Terese Mason Pierre

Surface Area

A love lowercase
wedged between comfort and cognition

that steals rest and drives
miles into the desert. I aim

for change, for weathered,
to line my hands with sand.

I’ll keep coming here
till we terraform the moon

light on the cracks
of our brains, type and token

voyeurs of each other’s folds
in motion.

Stability spreads, evening cool
like arms round the first child—

faith in the first mirage—brought
forth into the real.

You mould a gift in me:
made of white rock and

the safety of distance,
as deep as the earth is old.



Lines

You know where you are going,
but this city is unfamiliar to me

Every story you tell me has its own
highways and cul-de-sacs

leading to laughs you cut short,
a brief peer over the hedge to the

foreign green. It is irrational
to envy the time before I existed.

In the attic of your childhood home,
I see you in the orange glow

of a lack of someone to please.
I put my hand over yours

as you hold a photo, and I do not
recognize any of the words.

Terese Mason Pierre is a writer, editor and organizer. Her work has appeared in the Hart House Review, The Collapsar, Train: a poetry journal, and others. She is the poetry editor of Augur Magazine and the co-host of Shab-e She'r poetry reading series. She lives in Toronto. Visit her website at: www.teresemasonpierre.com