Threshold by Heather Saluti
Heather Saluti is a visual artist, writer, expressive arts practitioner, and grief-worker. Their poems have appeared in Canthius, Beyond the Veil Press, CV2 and others. They live with their partner and three cats Burt, Etta, and Babydoll on the unceded ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, & Tsleil-Waututh peoples or what is colonially known as Burnaby, British Columbia.
Author Foreword:
The inspiration for the poem ‘threshold’ comes from housing precarities. My family currently lives in an area that has been completely rezoned except for single-dwelling houses. We are surrounded by luxury highrises and pits that once held affordable low-rise apartments. The room I write in looks out to a giant clearing that formerly housed our neighbours and it now advertises the future site of a luxury wellness residency. While we wait to be evicted from our home, our rent costs and costs of living have increased substantially despite no ongoing maintenance or upkeep of the building. In the words of artist Marena Skinner, “Housing should not be a luxury. Landlord is not a real job.”
threshold
landlords, with their insatiable thirst for pestilence
knock at our door. we hold
our doors shut to protect our bodies like duvets filled with discretion,
plucked to shield intrusive eyes from our rarity
treasures of framed occasions
that reveal how to be
human.
landlords, barely masking their horntails
hide behind re-used plasticity
far away from the written word their evasion suplexes
our lived experience.
they offer us small distractions
— synthetic upgrade promises
already broken, pest
traps too small to slaughter
salivating developers
a green organics bin to store
banana peels & our renoviction fear
when will they wave
over their hats, make
our housing
mulch?
