Stephanie Yorke lives in Fredericton. She is currently having a great time working on a long poem about Truro, Nova Scotia, the first line of which is “The elm trees, tall in their kingdom, died [...]“
Stephanie has published poems in PRISM International, Grain, The Fiddlehead, and QWERTY, and a story in the Danforth Review. She has forthcoming poems in Descant and Prairie Fire, and has had several short plays performed through the NotaBle Acts Theatre Festival. She has gone to Europe twice on less money than most people spend on a day in Crystal Palace Amusement Park, and spent five days in Prague wth no money whatsoever. She studies English.
Samples:
The Oracle at Truro
Near express checkout four,
a bin of MULTICAT kitten-farm-caliber
cat litter
rose,
levitated,
like a pelvically-nested swami
ascending on the steady elevator of his proverbs.
A discreet miracle.
So I poked the woman ahead of me,
who carried a baby with muffin cap ears.
The lady flinched, turned away,
and smashed the interact keypad
as if she were phoning a prized and furious lover,
to sing him the worst of Andrew Lloyd Webber
in apology.
I hope their quarrel ended in french toast.
Still the litter rose, like the soul of a dead balloon.
Bashfully slow.
The other checkout standers
smelt of chloroform. We
were dilapidated teens and amnesia-stricken men and
unimaginative mothers with misaligned hips.
Why all this litter?
Some for cats, cat families.
Some for icy driveways.
Some for sopping must-smell in wet basements-
Oh! The saturated human eyes!
Liquid paper faces. We sweat.
Can none of us open our jackets?
And on each arm, MULTICAT litter,
and in each cart, MULTICAT litter,
a special-purchase-maximum of five pails,
though one had transcended.
Telephone Lover turned to the cashier,
pummeling my face with her baby.
But the blow was eased by the coiled pastry of his ears.
No tears. And the child’s brain was forked.
He pulled a coiled scroll from the ass of his snugglebyes,
steered the paper to my hand.
I unscrolled:
In the year that the Elm trees died,
I would have read on,
but the checkout girl was asking for my cards.
I fumbled them like amateur tarot.
On the Birth of a Hairy Monster
O halved
kiwi fruit
of new eyes,
three sprouty horns
like your teeth
begummed
and groveling
to the new light,
wet mewing,
you claim the teet.
Mother monster
licks you dry:
a new application
of her forked tongue.
Soft as vespers
under the umbilical knot.
The stump of her heart.
Above you
the stars are interrupted.
