Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Tourist Trap” by Gillian Sze, part of our 2024 Poem in Your Pocket Day collection!

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Tourist Trap

by Gillian Sze

Summer tries so hard this year: rainfall splits every sky and there’s no avoiding it, turning as you all are on these highways, catching the spins like commas. A weekend escape, you tell yourselves. Aren’t you each pretending you’re elsewhere? The mountains veer forward as you reel higher, higher. Your ears pop and you swallow, swallow. Your love looks so tired staring ahead at the road, but you’ve just forgotten those new lines as your own, wavering back. You make promises to yourselves but even these blasted rocks are laughing. Their jagged grins zipper shut just as you fly by. You catch sight of a gargoyled vulture picking at what’s left of a raccoon on the side of the road. When the children sitting back there ask why you made that sound in your throat, it’s all past so you just tell them to look ahead where the mountains have already made their excuses.

Look up at those wings stirring those clouds. Can you see? And oh, isn’t that nice. The sun is beginning to peek through.

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Gillian Sze is the author of multiple poetry books and picture books. Her latest poetry collection, Quiet Night Think, received the 2023 Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She lives in Montreal where she teaches at Concordia University.

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