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Two Poems: The Door at the End of Everything
Lynda Monahan wrote her new collection The Door at the End of Everything (Shadowpaw Press) while hospital writer-in-residence at the Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert. Frequently, she was stationed on the youth and adult mental health wards, and this collection honours the strength and courage of those living with mental illness. Read “closet space” and “just something to remember” from the collection below.
Two Poems from The Door at the End of Everything
by Lynda Monahan
thirty years of your brother’s life
hanging in a cedar-lined closet
under the back stairs
Judith Krause, “A History of Shirts”
closet space
brother I don’t go looking anymore
in the dark closets of memory
don’t go digging through those musty boxes
for the moth-eaten remains
of all the old sad stories
I’ll never rid myself of those memories
won’t drop them off
at the Salvation Army back door
leave them there
with the chipped cups
and broken kitchen clocks
I’ve stored them away
in the back reaches of my heart
where they don’t take up all the space
they once did those years
when the loss of you would not let go
and I refused to put anything
of you away
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just something to remember
sharing a bag of store-bought cookies
on a winter Wednesday morning
with a handful of guys
at the drop-in center
isn’t a poem
even though they dig into those cookies
like it was their last meal
even though there is a ritual to it
Ian sitting next to me
always the one to open the Peak Freans or Oreos
even though this place
is the very heart of life
to every one of them
and it’s home in the sense that
here they can grab a cup of coffee or a nap
and it’s where they feel cared for
when life is just too difficult
and they’ve lost who it is
they’re supposed to be
this couldn’t be poetry
even though they caught the bus to be here
on this frigid morning
stamping their frozen feet
in rundown running shoes
that do nothing to keep out the cold
poetry? no
just something to remember
when you feel life isn’t adding up
the way love can sometimes exactly equal
a bag of store bought cookies
shared among friends
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Lynda Monahan, author of The Door at the End of Everything, is also the author of three other collections of poetry, A Slow Dance in the Flames (Coteau Books, 1998), What My Body Knows (Coteau Books, 2003), and Verge (Guernica Editions, 2015), and a cowritten collection, A Beautiful Stone: poems and ululations (Radiant Press 2019). She facilitates a number of creative writing workshops and has been writer-in-residence at St. Peter’s College facilitated retreat, Balfour Collegiate in Regina, and the Prince Albert Public Library, and writer-on-the-wards at Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert. She is editor of several books, including Second Chances: stories of brain injury survivors, Skating in the Exit Light, a poetry anthology, and With Just One Reach of Hands, an anthology of the writing of the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Writing For Your Life group, which she also facilitates. She has served on the council for the League of Canadian Poets, the Sage Hill Writing Experience, and the Saskatchewan Writers Guild. She recently completed a year as lead artist for an Artists in Communities project through the Sask Arts Board, mentoring local artists to develop long-term community arts programming.
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