Crucifixes CJ Leon There was a crucifix above every door in Grandma's house, and on a couple of walls top-centre otherwise barren. She inherited that trick from generations of God-fearing home-owning Mr's who kept the livelong day their singing house-keeping Mrs's well-reminded of the plight of sons of men and the world out of doors. She decorated them with yellowing palm leaves acquired one per year on Palm Sundays at the Catholic service nearby. She used to say that 'anytime you have the mind is enough a time to pray; you could be sweeping the kitchen floor or riding your bicycle, bored in class or climbing trees; just turn to God and give.' But voices turn to God purveying misery, keeping their joys their own, because the least likely guy to be impressed by your jeweled sink taps is one in the throes of execution, compare lethal injection, hanging, the rack, impalement, disembowelment, exposure, starvation, and the electric chair; and the least likely man to dance drunk is the naked one publicly crucified wearing a dunce crown and a sign. So, somewhere along the line, I learned never to trust the man at the end of the whip. Either one. They're both preoccupied. After a season of hunger, I glutted blue-rare the Blood-Bodied Father and Son and their ascetic bravado, and I sucked the fruit nectars of Lovers' Communion. I learned to despise and war the misery of life, not to glorify, not hope for deliverance from it in death. It's pathological optimism, or the poet in me, but life is so much worthier; Life manifests Christ in its so many familiar faces, Christ who is the resurrecting body, the spirit of bread and wine and the urge, Christ of miracles, of accomplished whores, the good-loving Christ who always pulls rent out of a fish's mouth or at least finds a place to crash for a few days while the universe resolves the problem. My Christ plays guitar, gets shit-faced, gets laid, sings sauntering down the street, brings strings of Christmas lights to her lovers because their living spaces seem lacking a certain light these days. My Christ knows the crackheads on her street by name and jams with them to mutual everywhere musical delight. My Christ gives baked goods, her poems, dead flowers to perfect strangers and makes them perfect friends. My Christ gives licorice to the sore-throated, treats her starved neighboring artists to sex and breakfast with real maple syrup, freezer jam, and unlimited coffee, gets them stoned before noon, and sends them home to their art, because human spirits, Christ knows, will not survive on omelettess and toast alone.

Consumption CJ Leon So I got this letter from Toronto Health to the effect that: your neighbour has TB and you share a bathroom with him so there's a chance that you do, so you should get checked even if showing no sympotoms, and don't worry, people in Canada don't die from tuberculosis anymore because we give away the medications. Having about the average motivation of a university student, I kinda just ignored the letter for a couple months. My flatmate had led me to understand also that Korean medicine was not as heathen as the Canadians portrayed, and that he will always test positive if injected with tuberculin and that he had all the right drugs when he was a toddler and they cured him then and he, on the other hand, did have to pay for the doses we forced on him, a lot, which maybe explained why for spite he wasn't ever going to ingest them. My motivation did not soar. I was practically convinced. Then I got sick. I got so sick I lay in bed without the strength to fetch myself food or water and I developed this cough where I hacked up blood and rolling over made me dizzy and I did a lot of staring at the walls between naps and wheezes and sipping herbals. And, you know, I started to think about that letter that told me once that your neighbour has TB and so maybe you do, so get checked, even if you don't have symptoms, which when I looked at again read like a ticker-box list of yeah, well, I guess I got that one too. I went to the clinic. Where I said: I got this letter that says I may be consumptive so I need to get checked and could you do that please? Yes, that will be $20, said the nurse. Oh, I said, and my stomach dropped. I took account of all the money that I had, which was all the money in my wallet at the time, which was a measley ten bucks, and I was hoping to eat it. I suppose you want that in Canadian funds? I said. Uh, so, I got ten bucks. Uh, what can I get for ten bucks? The nurse shook her head: The needle is ten, the check-up is ten, you need twenty. I started to wheel around on my heel, pulling a grimace, and holding that black-letter injunction in my shaking hand, eyeballing it like the agonizingly raw and painful death sentence it was, and I thought, if only for the concerned pale horror on the faces of clinic bysitters, that I should give it a go. And I spun 360. I don't need a new needle! Rinse one off! And don't bother with the name brands. Or why not just give me the needle and I'll Google my results on the Internet. Now look here, I said pointing, I got this letter from Toronto Health that says my neighbour has tuberculosis and we share a bathroom so there's a chance that I have tuberculosis, so I need to get checked even if I don't have the symptoms, which, actually, I do; but, it says here that the medications are absolutely free; and so, since I'm pretty sure that I've got tuberculosis, and I can't afford to buy your stupid little test for it, why don't we just skip the fucking test and you give me the meds. For some reason, unlike the frosty, needly red-green, Christmas mucus in my lungs, these suggestions didn't seem to float. On my way home I started composing my obituary; and I figured I better get to polishing my work, for the best of headlines I could dream with my cynical romance was: Starving Artist Consumed: Dead from TB, First in a Very Long While. It was miles more desirable than: TB in TO: Beware! And I'd be damned if I wasn't going to get it. I didn't feel overly badly for myself, really. I was soon to put my foot in the door of the hall of all dead young writers (where I'd give Keats a pat on the back, especially were he still choking on his lung). But all those twisted patients' faces as I left the clinic untested and untreated! Had they hoped we lived in a socialist democracy? They seemed to watch me step out through the cracks.

