My sister shot herself dead the last time crude prices guttered. 

Estevan winters are Solzhenitsynian in breadth, 

and it turns out the distance from El Dorado to gulag 

can be mapped on a paystub. 

She got a hot-pink camo rifle that year for a Christmas gift 

and chose the basement laundry room 

I guess as a courtesy: you can hose-off the concrete, 

there’s drainage down there. 

She expired among Tide Pods, 

Roughriders Pajamas, 

immaculate blue coveralls X’d luminescent. 

As nightmares go it’s not an uncommon one. 

‍

I have sometimes sensed an obscure significance 

to the fact my irish-twin hung-the-moon sister– 

who I once watched coo a pigeon in her arms, 

then lift it clear into the Adriatic-air 

above the Gabriola ferry like a peace dove 

–exited this earth below the frostline, 

below the snow-scabbed fields, 

the moaning beggared pump-jacks, 

the wheat stubble standing out ragged in the thaw like a model golgotha:

the rotting augurs of Spring.