A. A. Parr

Nothing Will Grow Here


It was always overcast on the
long drive out of the city.

Velvet dapples 
in ochre-lit friezes;
remnants of others’ dreams 
sprawling out alongside the road,
glistening and burning, shattered
yellow, white and silver
broken headlights glinting jewels amid
the wreckage of
a five car pile up sixteen miles outside
of town.

The horses do not try yet to run,
professionally broken as they are
penned in to idyllic scenes 
alongside the highway,
that only we can recognize 
from this distance because
at some point 
instead of resisting decay
we decided 
to idealise it.
 
Where decrepit barns
are framed and hung alongside
staged family portraits,
generations of tending livestock
through the harsh winters, fur at its thickest;
the dry summers, crops burnt and
goats restless
while chickens peck peck peck
until nothing grows here.

Nothing will grow here;
I don’t need a sign to say it.

And freedom only needs to span
so far as one can run
if put to the task,
so the fence posts are planted 
until the bush, where
snow fencing runs until coils 
of misremembered metal fencing,
hardware cloth sprawls 
downward, half buried
in the earth it once 
knew how to protect -
and if you wanted to 
meander out that far
then you deserved it
you earned it,
but you had to 
already know 
it was out there,
had to taste it once before
you acquired an appetite
for freedom.
 
And now, who dares chase the wind 
when we’ve built giant turbines
to do that for us?


Our ghosts glint 
in the late summer sun 
streaking out between
cloud striations, trees painted 
in oils to look like wind and
the caution of falling rocks
where roads have blasted through 
more natural formations.
But every stream eventually 
erodes the land before it,
every flood destroys 
the ground below to forge 
its new waterbed,
where someday a child might 
reach into the lake,
collect in two handfuls 
of shells and sands and algae
a shard of glinting yellow sea glass,
glistening and burning, shattered;
and our ghosts 
will regain their beacon, their 
way home 
along this highway, the 
long drive out of the city.


A. A. Parr is a Canadian writer, artist and entrepreneur with a Spec Honours BFA from York University. Her debut Chapbook, “What Lasts Beyond the Burning” is forthcoming from Nightingale & Sparrow Press, 2020; she writes a weekly poetry series for and about strangers, entitled: “I Wrote You This Poem” on Channillo.com; and, she is currently working on her second literary fiction novel. She has recent work out in untethered, Black Bough Poetry, Sonic Boom, Door=Jar, and Turnpike Magazine, as well as forthcoming in Brave Voices Magazine and elsewhere. In her work, she seeks to explore difficult themes in an attempt to shine a necessary light into our darkest crevices. https://aaparr.wixsite.com/ourghosts