A Man of Parts

by Richard-Yves Sitoski

James Ahlberg

The moon, they say, only looks bigger when it’s close to the horizon. But this morning I say it truly is bigger, swollen at the end of its shift like a factory worker’s ankles. Meanwhile, birds I can’t identify begin their programming day, and this lake that likely has a name is getting choppy, hinting at what the wind could do if it made an effort. This is worth drinking Sanka from a thermos for, as I fish for trout I wasn’t taught to clean by a man who wasn’t taught to show me. He was too consumed with the sheer act of angling, not because it lent itself to meditation, but to rumination on a lifetime of real and made-up slights. I often felt relief he didn’t live for hunting, that he didn’t go in for guns but was maudlin on the subject of Bambi. In fact, the only time I saw him cry, he was in his cups and sat us down on the living room floor, campfire-style, and gushed for an hour on the beauty of white-tailed stags — their grace of motion, perfect senses, moral superiority. And of course their rack, which followed the progress of love, hardening under skin to become a weapon that dropped away when its season was done.

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Richard-Yves Sitoski (he/him) is a songwriter, performance poet, and the 2019–2022 Poet Laureate of Owen Sound (Ontario, Canada), on the territory of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Fire, Train, The Fiddlehead, The Maynard and a whole bunch of others. He is the 2021 John Newlove Award winner and a 2021 Best of the Net nominee. His latest book is No Sleep ’til Eden, an augmented reality multimedia collection of poems on the environment. When not chasing his impossible cat, he uses guitars to make sounds not heard since the Cretaceous as part of an indie folk duo with his wife, Mary.