I was always told a good Canadian poet should only publish once a year, on the Queen’s birthday, and on the subject of the Queen’s birthday.

A government program seeks to leave poems

in hospital waiting rooms so patients

might read them and begin to understand

there are worse things than diabetes.

When Seamus Heaney passed away, he took

his ‘Seven Secret Words that Rhyme with Horse’

to the grave with him. Our rented horse-drawn hearse

just clopped away, Canadian cloppe après cloppe.

Editions of Gwendolyn MacEwen

where the word love is purposely crossed out

and replaced with the word Kahlua –

are those still considered erasures?

Show, don’t tell. Show everyone in Mimico

the kind of mustard-coloured activewear

one only sees in the best golf magazines –

the kind they used to have in waiting rooms.