Author: Rocco

Rocco is based in Toronto. He has been published in over 30 magazines and literary journals in Canada and abroad, including Descant, Queens Quarterly, Event and Canadian Literature. He has appeared on radio specials in Toronto, Vancouver, Halifax and New York City and has been commissioned to write poetry by the CBC. He is currently the editor-in-chief of the arts ezine, Latchkey.net, and is working on his third collection of poetry, "Everything is Still Burning: 20 Travel Poems." Another collection, published by Fooliar Press, is expected in the fall of 2005 Rocco has travelled much throughout Europe and Asia and Canada and all the places and experiences reflect in his writing. He has worked as a garbage man, a research reporter, a rickshaw driver, a hard labourer, and presently an English instructor for new Canadian immigrants. He has launched his website not only to promote his own poetry and art, but also to open an online venue for other artists like himself, struggling for an audience and a stake in a little immortality.

Louis Riel

Posted on by Rocco

 
Head east on Broadway.
Make a right at the Safeway.
Keep going until you get to the intersection with a Superlube.
Turn left.
This road turns into Highway 20. Keep right. Get off at the first exit.
Follow onto Goldwheat. Then to River Road.
House number 330. The red one.
On the right. The wide driveway. The vegetable garden.
The rope mattress. The part-time actor explaining
everything. The enormous kitchen stove. The wooden cradle. Winter
hanging over each word like a millstone. Summer beckoning like a faded serigraph
on the wall; the wildflowers on the table stunned with silence. Your hands
remain there, poised over a piano key; this is the wake of someone
you knew; or an office Halloween party: everyone smiling
as if into a flurry, red-eared, endearing ourselves
to our self-effacement: the soft eradication
of one more dream into the details
of waking.
 

 

A version of “Louis Riel” first appeared in Prism International, Vol. 45 No.1,Vancouver, BC, 2006.