Lucy holds down the fort

In which Rachel and Susan come home.

Rachel and Susan, gone for all of
two weeks, now back,
claim the city is changed 
since they left.

Some shift has occurred 
without their supervision;

they are like aunts
bewildered to discover 
that their teenaged niece has taken
her first drink without them.

They are jealous of the patios
they haven't sat on.

They are jealous 
of every new leaf now open.

It was winter when they left.
Unlike more literary cities,
we don't do spring. Our two seasons 
are winter and construction.

Rachel likes the fact 
that we are always fixing something,

but is unimpressed 
that we have waltzed into summer
behind the backs 
of her and Susan.

Now it is fire season.
They are jealous of the way I silence 
my government emergency alarm, as if 
declining a call from a man.

They are jealous of the day
fifteen fires were burning
in the river valley, 
simultaneously, 

the work of spontaneous combustion, 
class warfare, 
eco terrorism, apocalypse, 
coordinated arson? 

Rachel and Susan 
had to watch the videos from another city.

They didn't smell the smoke,
they didn't take the particles into their bodies.

Two weeks later, they mourn 
the destruction of trees. 
They mourn the secondhand knowledge
of what all of this means.

At the end of the world,
Rachel and Susan know where they want to be:

On the patio of the Hotel Macdonald
lighting the fifteenth fire
under the ass of a rich person.
They applaud when I report

that though they couldn't personally attend,
after he extinguished that last fire,
someone lit it again! 
It burned down the slope.

We don't talk about our dry heat
as much as we talk about our dry cold.

Rachel digs into her suitcase 
and points her finger at me. 
For two weeks, it has been incomplete,
this piece of home,

this reverse souvenir snowglobe—
missing the fire, flakes of ash 
in place of snow,
her and Susan on the patios,

and the lifesize cutout 
of our captain McJesus.

Yes, at the end of the world
the Oilers are in the playoffs.

Plucked from the flames,
the cardboard Connor McDavid
has been re-erected, facing traffic, 
at the top of Connors Road.

Not even his luxuriant mustache is singed.
Even Rachel and Susan know
that until McJesus hoists the Stanley Cup,
the world cannot possibly end.

Still, Rachel complains she wasn't aware it was hockey season.
Susan says that has nothing to do with them being gone.