Contributed by Quebec poet Barb Kelly. First published in Encore Poetry’s “In Dialogue” issue. All trails still lead to that room* its knotty-pine walls and coffee table full of crackers and cheese, chips and drinks, the aunts and uncles, settled on couches. We’d skied across the top of the hills, through late-day shadows, feeling the chill, then

Certain kinds of information seem impossible to encounter at the speed they actually arrive. The Google search engine offers them with the same mechanical composure whether it is providing the operating hours of the nearest Canadian Tire store or informing you that someone who once occupied the emotional centre of your life has tripped the light fantastic. The medium has no concept of proportion. It has only retrieval. So you type a name almost absentmindedly. Or perhaps not

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was — only is. — William Faulkner, as quoted by Jean Stein in a 1956 article in The Paris Review If one has been granted enough years to discover that the years themselves are curious deceivers, there comes a season when the old arithmetic ceases to satisfy, when one no longer believes that life has been composed of separate compartments dutifully e