“The Land is Laid Out Flat Forever” by Frances Boyle

April 11, 2024

Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “The Land is Laid Out Flat Forever” by Frances Boyle. Due to the poem’s formatting, it is only available as an image.

The Land is Laid Out Flat Forever

by Frances Boyle

The night before I leave, you keep me waiting in the truck. Hint of fall in late summer’s midnight breath, vibrant blues from the dance and long farewells to friends still hum through me. It’s warm inside the cab. Its yellow sides shake. Back from the house, you carry blankets, a squat bottle of Drambuie. The truck lurches into motion. You let it have its head down the highway, sculpting a tunnel of light along grid roads, over ruts, into a field. Come on, you say and I follow. We slam heavy doors, clamber over the tailgate. Our shoes clang against the box. You drape a blanket around my shoulders, slide in beside me. We lean against the truck’s back window, wait. Far off, light glints briefly, defines our line of sight. The grinding storm advances: a herd of bison that might rumble through for days. Flashes, brighter, longer. Sky etched on horizon. We smoke, pass the bottle, the liquid-sweet burns as the salvo breaks open the sky. In one near-daylight moment you kiss me and the land is laid out flat forever: lit prairie under tin-basher clouds. Liqueur-laced, the cigarette taste of your lips. We bang the doors as the first flat drops hit the windshield. Don’t ever forget where you come from you tell me, you ask me as the truck finds its way through rain.

First published in The New Quarterly Number 123 (Summer 2012); republished in Light-carved Passages by Frances Boyle (BuschekBooks 2014); forthcoming in new edition of Light-carved Passages (Doubleback Press 2024).

Frances Boyle’s most recent book is Openwork and Limestone (Frontenac House 2022). She is also the author of Tower, a novella (Fish Gotta Swim Editions 2018), Seeking Shade, a short story collection that was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Awards and a ReLit Award, and two earlier poetry collections, one of which will be republished in 2024 by Doubleback Press. She is a past board member and President of Arc Poetry Magazine and currently serves on the boards of The League of Canadian Poets and of VerseFest, Ottawa’s international poetry festival. Raised on the prairies, Frances has long made her home in Ottawa.

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