A Chorus of Severed Pipes
by Kelly Rose Pflug-Back
When I was a kid, I threw a stone into the moon's reflection and saw it break into a thousand sharp pieces. It was dark, and the world sang to itself to keep from being frightened. Wheat stalks sighed under the thresher's blades, a chorus of severed pipes. The crickets and frogs kept time with one another; I wrapped my arms around nothing and waltzed circles through the corn rows adrift in the harvest's beaconless sea. I kept all the pieces I found in a sack in the barn where the pigeons battered, frantic in my chest. Sunrise flicked its laughing tongue through the interstices between gap-toothed rafters and I knew that I could never make it whole again; all those tarnish-bright shards carried away in the silt of stream beds winking at nothing from the thatch of magpies' nests. That's why there are still dark patches on the moon. That's why the animals still call out to each other in the dark, bullfrogs' throats stretched fat like pearls while the crickets rub their thighs and sing.
Kelly Rose Pflug-Back grew up in a draughty farm house somewhere in rural Ontario, where she spent more time talking to goats and chickens than to other people. She is currently an undergrad student of Human Rights and Human Diversity at Wilfrid Laurier University. You can find her poetry and fiction in upcoming anthologies from Exaggerated Press, Aqueduct Press and Hidden Brook Press, as well an upcoming issue of Ideomancer. Her shameless leftist muckracking frequently graces the pages of The Dominion. Her favourite fruit, of course, is that much-maligned root of all critical thought and rebellious temptation: the apple.
If you like, you can visit her blog.
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