by Carla Maj
The geese are back and they want to know what you did all winter. While they were hoarding winter wheat, mastering monogamy, flouting border walls with impunity and goose bombs, before the north star had fixed their V-shaped compass, they had formed brigades of winged comrades in the sky it seems you have amused yourselves by pushing piles of heaping, frozen white clouds around with wide-bottomed sticks from one inconvenient place to another sailing down even more enormous frozen, white clouds on nothing but slippery twigs strapped to your feet, limbs flailing with senseless abandon returning always to where you began, learning nothing, gaining less, swigging crystal brandy by the fire thawing unwebbed, useless toes. Spring, too, finds you flushing sprouting gutters popping up round-about clotheslines like giant umbrellas draped in gaudy, fluttering, flannel rags, thrusting dirt around with straw-ended sticks from one inconvenient place to another. You have no magnetite to move you beyond the sense of falling in your dreams, eyes fixated on the ground, blind to everything but your flock of overgrown and silent graves marked like buoys in a shoreless ocean. Perhaps the day will come by ignorant surprise when the northern snow melts as it falls, the earth warms itself near open water all year long and they can stay. But now they set off and return because they must because the challenge of this flight still evolves. There's a reason geese can't fly backwards, you know. So why has nothing here changed?
Carla Maj writes fiction, non-fiction, essays and poetry. Her writing has appeared in Room Magazine, The Quilliad, and Volumes I and II of 40 Below, Edmonton’s Winter Anthology. Her work will also be featured in the upcoming anthology of St. Albert’s Saint City Writers.
Capital City Press Anthology 