we're in this doctor's office, me and mom, and auntie and cousins and niece. his wife has just had a baby. the baby is a girl, very pretty. his wife looks like daniel pearl's wife. she is happy. the doctor has meant for this to be a kind of welcoming party for the baby, but it is only hours after the birth and the mama is tired. she is laying on the examining table with the baby wrapped up in paper and gauze. one of the party games he wants us to play involves pushing another examining table up against hers, having me lie down next to her and then connecting us with two tubes to exchange fluids. one tube runs from my breast to hers, the other from her womb to mine. he tells me this will assist the baby i'm carrying in my womb to grow properly, and will assist his wife in transfering milk from my breasts to hers, to help her feed her newborn. he demonstrates with a doll, but scares me by injecting poison into the doll. i am shocked that i am pregnant again, since i just had my third child two weeks prior. everyone pats my belly and tells me to get my husband to have a vasectomy; the doctor says he performed his own vasectomy hours ago, shows me diagrams of the procedure. he has a grey and white beard and laughs about everything scary.

the other mama is very tired; he tells us all the party is over and that we should go home. we all get in the elevator and when i look up i see that the building we are in has 400 floors. the elevator has to switch shafts several times during our descent, going sideways at times. sometimes it even drops at an alarming rate, making little sadie (my niece) and i experience weightlessness. we are kind of scared but no one else feels the effects of the elevator free-falling but sadie and i. we arrive safely on the ground. when we step out of the building i find we were actually in my grandparents' old house in ontario.

i get in an old beat-up boat of a car to start driving home. it's a long drive and i'm excited at the prospect of a solo road-trip across the country. i drive for hours and hours and i can see my belly growing. when it starts to touch the steering wheel i realize i am lost. i pull into a gas station that is just about to close. a bunch of little girls who are maybe 8 or 9 are standing outside the glass door waving money at the proprietor and swearing at him for not selling them packages of cigarettes. i decide i need a smoke and knock on the locked door to ask him to sell me some. he shakes his head, thinking i'm going to buy a whole bunch and give them to the girls but i assure him that it's just for me. the girls all look deflated and sad when i tell them to forget it and go home.

he lets me in the booth and he and i start smoking together. he starts in on some diatribe about how it's so much bullshit that pregnant mothers are told to not smoke and drink - back in his day there were big pregnant mother parties in pubs and bars where they all got sloshed and smoked cigars, and look at how he and all his generation turned out...just fine! i am shocked that i can't seem to remember i'm pregnant again, and stub out the smoke and ask him for directions to white rock. he shrugs and gives me a map, but tells me i'm heading in the wrong direction and i'm closer to newfoundland than i am to b.c. i sigh and walk back towards my car, tossing the pack of cigarettes on the highway. the gaggle of 8 year old girls swoop in on it like vultures, picking over the cardboard box and foil wrappers, laughing and lighting up and throwing the garbage at me. i get in the car and drive away.

milk

last night a beautiful young native man was pursuing me. he wooed me with cigarettes and compliments. "young mothers are invaluable, sexy, alluring," he told me. "your body is shining and soft." he showed me an article he was writing, about veganism and the environment.

Rice milk won't solve the world's problems. Indeed, the world would have to break down the industry that already exists, and rebuild and further destroy more wild land to create and maintain the flood plains of giant rice paddies. The paradigm we should be working towards is that of an entirely milk-less society, whether that milk be from cows, goats, rats, soy beans, or rice. once we wean, we need only water as a beverage. All other liquids are food. Chew your milk.

i wanted to fuck him. his face was clear, smooth, the high cheekbones and defined jawline called to me on the basest of levels. he was probably 20, maybe 23. i could feel he wanted me in entirity, not just in body but in soul and mind. i was cruel and played the femme fatale, smoking his cigarettes, highlighting his ideas in my own words, mirroring his enthusiasm for our beach-swept surroundings.

he finally tired of my inability to commit to anything beyond petting, and left, moping, with one of his friends. i never got his name.

when i woke up this morning, i drank my coffee black.

bunny

breasts molded into your grasp
like vanilla plasticine
i moved in tiny gasps
like girls in magazines
i lied and said 'oh just like that'
i'm supposed to, right?
just laid there, splayed there
while you played there
did it every night.

how i learned to stop worrying and love the rock star draft dodgers

i was trying so hard to be a good granddaughter. i bought tickets to see the paul mccartney concert and wanted to take gramma with me. the problem is that she is suffering from dementia and is confused, flustered and frustrated most of the time. she kept forgetting who i was and where i was taking her.

