March 30, 2025

NEW! A one-minute-play written for the One-Minute-Play competition, Ignite the Arts Festival Penticton, BC.

The Cure, a One-Minute Play (for man and dog)
by Suzanne Steele

Man walks onto stage with dog (Frieda) and gets her to sit. He feeds her cookies and pets her as he talks to her.

Sit Frieda, sit!

Such a good dog Bubs (crunch crunch)
Always there for us ever since you were a tiny pup, and what a pup!

I remember picking you up (crunch crunch),
handed over to me in a parking lot on a cold January evening in Canmore.

Twelve hundred bucks … I never paid for a dog in my life, but Pandemic scarcity boosted prices!

I drove for hours, you settled in on the passenger seat, didn’t make a peep, I drove late into the night all the way back to the coast.  No, not a peep even though you’d just left your litter (crunch crunch)

Brought you home to Mom. Oh Mom was so sick Frieda, dying actually, really, she was dying (crunch crunch) Stage IV blood cancer, took months for proper diagnosis (crunch crunch)

That night I got home, handed you to mom lying there in bed,
she was so thin, so weak, her eyes haunted (shake your head) … (crunch crunch)
When she tried to pet you your sharp little teeth sunk right into Mom’s skinny hands 
and Mom cried.

But soon you settled in, and we took Mom to every appointment. We walked at Spanish Banks before every chemo, and sometimes Mom could only sit in the car and watch us … she was so sick.

You grew and grew. Slept beneath Mom’s bed day and night while she grew thinner and thinner, weaker and weaker (crunch crunch)

Until, miracle, she turned the corner, she began to live.

And some say the chemo killed the cancer
but I know, 100% I know …

the cure was really
you.

A few doodles written during AIR (St Andrews Wesley/Vanc) Brandon Wint’s first workshop on prayer and poetry. I haven’t sat in a workshop setting for years, maybe 17 years, the Banff Writers Studio and that wasn’t a poetry workshop, so this is interesting!

March 17, 2025

For Sam Who Asked

I said, “Sam, emotion is in the vowels,
information is in the consonants … “

but what the hell do I know?

All I have ever done
is pray

that the sun might rise
across the prairies in early May

that the night stars will shift,
sing us across the Milky Way

that my ancestors will teach us
to jig Northern Lights

and that wind flowers, pulsitillas, anemones
will push back black prairie earth

after such a long, heartless winter
that I, we, might inhale deeply,

that maybe, just maybe,
words might come to us all

again.

Jan. 27, 2025

Even Though You Are in Tay-ha

Even though you are in Texas — or Tay-ha
as it should rightly be known

(and hey, such foreignness I’ve yet to meet:
those marching bands

all that swinging all that swerving
chopping up the football field on your step-papa’s t.v. set;

Aggies vrs Longhorns
oh man, those uniforms, ALL that brass!

& Revvie, the collie mascot dragging this year’s handler
across the Tay-ha grass … and girl, is it really grass

I mean does it rain enough in Tay-ha
for it to look so damned green?!!)

Daughter, my grown child, a PhD within your grasp,
sometimes I still check my sweater shoulders

for posset stains, still feel the heat,
the weight of your sleeping head,

and sometimes my feet feel too comfortable
and they long for, no, ache

just one more time to pace
those midnight steps, the midnight floor.

Jan. 20, 2025

1st Anniversary of Her Funeral

Could you in this merciless night
remember with me the gathering,
the water, salt rituals, sweet tea
served-sipped, fine china, the weeping?

In this merciless night, could you
remember with me how we laid her down
to sleep one last time, one last fold,
one last blanket soft imagining of her precious, one life …

O grief, O grief through you in you
I, we, swim against the tide, on such
a merciless night.

Jan. 18,2025

Buying a Teapot Online

Twenty stores at least I tread, hunting for a teapot, something nice:
homestyle stores, tea shops, antique stores, even HBC
(its departments anorexic, starved of what used to be).

Something beautiful, elegant, sound,
I’m forced to trawl websites now.

I had a teapot once, it was lovely, but my ex’s
now-wife, lovely Miss 2.0, took all my good dishes,
my good Henkel knives, my sideboard,
the Art Deco clock … and what the hell,
what woman wants to eat off another’s plates any how?
Oh … wait, she bloodied my sheets too
I suddenly, weirdly, recall.

Who sells china anymore?
Antique shops turn it away at the door,
full sets of china shunned like old wives, wives
abandoned, wives wished dead, the HBC gone,

all those precious plates, tureens, bowls passed
across five generations: fin-de-siecle, the Great War,
Depression, WWII, electricity, t.v. sets, astronauts, internet!

China dragged out at Xmas, Easter, Sunday dinners …
all that gravy, all those mashed potatoes, all those cups of tea,
all that soaking, washing, all that gossiping at the sink …

those years cooking, cleaning,
keeping decades for some man, and never for ourselves,

what a waste of good china, what a fool to love china,
no wonder it’s being thrown out.

Oct. 21, 2024

More doodles written during AIR (St Andrews Wesley/Vanc) Brandon Wint’s first workshop on prayer and poetry. I haven’t sat in a workshop setting for years, maybe 17 years, the Banff Writers Studio, so this is gonna be interesting!

First prompt: What is prayer?

prayer

I walk with the dead

long for them, call them back

generation after generation

of ancestor faces fixed in black

and white photographs, little miracles.

At night, they slip through cracks

in my grandmother’s rolltop desk

where their images are kept,

their chatter, beautiful laughter

returning, seals my sleep at last.

Second prompt: a response to Bringing the Shovel Down by Ross Gay as read by Brandon Wint. I’ve never read Gay’s poetry before & this was def. a challenging albeit exquisite piece. Given the context of
the workshop I received the poem as a confession. The hard part of confessionals is that while they might help the confessor feel better, without absolution they may pass the trauma forward. This, then, might be an absolution?

Confession Upon Hearing Ross Gay’s ‘Bringing the Shovel Down’

I am going to steal the salt of this poem,
then the white birch,
and probably the starlings in sticker bushes.
100%, for sure, I want blue robin eggs…

Darling, for love I will
copy his light breaking over the fields,
yet, too, for you,

I shall forget every last detail
of his testimony, witness,

of his brutal, bruising youth.