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!
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The Eight-Year-Olds
ANNE HOPKINSON
Evelyn
Evelyn wears the same pink shorts and T-shirt
to school for a week,
they are dirty, she is dirty.
Some kids hold their noses and laugh,
but she smiles and plays and tries to read,
tries to print, her small brown hands
are dirty and scraped,
her chipped pink nail polish is almost gone.
She’s a Native girl from Hazelton, not a city girl.
So when drinking parties go on too loud and too long
Evelyn and her sister camp out
by the tracks in an empty fridge box.
They take food from the market, and some blankets
and pillows from home,
and a candle in a jar.
Five nights they sleep there, and come to school each day,
until they are picked up by police
when the box catches on fire.
Evelyn screams, and her sister screams alone
in the night by the city tracks,
and she comes to school the week after,
her eyes big and brown as she chooses
art paper. “Pink, please.”
Breno
He’s a young prince in training. He’s short and round, with dark eyes and dark curly hair that his mother fondles in the playground as she kisses him good-bye. She hovers at the classroom door. He’s well- dressed in a classroom of children who aren’t. Sometimes she comes into the cloakroom and kneels down on the wet floor to help him get his boots off. She shakes the rain from his coat and hangs it on the hook.
Breno has chocolate bar sandwiches every day for lunch: two pieces of white bread, buttered, with slabs of milk chocolate in be- tween. “He won’t eat anything else,” his mother sighs, and tucks a powdered doughnut in his backpack for recess.
“He’s a good boy, yes? Good at school?” But she doesn’t listen to the answer; she knows it’s not what she wants to hear.
“Could we meet one day after school to talk about his progress? Mrs Madeiros? How about tomorrow?”
She refolds his paint smock in his cubbyhole. Breno fusses with his backpack. “Where’s my library books?” He stamps his feet.
“You forgot them,” he says. She bends to look at him, and he whacks her on the shoulder. She speaks rapidly and softly in Portu- guese and he stomps off to his desk, pushing a child out of his way.
“I come back with the books for the library, okay?” She hurries out.
Lisa Camparmo
Lisa is the classroom thief, I’m almost sure. I wait here behind the door to catch her in the act, to talk to her about stealing, and to talk her into returning the trading cards to her classmates. I think they will forgive her easily, because they like her so much.
Lisa is fast and thin; she runs instead of walking. She is the first in line, the first outside at recess, lunch, and at 3:01. She dashes around the classroom to find a missing pencil, pick up a fallen poster, or col- lect the papers. On the playground she runs for the pure pleasure ofrunning, collapses in a complete bliss of exhaustion.
She’s the surprise child of the Camparmo family, born late in life to
parents of six children already. The next oldest, Chiara, is seventeen, a nine-year gap. She will marry after her next birthday and join her siblings in making lots of babies.
But what of Lisa the Quick, Lisa the Agile? Will she be quick enough and agile enough to dodge the accepted route to adulthood? Will her speed in foot races keep her ahead of the pack, running full out through any traditional finish line? Will she steal what she needs to escape her predictable fate?
Mason Wu
I think I will draw him out,
but I do all the talking.
I give him time to answer,
but he only nods or shakes his head.
I open the book of trucks and say trucks,
but he just looks at the pictures.
I send Sammy over with his battleship book
and they start right in,
I see him flip the pages back and forth,
pointing and chattering.
I nod when he looks up at me to confirm
it’s okay to speak Chinese.
I find the geometric shapes for math,
and Mason bounces from his desk.
I give him a pile to make a pattern,
and Mason creates an incremental spiral.
I say triangle and he says triangle, I say square
and he says square.
Brian
Brian’s mother is killed in the night.
Brian is at the door when the man comes,
for the shouting,
for the stabbing,
for the quiet.
Brian is there in the apartment through the night
with the neighbours,
with the cops,
with the ambulance men.
Are you all right? asks the neighbour.
Blood sticks, says Brian.
Okay, little fella? asks the cop.
Screams hurt, says Brian.
Are you injured? asks the man in white.
Mum says she loves me, says Brian.
No one notices when Brian leaves;
how he brushes his teeth,
and finds his lunch in the fridge, all ready to go.
how he gets his backpack and runners,
how he grabs his football,
and meets Jason in front of the building.
how they walk with Marco,
all the way to school.
Brian comes into the classroom the morning after
his mother is killed.
He is humming, rocking,
but then as the children sit in a circle
his legs shake stiff and jerky,
his hands are clenched,
and his teeth clack out 9-1-1, 9-1-1, 9-1-1
howling, peeing, and clinging to the edge of the carpet. Good thing we hired carpet cleaning Minneapolis to take care of the mess.
•••
Anne Hopkinson writes with Thursdays Writing Collective at the Carnegie Centre and was a teacher in the DTES. She is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University and is a columnist for the Burnaby NewsLeader. She writes poetry and prose for adults and children.
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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.