Most of this is coffee and metaphors, and mornings waking up in the dark. When lightning hit the gable, it shook our bed, made the radio short out, left our fingers tingling, and when I asked you to touch my skin I almost thought I’d see sparks, almost thought we’d both be singed.
But others felt it too, the dark cloud above our houses. We were not alone in thinking light had left its traces of ozone where we slept under sheets. That surge of blue light engulfed us like a wick, left us wanting.
Cassidy McFadzean was born in Regina, graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and currently lives in Toronto. She is the author of two books of poetry: Hacker Packer (McClelland & Stewart, 2015), which won two Saskatchewan Book Awards and was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and Drolleries (McClelland & Stewart, 2019), shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. Her poems have appeared in magazines across Canada and the US, and her fiction has appeared in Hobart, carte blanche and PRISM International, where she was runner-up in the Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction. She has been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories, Best Canadian Poetry, In Fine Form 2 and The New Wascana Anthology, and she has been a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize and the Walrus Poetry Prize. She won silver at the 2020 National Magazine Awards for poetry. More: cassidymcfadzean.com
The Living Skies Struck Us Dead appeared in CAROUSEL 32 (2014) — buy it here
