above/ground press: Emily Ursuliak

Braking and Blather
Emily Ursuliak
$4

His plump thumbs
are paper weights,
pinning the map,
the heft
of his barrel body
thrown forward,
as his index finger
etches possible routes.

The map
is more for Anne and Phyl
than for him:
Mr. Richter, their savior,
every goat track
and clear-cut path
is a memory woven
within a synapse.

An ample Bavarian,
a mountain guide,
he traded Alps for Rockies,
his English words still coated
with guttural German,
when he invites the girls
for an errand run
to Antler Lodge.
The three of them packed
in his crew cab truck.
Bottles of beer,
brought for the trip
jostle in the back.

They stop
at a colossal outcrop.
Mount Swanzy,
named for one
of Anne’s kin,
the mountain’s face
painted tawny
by the last slants
of a fading sun.

The gravel artery
carves higher.
Dusk clutches
the valley below.
The truck rolls
to a halt.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
July 2014
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Emily Ursuliak is the current fiction editor, and a member of the board, for filling Station magazine and an executive producer for the literary radio show Writer’s Block. This spring she was given the Volunteer of the Year Award by the Alberta Magazine and Publishers Association for her work with filling Station. She recently completed an MA in English at the University of Calgary where she worked on her first novel and collection of poems. You can find her work in Warpaint, Blue Skies Poetry, FreeFall, No Press and the anthology The Calgary Project: A City Map in Verse and Visual.

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