Writing Vancouver is a bi-weekly section that highlights local talent in the literary arts. Over the coming weeks, Spacing Vancouver readers will be treated to a selected number of poems, stories and essays from the recently released V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
We invite our readers to submit their own pieces for publication. We look forward to helping spread the word!
•••
Watermelon; I Know That Sound
PATRICK FOLEY
A wild Mustang gallops out of the Old West, and it’s coming to take me there.
I drift off to sleep and hear an owl hoot his good-night three times.
Through the mist I hear the suction rise of a fish in fast water; it sounds like he’s hungry.
A card shark shuffles the deck and makes the cards whir. He’s looking for a sucker.
My bacon sizzles and dances in the frying pan.
There’s that mouse again, rustling in amongst my junk, making himself at home.
Ice cubes land in a glass with a loud clinks.
The customer waits all lathered up, the slap of the straight razor on the leather strop.
The soft quiet hiss as my mother cracks another beer.
Next door, the lovers are on the home stretch.
My old man used to sigh at the end of the day, letting the world know he was all worn out. He had only one lung thanks to T. B., and only part of a stomach.
An old binner with his shopping cart full of bottles and cans rattles down the street at three o’clock in the morning.
The wind is moaning through the cracks around the doors and windows. It is saying something, but I don’t know what it is.
I hear my heart breaking in the days after I leave her.
•••
Patrick Foley is a Vancouver playwright and a member of Thursdays Writing Collective. He attended Jay Hamburger’s Carnegie Theatre Workshop and has participated in several community plays and work- shops with Vancouver Moving Theatre. He has also written several one-act plays: You Are What You Eat, Binners Anonymous, The Rat, and Philomena, produced by Theatre in the Raw.
***
V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is a record of this community’s self-determination via the poems, stories, essays and experimental writing of 32 authors, who have all been members of the DTES community in some way, at some point in their lives.
Published by Arsenal Pulp Press, the contributors feature in the book are: John Barry, Elisabeth Buchanan, Wayde Compton, Henry Doyle, Daggar Earnshaw, Albert Flett, Patrick Foley, Angela Gallant, Gary Geddes, Anne Hopkinson, Jonina Kirton, Don Larson, Gisele LeMire, Robyn Livingstone, Stephen Lytton, Don Macdonald, Muriel Marjorie, My Name is Scot, Lora McElhinney, James McLean, Brenda Prince, Antonette Rea, Rachel Rose, Sen Yi, Irit Shimrat, Kevin Spenst, Loren Stewart, Madeleine Thien, Michael Turner, Phoenix Winter, Cathleen With, Elaine Woo and Daniel Zomparelli.
V6A is for sale at People’s Coop Bookstore, Little Sister’s, Chapters/Indigo, SFU Bookstore Downtown, Hager Books and online at amazon.ca also as an ebook and available internationally as of September 2012. Partial proceeds benefit Thursdays Writing Collective.