The Diorama Of Our Future Breakup

August 10, 2014

Jeramy Dodds grew up in Orono, Ontario, Canada. He is the winner of the 2006 Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award and the 2007 CBC Literary Award for poetry...

I made a diorama of your eye exam from scratch
and sniff stickers, the colonel’s favourite private
stash of weed for shrubbery. Broccoli hedges
my bets with Realism. Gallery-goers caught a rash
of suicides on their car roofs opening night. Art is Art
Garfunkel’s archnemesis. Paratroopers falling
on hard times were hired as security forces
us to take it easy. If I said I had a vision I was lying
zip-tied in a sea chest. A diorama of what the carpenters saw
in half the magician's chests: a top hat, a hare, a cape
freighters of dream catchers couldn’t round due to a raft
of shootings off the promontory. The cape I used
to get away with. I haven’t jerked off since you left
the stove on. A diorama of you in boots and bustier
than in Reality, crossing off a love list chore with a fire poker,
coveting your optometrist because your eye had this
burnt into it like a brand: the image of me at my art opening
that you left early after getting in late. You and your
optometrist in my car fishtailing off. Me under the marquee
with the diorama I made in one hand, the other waving a cake.

Jeramy Dodds grew up in Orono, Ontario, Canada. He is the winner of the 2006 Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award and the 2007 CBC Literary Award for poetry. His first collection of poems, Crabwise to the Hounds (Coach House Books, 2008), was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the Trillium Book Award for poetry. His most recent book is an English translation of The Poetic Edda.