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"Everybody Knows" & "Fatal Flaws" by Richard-Yves Sitoski



Everybody Knows


In childhood father said I was indelicate, 

clumsy, straw bristles for digits and feet like oil drums. 

About these things he was never wrong.  

Yes, I’m a homewrecker.

That is, measure once, cut twice. 

Patience left in the pocket of my other jeans.

But I persist, inserting crooked planks

in the gap-toothed decking, smearing caulk

on the surgical backsplash, twisting backwards

the marrettes of ceiling lamps to throw 

some 60 flickering Watts into cobwebby corners 

of a marriage. I’m trusted not to burn us down 

and I don’t know why. On the ladder 

as I curse in French I can’t believe

I’d risk us all before I’d call an electrician,

one who’d rob us blind for a job a chimp could do.

Me, whose greatest fear is burning alive.

So much that I’ve never used the sun

in a poem, leery of metaphors around 

an H-bomb the source of all creation,

a thing which blinds us into silence

so that only lesser lights are speakable:

candles, coals in a wood stove, fridge bulbs.

Illumination that makes the things I can relate to.

Like a welder’s torch and rod, 

fusing means toward an end in white hot lust.

Or the crackle of socks removed 

in the dark: little blue gods deserting 

dad’s drunken feet before the heft of his head 

could topple him—the room as quiet 

as a clearing once a blaze 

has claimed a forest at the speed of gossip.



Fatal Flaws


I’m plummeting as we speak, 

a cherub bucked from a thunderhead 

before I fledged. 


I won’t land at mother’s feet, 

she who gave so much

that what remained cast no shadow.


I will splatter the shoes 

of the man she married, 

who built a house 


on a pillow too small for joy. 

From him I learned to treat the world 

like a G.I.’s chocolate ration, 


as last-ditch energy or currency for sex. 

He taught me that if kindness 

hugs a man beside his sons 


it must be picking his pockets. 

I was due to meet him

at the place where children say 


of the quivering aspen, 

Look dad! 

That tree ate the wind and now it’s full! 


but he was too busy 

dying so slowly 

it looked like natural causes. 


I missed his end because hamartia 

is not a flaw 

but a missing of the mark.


I never heard his final words, 

which were to wait 

till he was gone


before I burned him, 

before I cast him to the lake 

and buried him in water.




Performance poet and songwriter Richard-Yves Sitoski is the 2019-23 poet laureate of the city of Owen Sound, Ontario, on the territory of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation. He has given performances in industrial ruins, has read poems to earth worms, and has written verse on snow with biodegradable food dye. He's got poems in Arc, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire and elsewhere. His most recent works are the chapbook How to Be Human (Bywords.ca, 2022), and his Don Gutteridge Award-winning full-length collection Wait, What? (Wet Ink Books, 2023). He is co-editor, with Penn Kemp, of Poems in Response to Peril: An Anthology in Support of Ukraine (Pendas Productions/Laughing Raven Press, 2022), profits from which went to assist displaced Ukrainian cultural workers. 

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