I made this hand-traced long poem by reorganizing letters from a grocery list found in the Sidney Clarke Ells fonds at Library and Archives Canada. Sid Ells (1878-1971), also known as the “father of the tar sands,” was married to Irene Currie. There isn’t much about Irene or their domestic life in the fonds, so it was neat to find this piece of paper, with the list crossed off, in the fonds. The list is in both Irene’s and Sid’s hands, and my uneducated guess from tracing their letters is that Irene was left-handed and Sid was right-handed. This poem haunts, disrupts, queers an archive and critiques the tar sands.