Luc lived down the street
from the Taco Bell,
in his grandmother’s house.
I don’t know how but I knew
to ask mom to drive him home
on nights we worked late
and that if I packed an extra lunch,
he would eat it.
Luc and I spent that year laughing,
slinging fast food and
dusting crumbs from
the creases of our khakis,
laying plans for futures
we thought were promised to us.
When we said goodbye
I didn’t know we meant forever,
fathomless at seventeen.
It was late one night
when I recognized his smile
below a headline about
what they found
at the bottom of
the Winnipeg River.
The obituary painted him an artist:
ten years spent gathering driftwood
like spoils of a gold rush
across the west,
following the current of its lakes,
gentle as ever and
laughing all the way.
Only then,
illuminated by loss,
did I glimpse
the spider silk strands —
barely visible but
hard to break —
woven between
those of us who share
some inaugural sense of
being seen.
Raised in the Canadian prairies, Glennys Egan writes poetry from her apartment in Ottawa, ON, where she works for the government like everyone else. She holds a BA and an MA from Carleton University. Glennys enjoys looking for ways to contribute to her community, captaining her pub trivia team, and hanging out with her dog, Boris. Taco Bell Quarterly is the first to publish her creative work, but she hopes not the last. You can find her online at @gleegz.
Taco Bell Quarterly 