with two strangers,
crippled fingers scrawling fugues on scrap paper,
unable to unfold his fingers over the keys.
Oma in her condo marvels at the SkyTrain,
popeye pizza and hoards dietary supplements
in her kitchen drawer.
Uncle Morris in the Okanagan sun stanza
still smiled when his sister-in-law whispered chess
into his large-lobed ear while Aunt Barbara refuses to visit,
walking with one glass eye in the empty lots in Lumby
where she said his spirit lived.
Then Uncle George just dying
in his diapers, losing his dreams
of a Whites-only golf course
as a swift-fingered Filipina
sponged his slack limbs.
Finally you, benedick, your shoulders
bent forward in heavy red,
a supplicant posture, just another
broken holy father.
