Foreign Travel

Our bodies now are foreign lands
we never cared to visit.
Doctors find strange things
that may or may not spell trouble
and carve their names on our insides
like young couples leaving traces
of their love on trees they may need
to burn later. We watch people falling
away some early some late some right
on time, and wonder what our expiry date
might be. Until then we keep getting up,
getting dressed brushing our teeth,
what’s left of our hair, all of us
checking the mirror until we look
good enough. The hearing may be going
but we can still see.

Waltzing at 95

She is sore almost all the time
but she won’t spend the day moaning
about it.

Nobody wants to hear it,

she tells the other old people
when they complain about
their illnesses, their pains.

Make a friend of it—
if you can. The ache.

Take it dancing.

Some neighbours stop talking
to her after that —
avoid her as she hums, taking her arthritis,
her swollen legs, her varicose veins,
her failing hearing
for twice-daily waltzes
through the communal kitchen,
down their shared hall.

Christine Harapiak is a poet and playwright obsessed with discovering mythic echoes in the everyday. She spent time as a patient in 2026, walking out of a week of surgical standby for a fractured elbow with the long poem Nobody’s Patient which was almost worth the trouble. Her poetry appears in The Letter Review, San Miguel Journal, Mantis, 1922 Review and elsewhere. Harapiak lives in Dauphin, Manitoba. She is completing her first book of poetry Take the Long Way Home: A Prairie Mythology.