Blanksicle
by Dominique Bernier-Cormier
I count how many bedrooms ago
we ate fudgsicles after sex
on your balcony in Brooklyn. Four. Ferns
like the black fossilized wings
of dinosaurs. Your dad across the Hudson
inventing better and better
lightbulbs to flood ski hills at night. Fudgsicles
dripping into the street. Futuresicles. Pastsicles.
Nothing like presentsicles. Your fluorescent bra.
Your skin the colour of lemons
floating in a hotel pool at night. A truck full
of blood-vials crossing a bridge
to get analyzed. That’s what I told your dad.
I didn’t cross a bridge to get analyzed,
sir. Outside, a bird was making the sound
of a fax machine printing bad test results. I told
your mom she should get raptor
silhouettes to stop the bad news from slamming
into her windows. It started to rain
while you were in the shower. Tennis matches
were getting cancelled all over
the observable universe. I stood in the window
trying on the shape of an umbrella,
a popsicle stick, a fern.
Dominique Bernier-Cormier’s poetry won The Fiddlehead’s 26th Ralph Gustafson Prize, and was shortlisted in Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year Contest in 2017. His first chapbook, Englishing, was recently published by Frog Hollow Press, and his first full-length book of poetry, Correspondent, is forthcoming from icehouse (Goose Lane Editions). He is a poetry editor for Rahila’s Ghost Press.