Your Montreal Pool Room combat lesson:
“You have a good spear if you have a straight cue.
Here, grab it palms down, thumbs up and learn to
twist and thrust it in a single motion.

Boom! You’ve pierced a lung or bruised an organ.”
Days before my mother died, she said you
buried a jar of cash behind the plough
and emptied a locker full of weapons

in the pond before mechanic cancer
let your bookend brother and sister
cremate your remains in a canvas casket.

“Word gets round, they’ll wonder where the cash is,”
a friend warned me, “Don’t write about it.”
Bring it. I have a cue and jar of ashes.

Stephen Brockwell is an Ottawa poet and entrepreneur. His sixth book, All of Us Reticent, Here, Together, will be published by Mansfield Press in 2016.

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