“Journal Intime” by Annick MacAskill
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Journal Intime” by Annick MacAskill.
Journal Intime
By Annick MacAskill
As early as grade two, sprawling in shaky stout
printing, soft lead smudging tails and knots
like arthritis in the shoulders of our capital letters, rambling
in error-fringed French as we detailed to Madame,
our only reader, the marshmallow machinations
of our limited spheres, pressing these between
the blue lines of onion-skin pages in the Easter-coloured
cahier halves she cut at the classroom guillotine.
I treasured my trimmed world—an atlas
she explored in her own red ink—quick adapting
to the assignment, unspoken: to entertain without
worrying, exaggerating this and muffling that,
and reaching for a levity like an accent adopted in a country
I could imagine I’d once visited: privacy.
Copyright © Erin Kirsh
Previously published in Plenitude.
Erin Kirsh is a writer and performer based in Vancouver. Her work has appeared in Plenitude, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Malahat Review, QWERTY, EVENT, Geist, and more. She can be found in a city near you grumbling about needing to use QR codes to access menus.
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