Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “I’m Sure We’re Taller in Another Dimension” by Justin Timbol.

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I’m Sure We’re Taller in Another Dimension

By Justin Timbol

The years when the Woodie Wood Chucks

at the corner of Dundas was still a Woodie Wood Chucks

across the street nanay is still alive and goading me

into a game of the guessing jar:

Atop TV set habitats a totem of nickels and dimes

wears the suit of a silver monkey growing older every year,

timelapse of sweat tarnishing shiny simian hands

clasped together–shake to misjudge

the monetary value in this annual memory. Outside periodically

enough cars to constitute the chugging of gravel and horns

not infrequent sounds of the GO train. We parked the plaza beside

in front of the employment centre

cause it’s free and besides we’re only going to be a minute

just to shake the silver monkey into a headache and ultimately

choose the consolation twenty instead and sometimes

so what if we did?

The silver monkey claps at everyone’s misfortunes;

the employment centre like tongue twisting ripoff restaurants

and preteen me’s ducking the tunneled life at the end of her ought’s,

coins click thunder between the eyes.

Primitive applause rings in the hallway of nanay’s

memory echos my unwavering grip on its form

before I aged out of visits or forgot and sometimes

so what if I did

until years later when my father and I recall his mother gently

not to disturb the rest of her, recall the Woodie Wood Chucks

and the plaza among all the CRT static of the living

and we cannot remember

where this mystery monkey ended up. In death we inherit

only the unsolvable riddle, think maybe she took it

with its exact dollar value to the dirt and we debate

that precise amount as if it makes it worth it

and besides, even if it could, how much how much would?

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Copyright © Justin Timbol

Justin Timbol (he/him) is a Filipino writer from Mississauga, ON. His poems have appeared in The Ampersand Review, long con magazine, and This Magazine, among others. His poems have been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Foster Poetry Prize.

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