POETRY: AARON KREUTER

SHIFTING BASELINE SYNDROME
 
A cup of coffee was always a dollar fifty. The fisheries were always at the level of fish they were at when I was a little kid with a little kid's obsession with the ocean. From the windows of an airplane the great lakes were always noosed in four-lane highways. The land was always distributed in neat tight little stamps. There were never any birds here. A moose was always a rare sighting. The bats were always dying. The wilderness was always accessible for the day rate of twelve-fifty a car, and the highly reasonable season rate of a hundred-and-fifteen. Speaking of cars, there were always cars. There were always tailing ponds. There were always spider webs of six-lane highways, eight-lane highways, ten-lane highways. There were always continents. There were always oil spills visible from space. There were always clearcuts the exact shape and size of Kansas. We were always one heartbeat away from cancer. There was always somebody to hate and always a reasonable way to hate them. Our baselines haven't shifted--you have. We were always hemmed in by landfill, our rivers were always flammable, our lakes always figments of our imagination. There was always a view from the airplane window. Always.

"Shifting Baseline Syndrome" originally appeared in Vallum 13.2

Aaron Kreuter is the author of the poetry collection Arguments for Lawn Chairs (Guernica Editions, 2016) and the short story collection You and Me, Belonging (Tightrope Books, 2018), which won the Miramichi Reader's 2019 'The Very Best!' Short Fiction Award and was shortlisted for a Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature. Aaron is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel. He lives in Toronto, Canada, where he is currently writing a novel that takes place at Jewish sleepover camp. Follow him on Twitter @aaronkreuter.