Where Mustangs fuck you electronically in neon pink above licence plates fast through blind four-ways, where T-shirts say things like 100% bitch or looking for obedient wife whom I can love and honor and cherish in black felt where the butcher on the strip is content to chew the fat for thirty-four years and the cobbler holed up in his clapboard barrack pre-dates concrete remembers skid row for its cedars humped down the grey clay of James Street, the swish of his pink tongue, palm charted across the shop over head-high shoeboxes, shaking for age and the rough terrain, across main, frosted glass front, down to the river with a splash where spring salmon run, where some fly ten thousand clicks to reel upstream cursing past the cottonwoods, blackberries, around the bar to return broken mumbling slipshod beauty where levees rise to reclaim Matsqui flats where black bears sally calf slunk and hipsters reconsider backyard stashes of scrumpy, where that burly angel called uncle cooks basement voodoo juice which the Mennonite kids slurp in concession from the pitted ladle, where your actual uncle lives in a camper behind the skate park, dickers a lift to emerg for the one-legged man stole his phone fourth this month, where you live in a flophouse where two Ziplocs of crushed Percocets fall divine from the closet and the fir plank walls are packed with newspaper from 1912, where the snow-weighted roof droops where a plow is for pussies, where the coot wheeling his bike blind for sleet looks like your father smiling up, afro and glasses ranting trendy trendy down Second Ave where The Man ships inmates of the shuttered asylum where mental illness is the new economy of light roast beans and warehouse pubs where Westminster Abbey of Saint Joseph on the hill is besieged with sunset virgins groping for a sweet little plot with a view where Heritage Park is constructed upon the rotten stone of British Columbia’s oldest and last-closed residential school where plaques recount pioneer adventures, where the cemetery for Oblates of Mary is fenced in twelve-foot gilded spires where the children are silent and their parents step softly, shape the names with their lips.