Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Four
November- December 2025
Knowing, poems by Carolyne Van Der Meer.
Knowing
What do we know when we’re born that we don’t know when we
die It’s what comes to mind as I help my mother navigate her small
apartment a trip to the bathroom with tender broken ribs
Between the critical remarks that exit her lips and the gratitude
for the help of a visiting daughter she tells me she wants to die
that life is too long that the music is too fast that everything hurts
not just the fractured bones When we’re born the world is a place of
awe everything new and wondrous our parents perfect doting
We know certain things intrinsically until experience tells us otherwise
that our parents are flawed that our husbands have the power to break
us our children too that our minds might give out before our bodies
Her own mother died young from pancreatic cancer after her father
knocked her up some fifteen times miscarriage after miscarriage
Her husband philanderer extraordinaire left her bereft at fifty
after thirty years of (too) blind faith Once the blinkers were off she
made her way slowly towards the broken ribs the clouded-over
eyes the unsure steps to the toilet squeezing my hand repeatedly
as if constantly assuring herself that I am still there She doesn’t
wish she’d never been born she just wishes that what she knew in
those first days was still true
The Vintage Rolex Knock-Off
at Stanley Bridge, PEI
My husband is a watch enthusiast knows a
face when he sees one I show him the
knock-off with the jubilee bracelet sitting
on the counter where the two owners older
and grey-haired chat with a gaggle of young
men probably relatives he laughs says it’s
likely an eighties replica almost mint no
scratches on the face keeping excellent time
I place it back on the case and one owner tells
me it’s fifteen dollars keeps better time than her
own She starts to tell me about the quest for
jewelry to sell here her partner joining in with
stories about a vintage crystal stone set in silver
purchased by a young man as his girlfriend
combed the shelves for treasures they left
his package well hidden moments later she
rushed back in ear-to-ear grin I said yes!
A story told with such authenticity I said yes to
the watch paid my fifteen dollars and wear it
despite its cheapness for the way it captures
the memory of connection at Stanley Bridge
locks in the hope of that couple still together
When Your Hairdresser
Tells You How It Is
She presses my hair down on strips of aluminum foil
paints on bleach tells me stories family matters
marital issues ageing mothers struggling friends
all with her pragmatic approach no mincing of words
old-world Italian tradition of telling it how it is
Of a friend who has become increasingly unhinged
she says Si perde dentro un bicchiere di Aqua!
She’d lose herself in a glass of water
singsong voice and Oh that’s an old Italian expression
hard to explain but to me it’s perfectly clear
imagine the perfect panic as I try to get my
bearings in the narrow glass up down across
none of it far or wide yet I cannot see my way clear
We’re all hanging on for dear life our kids leave
us with empty nests our parents depart our marriages
traverse these losses gone for good
I want to put my foot down on the bottom of the glass
hoist myself up on the rim but instead feel the swirl
the churning the rush of water as Stella takes me back
to another time bleaching my hair to the colour of
young sunlight
© Carolyne Van Der Meer
Carolyne Van Der Meer lives and writes in Montreal, Canada. She has five published books, including Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime Experience (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014), and the poetry collections Sensorial (Inanna, 2022) and All This As I Stand By (Ekstasis Editions, 2024). Two chapbooks have been released in 2025: Birdology, published by Cactus Press; and Sincerely, Sincerely, co-written with Rayanne Haines, and published by Agatha Press. She is currently working on a book of linked fictional vignettes.