The Act

I remember you as God in a fold-out lawn chair.

Clipboard, stopwatch, lemonade at your elbow. 

You timed our sprints between goalpost

and grain silo, our cleats punching holes 

in the turf like a thousand tiny hooves. 

I was fourteen and just wanted to run. 

I remember the funhouse contortion 

of the canola fields at the end of a race, the sky 

a shade between bone and blue. 

How my breath sawed like an aerial tumbler, 

tumbling. How you watched 

my legs in the cooldown. 

One time, Cirque du Soleil came to Regina. 

You picked me up in your Jeep Wrangler 

and drove us to the big top, sat beside me 

in the hard plastic chairs, your thigh 

against mine while a man on stilts 

crossed the stage, an accordion zydeco’d,

and a woman in a leotard the colour of butter 

lost her grip on the high trapeze. She swung 

for a moment by only one foot, unmoored.

The air smelled of popcorn. 

That trapezist had the thinnest muscle line imaginable

from thigh to ankle, like a ripcord.

Your hand closed over my knee. The accordion

blared like a starting gun, on and on.

Later, you drove me home. I don’t know why 

no one else on the team was invited, or why

that night you walked me all the way to the door.

All part of the act, you laughed.

I remember your rituals at the end 

of each practice, how you spit the last lemon rind 

into the grass, slipped on your aviators,

folded closed your lawn chair and stared

straight ahead as you drove away.

I walked home with my legs on fire. I ran 

ice baths. Downstairs, Mum ground Nabob 

with a sound like applause 

or shrapnel. The clouds that year 

were unsalted popcorn. 

The woman on the trapeze had strobe-white sequins

glued to her cheeks. I remember

because in the flashing lights it appeared

as if her whole face were eyes.

DANIELLE HUBBARD lives in Kelowna, BC, where she works as the CEO of the Okanagan Regional Library. Her poetry has appeared in CV2, Prairie Fire, Grain, and Geist, among other places. When not writing or working, Danielle spends most of her time in swimming pools or on bicycles.