☻ ABOUT . ISSUES . EVENTS ☻
𝓜𝓲𝓼𝓱𝓪 𝓢𝓸𝓵𝓸𝓶𝓸𝓷
𝓐𝓲𝓰𝓾𝓮𝓼-𝓜𝓸𝓻𝓽𝓮𝓼
Aigues-Mortes. Thus began the index of our travel
book, a comprehensive guide to Provence and the
Côte d’Azur, unbearably glossy and proudly sporting its
DK Eyewitness logo (at 14, it was essential, absolutely
essential that I be an eyewitness to the region
from A to Z, following a rigid order,
going from town to town in our over-
heated little rental car,
ill from all the anchovies at lunch,
just me and my mother and my grandfather and his
kind but kind of beside-the-point
live-in lover, but I couldn’t tell
my travel companions about my absolutely
necessary use of the index to determine
our next destinations because I knew that
people found it odd, if not odd then
questionable, for an adolescent to be so
rigorously bonded to an index, especially while the
South of France lay sprawled open,
titillating with its lavender and herbs, but I
understood how to get my way, how to
veer our overheated little rental car
wherever I wanted, needed it to go, my own private
Xanadu, my dream of primacy and order,
yearning for a town called “Stagnant Water,” a
zealot for the alphabet), and so we
zig-zagged through old roads, my mother
yelling directions, no one sure e-
xactly where or why or how we were going — listen, my
word choice above is making me
very comfortable, the cheat of the dash in “exactly”
underscores the shaky conceit behind the
text, a transparently metacritical and
self-
referential
quest to juxta-
p
ose the form and functio
n,
make explicit my under-
lying disordered orderly obsessions and
kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk —
just following the BBC voice coming from
inside the GPS as it confused itself within all the
hellishly walled villages and crumbling medieval ramparts —
goddammit
fuck me, it’s
evident that juxtapose
does not apply here be-
cause the form and function are in fact
both
aligned.
𝓜𝓲𝓵𝓴 𝓙𝓾𝓰 𝓔𝓴𝓹𝓱𝓻𝓪𝓼𝓽𝓲𝓬
sits and fishes beneath a large pink umbrella.
Across the blue pond: green trees, blue clouds, pink sky.
The man in the milk jug art puts down
his rod, his umbrella, turns to me, says
hey man do you want a blow job?
My partner and I bought this decorative
milk jug together, in a church basement
antique sale, not at a charming
small-town church basement antique sale,
at a reductive Mile-End one, but we loved
the colours and now, look at me, I’m balls
deep in this fisherman and it turns out those
weren’t clouds across the pond, they were further trees, shadowed blue.
Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. He is the author of two chapbooks, FLORALS (above/ground press, 2020) and Full Sentences (Turret House Press, 2022), and his work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry 2024, The Antigonish Review, Hungry Zine, The Fiddlehead, Plenitude Magazine, and Vallum.