young together in all kinds of light

By Jason Emde

Leave my sons, my wife, fly to Vernon, stay
in my old bedroom in my dad’s house,
admire my books & pictures:
my friends & me in Zimbabwe, Malawi, Swaziland, Vancouver,
Mexico, America, Paris, Poland. — Look out the window
at my valley, my rattlesnake hills, my lake.

Walk Highway 97 to downtown,
walk through my memories strung all over from
1976 on, parades, movies at the Towne, 
coffee shops of my college days, routines,
the poolhall, Hung Phat’s where Geoff worked,
Bookland, Backstreets, places no longer where they were. 

The Kal Hotel on its corner since 1892 much 
diminished now, full of phantoms, my phantoms, gone.
All the alcoholic evenings, yelling talk or whispering.
Sit in there alone today hoping for connection 
beyond ego & hope, signs from anywhere, but
it isn’t like the old days & I still am. And now

       (tending towards ours at last)
       I veer through images flashing,
       careen 30 years of us in our days
       together in our everything
       even when we weren’t & it wasn’t even true.

    a lot of time, a lot of many years
      a lot of arms around each other
    (staggering with our arms,
    staggering home singing)
      a lot of arcade faces bent to laser kung-fu in Friday’s
      a lot of isotropic talk
      a lot of bar carpet footfalls, glimmer dims of afternoons
    right here in our Kal
      a lot of iron Polish dark you knew & I went to see & know
      a lot of alarmingly smart with laughter & blast
    before smart went cold
      a lot of stuff that never killed us
      a lot of I love you & I love you still
      a lot of goodbye stretching both forward & back

& not enough, but a lot of our light

Jason Emde is a teacher, writer, amateur boxer, REM enthusiast, and graduate student in the MFA Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia. He's also the author of 'My Hand’s Tired and My Heart Aches'(Kalamalka Press, 2005). Hiswork has appeared in Ariel, The Malahat Review, Anastamos, Miracle Monocle, Prometheus Dreaming, Panoply, Cleaver, Soliloquies Anthology, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, and Who Lies Beautifully: The Kalamalka Anthology. Jason lives in Japan with his wife, Maho, and their sons, Joe and Sasha.