she also likes to sleep until 2 or 3 o'clock in the afternoon most days, so i found myself puttering around the huge old house she was in (never been there before...my imagination must have conjured it up) until she got up. i realized as i looked out the living room window that we were situated across the street from a busy little city park. i could see my mister romping around in the field with the kids, and decided to join them while gramma slept.

playing was fun. we were falling all over ourselves, getting grass-stained knees, tackling each other and gasping into each other's faces, tickling and teasing and being crazy-mad in love. then i heard the planes.

we looked up into the sky to see four or six blue planes come swooping down over the park, spraying everything with some kind of blue misty stuff. i panicked and tried to cover my nose and mouth with my shirt, and keep the kids' noses and mouths covered too. mister was laughing at me, saying they were only spraying the park to combat the scourge of the asian gypsy moth, but i knew better. it was some sort of bio-chemical warfare being waged against us. i started to argue with him, when suddenly the planes proved my point for me, as they turned around, came back, and opened fire on the people in the park.

bodies were being riddled with bullets indiscriminately. little kids, moms in their keds and white shorts, dads carrying frisbees, everyone, falling all over the grass and playground, bleeding and screaming and the sound of gunfire deafening and cruel. i was weeping, thinking about how little my kids had gotten to experience, how i'd never taken gramma to that concert, and now it was going to be all over for us. if we weren't hit with gunfire, we'd be dead in a matter of days from the chemicals they sprayed on us.

mister grabbed julian and began running for the house while i dashed behind him with the baby inside my shirt. she was crying, clawing at my breasts, and no matter how i tried to soothe her with gasping noises of mama-ness, she wouldn't calm down. i was sure that at any moment the planes would come back and claim us as victims. instead, we made it back to house, and just as we slammed the door shut, we heard the first explosion. within miliseconds, the shockwave pushed the glass in the windows inwards, bending, swelling, groaning, but not breaking.

'holy shit,' said my mister, 'they got the oil refinary.'

'we'd better get gramma, and go into the basement,' i said. 'you get some water and food to take down there. i'll keep the kids and gramma with me.'

we split up, and i gathered a confused gramma up out of her bed. she wanted to keep her quilts and pillows around her which made it difficult for me to help her navigate her way down the rickety stairs into the cellar, but we managed.

another explosion nearby rocked the house around us. i heard glass breaking breaking somewhere. my mister never made it to the basement. i tried to not think about it.

you can imagine my surprise when, after i got my gramma and kids snuggled in together, i looked up to see paul mccartney and a huge entourage of his people also hiding in our basement. he looked sheepish.

"hello," he said. "i hope you don't mind, but we were on our way to the stadium when all this happened. we needed somewhere to hide out."

"uh...yeah. no problem," i replied.

he was wearing jeans and a worn-out old black t-shirt that said '103.7 FM'. he didn't look all that old. i wondered where his wife was.

"can i...uh...have your autograph?" i asked.

"least i can do," he said, smiling. he signed an old yellowed crinkly newspaper that he found on the basement floor. as he handed it to me, another explosion caused the house to tremble around us. my kids and gramma all started crying. i hugged paul mccartney and then went to be with them.

we were huddled in two groups, paul's entourage of body guards and personal assistants and friends, me and my demented gramma and weeping kids. some of the body guards tried to keep my kids entertained by making silly faces and folding origami animals out of the labels off of the cans of beans and fruit i had stored down there. i was getting sleepy, when i realized that one of the guys in paul's entourage was lou reed. a huge stone formed in my throat. he was wearing a porkpie hat and big, thick-lensed glasses, and leather vest over a short-sleeved button-up shirt. he looked as though he was getting off on what was happening. every time we heard an explosion, he'd grin.

i knew i was being inappropriate, but i couldn't help myself. i left my kids and gramma again, and wandered over to the rock stars' side of the basement. "you're lou reed," i said.

"yep."

i put my arms around him, and held him for a moment. he put his arms around me, too. when we released each other, i kept my hands on his arms and just stared and stared. i couldn't think of one thing to say. i wanted to talk to him about his album 'songs for drella' and his relationship with andy warhol. i wanted to ask him to have sex with me. i wanted to explain to him how much his music had meant to me over the years. how it had affected me. how it had made me feel joyful, angst-ridden, angry, humorous. none of that came out, though.

"give me something," i said to him, finally. "give me something of yours."

he looked mildly amused. "i don't have anything, really," he said, holding out his hands. "i only brought my smokes and some money and stuff." i kept looking at him, kept my hands on him. finally he started digging around in his pockets. from one of his front jeans pockets he pulled out a mass of paper and money and lint.

"here," he said, handing it to me. "you can have this."

i went back to the corner where my family was huddled and started sorting through the treasures he'd given me. two $20 bills. some reciepts. a soda pop can tab. a carbon copied sheet of something official looking.

it was tom waits' draft notice.