PAULA TURCOTTE

We’re a moving target, red and blue Alberta plates

heading west on the 401. If you aren’t From Here

you should wish you were, and we don’t.

I wave to the mechanic off exit 628

who once saved us from dire straits when I veered

too close to a pothole. I hate this road, how it furcates

endlessly, pours you down Toronto’s throat.

I flick the wipers and wasp guts smear

across the windshield. The city I’ll miss: arcane

rooftops, the Communist’s Daughter, tuna

sandwiches at Donna’s, Hyde Park in the rain.

Walking on Geary on a Friday afternoon.

Somehow the same as the city I won’t:
a fortress, inscrutable. An impassable moat. 

We’re just outside Barrie when hunger catches

us. You bite your burrito and juices stream

off the tin foil, stain your favourite jeans.

The road winds and the conversation matches:

your thoughts on Camus, the students I teach.

A thirty-minute podcast about sunscreen

lasts six hours—we keep pausing for tangents,

thoughts braiding together like interchanges.

At the pictographs in the limestone, the sign

reads closed, but we’ve come all this way.

Below the cliffs, the lake glows almost-green.

I’m safe on the dirt while you grip the chain,

lean over the edge until you can see the designs,

so much smaller than you thought they would be.

Early season heat sees us in to Thunder Bay,

weekday traffic crawling down the main drag,

windows down to catch the breeze.

The dog needs to pee, so we walk a ways,

stumble on a store that only sells cheese.

Next door, I buy a pét-nat beaujolais,

feel rich when I don’t look at the price tag.

It’s my turn to drive, so you toss me the keys—

I have us to the campsite before we lose the sun.

While Lake Superior licks the basalt crags

we eat three nights’ worth of Brie in one,

watch the sun slip below the rock-forms.

When the tent zipper sticks on my sleeping bag,

you pry it out gently, closing us into the warm.