My friend Aaron
My friend Aaron is a can of Pepsi – the basics.
He’s an amble down to Granville Island
with sunglasses, bucket hat, sunscreen on his ears.
He scatters French fries for the harbour seals
and ambles home. When I was a teenaged wrecking ball,
Aaron was a young man in chainmail.
Rammstein, Slip Knot, Evolution Nightclub.
The owner of a Mustang he let me rip
up and down Commercial, back when a sports car
was enough to connect.
My friend Aaron laughs when he eats
margarita pizza with oregano, an apple.
He appreciates the orange striations
of sunset across Vancouver, the way the light tangles
with the struts of Granville Bridge. He appreciates
how rarely this spectacle happens.
Appreciates almonds and pear slices.
I sprint the seawall, crying.
When I first met Aaron, we were both
the Grouse Mountain Grind with mickeys
of Jack Daniel in our pockets, the scrambling gallop
back to sea level. The sun now bothers his eyes.
He is a Smashing Pumpkins hoodie
spritzed in cat hair, noise-cancelling headphones,
a one-bedroom apartment at Commercial and Broadway.
Aaron sleeps to the lull of delivery trucks and public
transit.
He appreciates the intricacies
of a well-orchestrated arrival.
I remember Aaron conjuring fireball whiskey
from his Doc Martins at Evolution, back when I wanted
everyone to carry magic, and I wanted
to be the woman the magician saws in half.
Aaron used to wear leather arm bands held together
with nails. He used to dance with glowsticks at 3:00 a.m.
He is now the owner’s manual to optical migraines, chronic –
tunnel vision and vertigo so he no longer drives.
They don’t bring suffering, says Aaron,
because they don’t bring pain.
Only the inability to leave his apartment.
Except on those glowing and rarified occasions
when he walks to the water, turns
and then walks home again.
Why I deride the colour grey
Because under cloud-cover,
the Assiniboine River squats grey.
Pigeons are lesser doves,
grey whales lesser continents,
and cumulonimbus clouds herald
the end of a party.
Why would I want
a river this colour?
Mice are skittering capsules
of disenchantment. Flies, moths,
and evening primroses sculk at dusk.
I deride the colour grey
because of wet asphalt. Because silver
is the second-best medal – blah.
Because of double-edged swords.
Because brains are grey matter
but still pass the harshest judgement.
Dementia and mercury poisoning
both muddle the noodle. Tuna, mackerel,
sharks, and swordfish all carry mercury
and all of them grey.
Tuxedos have definitive cuts.
Women in grey dresses slither
in and out of this gig.
We’re serving up Jell-O
on oxidized spoons.
Dessert forks are gossiping teeth.
Colour photos turn sepia sooner or later.
Dear Grey, are you even a colour?
If you’re only a shade, a poltergeist,
why even bother? I deride you
because of my hair – goddammit.
Photo album of the long-distance runner
You, my once-upon-a-time husband, snapped a photo
of me at Bombers Stadium after the marathon,
legs limp, face turned rainwards, shit-eating grin on my
face.
Here’s me on my thirtieth birthday in mud-stained
Nikes, arms outflung and clouds roiling black
like an oil fire. Me at the starting line, up
with the elites where I hope I belong.
You waited in the Manitoba drizzle, snapped
my blur at the anaerobic threshold, the pain tunnel,
hitting the wall on Portage Avenue. Here’s a favourite:
me with my medal between my teeth.
Me on the chin-up bar in our basement gym, flexing
my lats, trapezius, the happiest flyer alive.
Me laughing at the camera.
I don’t know why you photographed me carb-loading
on marinara, queasy the night before race day.
Why the photo of my foot on the bathroom tiles
the evening my toenail finally shluffed off, good riddance.
Me on the treadmill, hours
in the basement with my face to the wall.
Look at that: a photo of us in the parking lot, thirty
minutes
to gun-time, you in a sports jacket with your arm
around my shoulder, almost my neck
and me in an electric body suit of nerves.
There never was a photo of the time we jogged together
around the cemetery ring road, and I ripped
away from you because you wanted to talk, I didn’t
want to hear it, and I knew I could always outrun you.
Never a photo of me in the taper, the cool-down,
the lactic stasis that follows a race.
No photo of the bull moose that barreled into my path
as I blind-charged the trails of East Sooke Park – sometime
before or after the divorce.
Nothing of the intervals
I used to run beside the ocean
when my breath was silver tongues.
Danielle Hubbard's poetry has appeared in The Malahat Review, Grain, Geist, and Best Canadian Poetry 2019 and 2024, among other places. Her poem "Swan dive" placed first in The New Quarterly's 2024 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest. She lives in Kelowna and works as the CEO of the Okanagan Regional Library.