Author: Theresa Smalec

Photo and copyright by George Webber Photography, originally published in AlbertaViews.   Kroetsch and Cars:  “Floor It” By Aritha van Herk You always drove cars the colour of asphalt parking lots.  They served as effective camouflage, impossible to find, quiet in their under-studied disguise, locum tenens for your breakaway, your constantly figurative departures. Your characters rely on cars as a device, use them to escape, use them to careen down endless highways, through roadblocks, up north. You wanted to be fond of hitchhikers, but knew they were vortexes of misdeed, the wrong side of the road and dangerous for...

Installment 25 features two poems by Lea Graham: excursions into meaning that meander toward etymology, history, memory, and association. “Wend” and “Calque” travel the back roads and back channels of language, constantly surprising and rerouting expectations in the process.   *** Wend: to direct one’s course; to travel, proceed 1. Forty years later in Mayflower, Arkansas, I wake from the dream where I am forever riding the Greyhound around hairpins, a car-sick kid next to a chain-smoking crone draped in a pink afghan. I’m eager for the mountain’s descent where the river begins to bottom out this drive, but stuck...

Our 23rd installment is Brent Raycroft’s “Glendette,” a reflection on the sedimentary nature of used vehicles and previous owners. Raycroft suggests that seemingly inanimate cars impart their histories in material ways, thus keeping traces of the past alive through us.     *** Glendette From what we were told we’re the third or fourth owners of this heavy appendix to car transportation. I’ve got the original road registration: a worn paper slip for a sixteen-foot, one-axle ’65 Glendale Glendette. We might make it road worthy, go for a trip. But it looks pretty good where it is. It will be...

Michael Caan’s tribute to incorrigible driving is our 22nd installment. Built on repetitions with a difference, “Sestina on Doing One Hundred and Forty on the 405” puts pedal to metal, dramatizing the risks that accrue value with time.    *** Sestina On Doing One Hundred And Forty On The 405. The speedo pegged at 130 and man that felt fine. I was twenty-one, an age when a guy’s just got to speed. Forty-five years later I’m on the 405 again, same wide cut through the Valley where I’d gone so fast. The Sierra foothills frame the shimmering asphalt. The...

Laura Winton’s “Custom Car Parade” is our 21st installment. This is also our first installment featuring a recording of the poet reading their work. Deeply in touch with our age of precariousness, Winton’s driver dares us to risk what little mileage we have left–and possibly win back something much bigger, like freedom. *** Custom Car Parade Who knew we’d make it this far already who knew that our hearts wouldn’t wear out so much sooner than this that the big one was this far off that we could spiral down this far without hitting bottom so hard it knocked...