I’m surrounded by apples. The buckets are heavy laden, spotting the front and sides of the barn with mounds of red rounds. David’s saws settle in behind the bounty.  He points to tomato vines weaving a fence on a heap of boards, to other cauldrons blooming his brother’s favoured seeds. The air is full of saw dust and skunk and Jonamac must and the sugar of warm raspberries. David shows me the jigsaw and what he is making. He hacked down the dying walnut tree himself, clawed it from the dirt with his hands and his tools, and here it is, transformed into chess: a raw rook, a crooked king, near perfect pawns. David built the barn we are in, figured out how to fit the pieces together and raise them with his own two ruddy hands and instructions from his Dad and his granddad. He is 20.  He has a slow grin and a sharp twinkle behind his glasses. When he was two, he padded over to me with an orange extension cord wound expertly around one arm, pressed the other end to my neck and made animated noises. Started digging holes and mixing cement that same summer, in his floppy yellow boots. He never cried, not until two decades had fallen away and he and I were standing together at the foot of a hospice bed, saying goodbye to my father. Dad, I said, the barn. If you could only see this kid’s barn! He never would.  He never walked again. We buried him. But in the midsummer sunset, the rooster weathervane raised to that roof brands the night in his blood.

Source: The author.  This prose poem first appeared in Verse and Voice (Hong Kong)

Lorette C. Luzajic was born in Niagara Falls and lives in Toronto. She has a degree in journalism from Ryerson University, but has been a lifelong student of art history and poetry. She is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal devoted to literature inspired by visual art. She writes prose poems and small fictions that merge personal experiences and observations and the contemplation of visual art. Her works were selected as Best Small Fictions 2023 and 2024, and have also been nominated several times each for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and Best Microfictions, as well as seven times for Best American Food Writing for her column on food and art in Good Food Revolution. Lorette is also an award-winning mixed-media artist who has collectors in over forty countries so far. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca