Louise Carson
Evanescent
Pearlescent is today’s word: made-up,
opal-sourced, white-budded.
Thought white, now its progress to palest pink;
rows of teeth clamp on to succulence.
Pearlescence is today’s word’s variant.
Tomorrow, pearlescence past,
from hatched tusks, blood-stained ivory horns,
weird beasts will form.
The plant imagines them.
Louise Carson has recently been published online at Montreal Serai and The Puritan, and in print by The Impressment Gang and The Literary Review of Canada. One of her poems was selected for The Best Canadian Poetry 2013. Her books are A Clearing, poetry; Executor, a mystery; Mermaid Road, a feminist novella; and Rope: A Tale Told in Prose and Verse. With her daughter and a huskador, she lives in rural Quebec where she writes, gardens and teaches music.