poetry

2nd issue prize winner
Taking the Bus from Regina to Saskatoon
by Elise Moser

Taking the Bus from Regina to Saskatoon

Taking the Bus from Regina to Saskatoon

The cattle are out collapsed like card tables upon the grass bony old gals their muscular babes tilting through sunlight

For the first time in years there is water in the fields the sloughs intense blue eyes unblinking rippled fringed by varied greens

Flat against the sloping sides of a hollow: a miniature oxbow just moistened muddy like a thread wound back upon itself across a plain brown hem

Outside Chamberlain to the right of the road a valley spreads open and closed again its descending walls ridged and undulating given by a glacier that scraped the soil and space with its excoriating underside a flow of ice

It's been eras since there was that much water on the fields

The surface of the Earth was tender then vulnerable to the massive sculpting power of an incomprehensible weight: the trickle that excavates the tiny oxbow its great- great- great- granddaughter

Elise Moser's short stories have appeared in several anthologies and periodicals, and she was a winner of the 2004 CBC/QWF Quebec Short Story Competition. Her first published poem can be found in carte blanche with three more in the July 2005 issue of Nth Position. She's currently coediting the anthology Lust for Life: Tales of Sex & Love, to appear in February 2006 from Véhicule Press.