Logement à Louer
by Elena Johnson
As I stare across Saint-Urbain at my old apartment, the door beside it opens. My former neighbour emerges, along with an elderly dog who descends the steps slowly and cautiously. That neighbour once rang my doorbell and asked to climb from our balcony over to his. He ended up staying for supper. Since then, the front yard has become unkempt. The neighbour got a dog, and the dog grew old. That’s how long it’s been since I lived on Saint-Urbain.
Elena Johnson is the author of Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra (Gaspereau, 2015), a collection of poems written at a remote ecology research station in the Yukon. She lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada, on unceded Coast Salish territory. She has been a finalist for the CBC Literary Awards and the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, and she was a co-editor of Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House, 2020). The French translation of her book, Notes de terrain pour la toundra alpine (tr. Luba Markovskaia), was published by Jardin de givre in 2021.