BANGED UP HOTWHEELS
a tugboat wake zips by the playground
at the pier and the train
stitches
tracks in metallic pitch
that commands the task of
climbing the ladder
to gesture for the horn
resonating a colour sound
we take into months of rain
the playground is our mediation
on park furniture
—the great movers
with gestures to nowhere
we are the mini red crane
—a mere god of sandbox—
whose pulley a fist of string,
attempts sky puppetry
we are luminary jars
on the merry-go-round
the magnetic moment
of paint on the bars
pigmented in the scene
we are water molecules
in sunned puddles
stampeding
we climb ropes for another height,
catch beams
from the Hotwheels
crashing down the slide
RUIN OF YELLOW
it's a comfort knowing
leaves come back
when life feels like
a post-home button
leaves stoop
to my level
only when they're dying
or dead, their graveyard
my autumnal snapshots
from a phone
with no manual click
framing my kid
against her school route's
ruin of yellow
the leaves part
from branch,
mask my automated paths,
the gentle peace makers
with eventual end
and after drop off,
on my commute
of small deaths,
I join the trunk
of dirtiest treads
into the train's sliding doors
when I narrow back home
our time begins
in the fall of our day
and I make each night
with my hands
before we rest
and when the leaf blowers
drone their last note,
I drift to the maple
branches swaying,
for they are
the automation’s
automation
THE PACIFIC RIM
I've become accustomed
to overthinking
—haven't been shrunk
by the mountains
or felt the ocean swell
pull me in a while,
haven't been tucked by
the blankets of Earth's rolling.
The Pacific is shrinking
and on Google Maps
it can be pinched small enough
to circle me
with fiery silicates projecting
a glass rim
I can slide my licked finger
round singing.
How may times I've frequented
the basin from Vancouver to Tokyo
and mistaken it
for a fixed frame
to manipulate, a shoreline
to memorize.
But the Rim is a puzzle
of tectonics
and the rattling skeleton
where I flesh out its border daily.
Its waves have the potential
to annihilate my borders—
my mental scaffolding
—to erase coasts
and extinguish the volcano
of thoughts that emit
smoke into its barrels.
Jessica Lee McMillan (she/her) is a poet and teacher with an MA in English and Creative Writing Certificate from the SFU Writer's Studio. Read her in The Humber Literary Review, Funicular Magazine, Pinhole Poetry, Rose Garden Press and Crab Creek Review, among others. She lives on the land of the Halkomelem-speaking Peoples (New Westminster, BC) with her little family and large dog. jessicaleemcmillan.com