by John Dorroh
Why I am Not a Serial Killer
for Colin Smith, with apologies to Frank O’Hara
I am not a serial killer, I am a poet.
Why? I’m happy with this arrangement but,
being a poet, the question still nags at me.
For instance, Anne and I are driving
back from Nova Scotia after seeing
my dying father. We’re listening
to a true crime podcast: we turn
it on outside Fredericton and listen well
into rural Quebec while we unpack
the fervency of religious belief, the weird
charisma that it affords the believer,
the evangelizing urge, things like that
that we are putting miles behind us
while we wind through fall’s foliage, along
the marshes of the St. Lawrence seaway.
Seven or eight killers in, Anne says, “again
he was raised in an isolating, religious
family with a domineering mother, etc.,
etc.,”
and I think how glad it makes me to be alive,
on the road with my partner, to have
never stashed anyone’s body in a Winnebago.
About an hour outside Quebec City we stop
for gas near Ste.-This-or-That, at a station
that shares a gravel patch with a shuttered motel.
Paying, going to get snacks, there are only
moldering apples and oranges,
tins of expired sardines and haricots.
I think about Norman Bates and the queer-coding
of danger in 1950s Hollywood, and of
an infamous criminal: Anatoly Moskvin,
a Russian grave robber.
I write a line about the cemeteries of Nizhny Novgorod,
another about his elderly parents
who mistook bodies for large dolls;
then we take some selfies by the bank of the seaway,
the Laurentides a blue rising beyond us.
Joel Robert Ferguson is the author of The Lost Cafeteria (Signature Editions, 2020) and holds an MA in English Literature from Concordia University in Montreal. His poetry has appeared in numerous publications including Arc Poetry Magazine, The Columbia Review, The Honest Ulsterman, The Malahat Review, Orbis, and Southword Journal. Having grown up in the Nova Scotian village of Bible Hill, Ferguson now lives in Winnipeg, Treaty 1 Territory, with his partner and their three cats.
Although born a writer, John Dorroh also enjoys art: the first photo-essay he created called “Beauty Confined” included pictures from the zoo in Columbus, MS. And of course, several poems followed to add another layer of depth to the topic. It was an unplanned magic. A lifelong traveler, Dorroh’s poetry has appeared in Selcouth Station, Os Pressan, Feral, Blue Moon Literary & Art Review, River Heron Review, El Portal, and many more.