My Punk Girl CJ Leon My punk girl says: Fuckin' flowers in the fuckin' trees. What the fuck is this? ...Spring? My punk girl has a gap in her te eth through which she spits the venom. My punk girl never looks at you directly and especially when drunk and if you catch her eyes passing over you in passions, you see skulls. My punk girl gets her tatts redone. It hurts, she says - which, I assume, is why. My punk girl rattles long white petals from short young trees: Ha-ha! It makes a prettier now! My punk girl lights fuses with her cigarettes' cherries and flicks her smoking tips with sparks and gunshot-like percussion. My punk girl says: Walking. That thing with your feet, right? ...and rolls her eyes to acquiesce. Then halfway over says: Okay, I get it. Bridge over water, black water, shaky lights. I'm done; let's call a cab. And does. My punk girl says: I'm afraid of heights! Leaping to the railing, causing me to choke on a heartbeat. My punk girl drinks gin (anyway she can) or vodka (straight) or whiskey (no water) or tequila (no lime) or wine or beer, that or whatever else you got'll do. My punk girl thinks safe sex is for safe people, but oral hygiene and mouth piercings are too much of a risk. My punk girl has scars with histories whose scars have histories whose scars were too drunk to recall who or how or what or when - ie. in what part of the missing life chunk it was that... gasps, corkscrew, and razorblades, and her soft white skin smothered in red-lipstick kisses. My punk girl says suddenly: Fuck, CJ! Since it's fuckin' every second fuckin' word I fuckin' say, I thought you'd fuckin' take my fuckin' hint by the incessant repe-fuckin'-tition without the fuckin' need for a fuckin' explanation! So... And she puts me in a grunting clawing grappling mood with the sharp raised hook of a pencil-thin black brow and the gouging look of one brown dead forward eye.

A New Year's Lease CJ Leon She is greyer than the sleet that falls, wearing everything black and balancing her ribcage in an over-fat teenage frame, unseasonably sleeveless and staggering like a cloud through the pitch of a morning that has otherwise seen much merry-making. She presses half-folded white paper-towels down to her upturned forearm, to her milky arm sheathed in a coarse weave of criss-crossing scars, and bleeds a bright red oval spot right through them: it is something of a modernist colour-blocking/etching effort that leaves an incidental found-art splatter-print on a sidewalk canvas. Was it fear to face the sore dawning of the day or the deft crafting of some deep ones for the New Year that has her now unwillingly escorted by our passing troupe of drunken fools? Her protest is simple: I'm ruining your New Year's Eve. And she rolls her eyes mis-stepping sideways to punctuate. So is our response: No, you're not. And we watch her intently. We hesitate when suddenly she stops. She refuses to enter the ER if we go with her. So we stand; and she walks in; and she disappears behind clear glass; and we all wait; and we wait, tautening the strings of conscience that pull our bodies and our minds together again, resurfacing from surreal winter dark, into a new purpose and a new day: a transition xxx more seamless for some than others.

autumn leaf who dies yet does so beautifully and only to return maple trees ink East Van sidewalks with patriotic tattoos no needles required one autumn frost and a field of rough and rotting grass turns diamond

Laila CJ Leon The beautiful Laila is a user of crack. You may see her on her street: she is the young princess of Queen; and you may see her black eyes and sassy lunge and her skin sorrel mulatto; and you may see her smile at her own reflection in the window of a restaurant or shop, as she turns her cap to the side and blows herself a kiss; and she may make you smile, the way beauty makes smiles, before she faces you and asks you, with a honey-tone voice, if you could help her out, give her a spare quarter; and you may think her worth so much, and give for the act if not of generosity; and you may see her at another time, the beautiful Laila she is, address any ears in the air, no two particular, when then she cries wide-glittery-eyed and terrified Please! Please, God, would someone just... for a God-sent death.

La Folle CJ Leon A woman wanders, bearded, swollen, past maturity, footsteps over walkways, footsteps in the street, adding no more than a tattered ghost to the relics of Avignon. Where are the children she has borne? For she wears that mark too, the softened hips, the soft wild eyes. Where are the living lives she bore to save her from the living death she suffers, of muttering to familiar gods and spirits broken nonsense from an unclean tongue that throbs between crusted lips, of insanity, of solitude, of sleeping just outside the fortifications where now she hesitates, while within the walls stand distorted in view in line les desmoiselles, where now she slowly stoops, where now she delicately spreads a sheet on the cobblestone?