SELECTED WRITING
by Writer & Artist Ellie Anglin
TIME MOVES BOTH WAYS
Published in Textile Magazine, 2019
Last summer my wife and I rode our bikes together along the Cambridge to Paris rail trail - an eighteen kilometer venture alongside an out-of-use train track. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fitness queen, but I’d heard that it was an easy trip with a pizza joint at the end of it. I like the kind of biking where you feel like you’re flying, and the crisp pure air and birdsong soundtrack of a forest, but I especially enjoy incorporating pizza into my exercise.
HOWL! WOLF!
Published by Papirmasse, with art by Aman, 2012
A Were-Poem in Two Parts
Howl!
A pack of run-down wolves
Skulk under the stale flourescence
of the Coffee Tyme at midnight.
These are the Night Men.
They tap ashes, clear throats.
Chink metal against cracked egg-shell mugs
in a yeasty late-night tympani.
Smoke gets under an eyelid.
Powdered ash-logs
rest on dented aluminum.
A milky ring is left
on the taut, greyscale abdomen
of the Sunshine girl.
A foster child with a duffle bag
is still waiting to be picked up.
From the half-moons under her eyes
you can see she is the natural daughter
of the night.
I am behind the counter,
with the flies walking around under the plexi-glass.
My shift will not end for another six hours.
I am watching and wondering.
Without Night Men
Who would buy the day olds?
Who would collect bottles?
Who would clear roadkill?
And who would sling his boots across the power wire?
Wolf!
The moon is one
Big ass white marble tonight
And just look at 'em.
Neon-lit lumps!
Vitamin deficient lugs!
Dunking donuts like a
lady doing her nails.
Coffee and powdered sugar
infused in their beards.
You can hear ‘em if you’re still.
These humanoids
slumped in Coffee Tyme
mutter code
while the city sleeps.
“Cold enough for ya?”
“Leave a lil room for milk, eh?”
It’s a secret language -
part of their brilliantly crafted
take-over of the night.
We’re one step ahead of ‘em this time, though.
We’ve got the place surrounded.
My knees are knockin’,
and what I wouldn't give
to hear Lottie say “Oh, Wolfie!” once again.
Yet, though we’re a-feared,
the Were-Men are coming for you, Night Men.
And it is not your donuts that we seek.
DUSTY ROSE
2018
The beautiful, terrible rule of decay
We bloom like roses only to become dirt
For the thorns to feed on
You and i one day two mounds of dust
Beneath the sod on our front lawn
Food for the worms and briar rose
Our beauty is forgotten by time
Just like our grandmothers before us
Not frozen in amber like the Jurassic bug
Or captured in a flip book
To replay on a loop
But trapped inside a universal wheel
Dying from the day we are born
BIRD WATCHING
2012
At the last of Donna’s six free counselling sessions, Dr. Pat told her that she should consider taking up a hobby. Wikipedia told Donna that Bird Watching or “Birding” is the most popular hobby in the world after walking. Donna hates to walk, so she borrowed “The Sibley Guide to Birds" from the Parkdale Library. Sibley told Donna to make notes on what birds she saw.