"poem" broadside #328 : "jwcurry's Map Drawers," by Anita Dolman

Weight of papers presses

the warped floor, latticework of rotten

boards bend, threatening

to pop through the ceiling

of the driving school below

his greybird Chinatown walk-up,

metalweight of mapminder’s cabinets

piled heavy by years

of carefully registered ephemera

We’ll have to evacuate these words

to lower ground,

flee them to the suburbs

like so much paperwork

and furnishings before

From the carpeted guest room of our bungalow,

I hear other writers’ intentions

shift inside the dented columbarium;

there’s a party drifting sleeplessly in there

from drawer to drawer, whose guests and intimacies

I have accepted I will never comprehend entirely,

not the way I would want to,

no matter how often I sneak in to pull the handles

and watch them whisper their secrets

to each other.

jwcurry’s Map Drawers
by Anita Dolman
produced for the spring edition of the ottawa small press book fair, June 2014
above/ground press broadside #328

This is Dolman's fourth above/ground press publication, after the previous "poem" broadsides "Shoes" (#175; summer 2003) and "From the Triptychs series (ongoing)" (#201; 2004) and the chapbook Scalpel, tea and shot glass (2004).

Anita Dolman’s poetry and flash fiction have appeared in journals and magazines throughout Canada and the United States, including, most recently, in Grain, Bywords.ca, The Antigonish Review, ottawater and The Peter F. Yacht Club. Her poetry appeared in the 2006 Chaudiere Books anthology Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets. Her short story “Happy Enough” is available as an e-book (Morning Rain Publishing, Burlington, 2014). You can follow her on Twitter @ajdolman.