Erin Wilson
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Doppelgänger

I knew this as my life.
             She hung like a decimal.

The way I made my bed, or didn't.
The way I brushed my hair, or didn't.

             ​There were things about her I couldn't stomach.
             Great fictions like new appliances.

My car rusted, needed work.
             Hers, an SUV, or some able other.

I was then twelve and this was very, very good.
             She was still twelve...

My pain tempered me.
             She. why. created. in me. a temper.
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I, with great birth breaths, broke through/broke through/broke through water.
             ​She bloated. bloated. repeating corpse.

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Recipe
                “It's all so strange, Karamazov, such grief and then pancakes...”
                                                                                                           F. Dostoevsky
Is it not urgent to live amongst people
who bow to lampposts,

who wear their shirts pulled over their heads
like vellum wings?

Don't we need our parents, our prime ministers,
our school teachers to sprout velvet antlers?

When I finally make it to the front of the queue,
a salmon in a suit devours my wallet...

Don't we desperately need a chest of drawers
of tiny running shoes and iguanas?
​
Shouldn't our yaks play banjos?

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Erin Wilson's poems have recently appeared in Vallum magazine, Tar River Poetry, The Shore, Verse Daily and January Review. Her first collection is At Home with Disquiet; her second, Blue, is about depression, grief and the transformative power of art. She lives in a small town on Robinson-Huron Treaty Territory in Northern Ontario, Canada, the traditional lands of the Anishinawbek.

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