Leah MacLean-Evans: Three Poems
The Fifth Day of Spring
For spring
my pixel friends stand by the lake
painting, and I click for fish.
There’s a turnip in my rucksack,
tiny pink petals in the upper-right
screen, the season an icon.
My livestock freshly pastured, pigs
pulling up too-early truffles.
I named the pigs for candy,
Taffy, Nougat, Ribbon.
I make the truffles into oil
to sell so my painter wife
will offer to adopt brown-haired sprites,
one girl one boy so binary.
I put a turnip in my rucksack
for them.
Bluebirds on the Farm
They say you can’t use fifty-two
pieces of driftwood
to make a redhead fall in love with you.
I guess I did throw in the goat cheese,
aged in my basement, with milk
milked from my barnyard goat,
milked with a click
of my own bare cursor.
We made beautiful pixel babies
named for ourselves, for our friend
who dreams of making his motorbike
fly in starlight.
I nearly married him but Red
seemed happier in my home, nurturing
invisible seeds into staminous fruit.
Our babies wear onesies and never walk
only run, holding the shift key.
The Henhouse
There are always secrets in small towns.
The wizard misses his ex who cursed my henhouse,
the black egg laid heavy on the incubator
straw, broke open with a wyrm-tailed chick
slick with mucus and albumen.
The caverns are full of slime beasts, and the wizard
taught me to raise them on my land.
It takes a hutch of laid stones, black as the cavern walls.
Their slime carcasses are useful
in the making of machines, of premium tools.
I keep the chickens away, double-fenced
across the farm, remember the wyrm-chick’s
slick exit, the way it turned,
devoured its egg’s slimy whites,
that sharp beak snap.
Leah MacLean-Evans is a writer in Ottawa. Her work has appeared in Qwerty, untethered, ottawater, On Spec Magazine, and elsewhere. She was the 2017 fiction winner of the Blodwyn Memorial Prize and the 2018 winner of the League of Canadian Poets’ National Broadsheet contest. She has an MFA in Writing from the University of Saskatchewan and is the proofreader of Grain.
Follow Leah on twitter @penanddragon and visit her website: www.macleanevans.ca.