...
1.
Plinths and ornaments; a cavalcade of bookshelves.
The pulsing energy of continuity: e-learning mornings.
Rose, in headphones: jumping jacks. She smacks
a stack of paper loose, to the hardwood. A handful
of pencils, scraps. Their grade two
calisthenics routine. They shake
their sillies out. Across the living room, Aoife shifts and re-shifts
zoom backgrounds: outer space, blue cloudscape, a temperament
of snow. She responds, when challenged: My teacher taught me.
Junior kindergarten sight words, reading: the, a, she. A writing grid
of nine, for Bingo, before they launch into a story
of a springtime frog. The blank space
of theoretical clarity.
2.
Home, home. We are home. We are endlessly, truly
home. Isolating daily rounds of paired coffee, corner office margins.
Scoped and paired, these opposites rarely meet. Two positives
consistently orbiting the nuclei
of assembled, concentrated parenting. Alternating as lifeguards
for their e-school sessions,
a lineage of comparable sentences. The cat transfixed at window-ledge,
abutting couch; preoccupied
with birdfeeder activity: black squirrels, a lone
red cardinal. He chirps the length of his curled tail.
3.
Each morning leaves its mark. The daily accommodation
of dining room,
living room, kitchen. The news
is not outside; it echoes. They live out isolation, routines
set down by safety, science. School-released by mid-afternoon,
our wee girls scatter,
escalate their bedroom, backyard, basement. Swings and
climbing apparatus. Tablet videos
viewed from underneath their sheets. Our boundary
of suburban bubble. As streamed music blooms,
Christine flicks past
CBC hourly updates, lest the listening ears
of our small sponges, soak. Their questions, percolate. Will
you die of Covid? Will we? Why did those people get shot? We
answer shorthand, truthfully. We monitor, observe.
Attend. The
durability of the pause.
...
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include the poetry collection Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025), On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). This fall, University of Calgary Press will be publishing his poetry collection the book of sentences, a follow-up to the book of smaller (2022). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.
@robmclennan.bsky.social | Bluesky