Mcclelland & Stewart, Belletristik, Fast Commute: A Poem (Englisch, Laurie D. Graham, 2022)

Aggregate conveyor pokes above the treeline at sunrise. Silhouettes of crows perched in the silhouettes of trees, fires not yet ripped through here. Sun orange and correctly ascending over new mountains of developers&rsquo slag&mdash all the For Lease signs along the artery, all the Styrofoam castles forming in the boonies. The signs won&rsquo t stay up in the wind. School buses bumping down the highway like apocalypse. Earth mounded up, garbage gathering at the stumps of hills, a canal of it grazing the houses&rsquo foundations. Brownfield and a flash of fresh woodchips. Blue branches and red ones and yellow ones in the sea of greys, winter unending but constantly interrupted. To cross this high over a creek, to stay that far away and claim to live here. I had a dream about a return of warmth, sudden and lively. Scratching a dog&rsquo s ears and getting a nuzzle in return. People gathered beside water. A big five-armed birch. I woke to maples bleeding sap on the sidewalks. I woke trying to tally the loss in a clearcut, all that intelligence wiped out for parcels of capitalist language. How I might also be a tree ripped out, and the machinery, interrupting any chance to dig in, to know somewhere. The fury that builds whenever we pull up stakes. And the need to do it, to follow the money. The relief I feel.