PEOPLE'S CHOICE
SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
On TV it looked like a high-speed photo of a milk drop
the dying leader of the Pana Wave laboratory cult smack in the
centre.
Acres of white cloth streamered his followers, who
An eagle egg fell into a farmer’s chicken shed
and when it hatched the farmer gave it chicken feed
even though he was the king of birds. The farmer
clipped the eaglet’s princely beak and raised him
You knock on the door but nobody answers. Cupping your hands around your face you peer through the side-panel of frosted glass. A kettle is whistling, a woman singing as she sets the table. This is a familiar house. You knock again.
Oliver Sacks is going to die,
He tells us blithely in the New York Times.
He’s 81. His liver’s shot.
He’s blind in one eye
Though when both worked fine
I was a kid other kids’
parents gossiped about.
They told their children
what I was: too negative.
I get it. Fair to fear
contagion of bad attitudes,
You’ve changed.
You used to be so
and now you’re all
like, you’ve transformed
I don’t know how to describe
it’s like
you don’t like canasta anymore
you text IN ALL CAPS
my friends, my sweet barbarians,
there is that hunger which is not for food —
but an eye at the navel turns the appetite
Won’t let your bad self.
Let go of your old debt.
Tiring of your old self.
Won’t let your made bed.
Let your bad blood let.
Your grown debt get.
Good Friday, the day they delivered
that sad bouquet, was the day our cat
ran out on the road and failed to look
both ways. I’d stashed the candy eggs
under the sink, in their pink raffia nests,
I am held within these claims: that I have kissed unlucky
things, buried pets, eaten sugar-free ice cream, endured a first
blood test, made friends without benefits, and lost them
The sky was never my court date.
If I died once. If I left the body.
Habeas corpus.
This is not my grave.
The value in a dead woman
My imaginary brother speaks of our migration and history,how time pulses like the green waterin the South Saskatchewan that sputters by our home,success measured in how still he’d lie after wandering
My father’s green Pontiac
It was clearly understood,
there was no ownership of land,
so clearly does the land, in fact, own me.
My water from the river and my nitrogen,
a buffalo protein.
stop at the edge of everything—bend down and stick your hands in the dirt.grab a fist full of soil and pull it close: inhale.
Twenty-four years agoI tried to kill myselfbut with my usual incompetencedid not manage to.
When my husband
lay dying a mountain
a lake three
cities ten years
and more
lay between us:
There were our
sons my wounds
and theirs,
It is told and retold
of how Kohkum killed a bear with a river rock
an arm like Ronnie Lancaster (that old Saskatchewan Roughrider)
she throws with precision
at Muskwa’s third eye
queen of great britain and ireland, by her commissioners the
honourable david laird, of winnipeg, manitoba, indian com
Sunbeams aren’t something I notice.
Mostly it’s my own breasts, bobbing with effort
like I’m a man writing the story of a woman
and the way her nipples strain politely
You sleep on the floor in my room
in the modelling apartment
I share with eight other girls
You open the fridge
to see what we’re eating
Butter Spray, Diet Coke, Jell-O
Do you think we’re clichés
i know she wants me
by her side in sleep. i do not really ask her to stay,
only imply she is invited. i speak
This is a prayer for the dead and dying -
and those that may never know a life on the outside
I hope your sins don’t meet you at your grave -
this is the growing of things birthing of skin
and bone stem and leaf this is planet
earth beneath snowlight and desert sand
the task given to me when all
the ice had melted was to
welcome the sky people to
the river and to show them
how to fish and how to
build a fire to warm
themselves.
I moved on and came across
I have so many now.
There’s one where we were giants, playing with our size by falling over
houses and trees, laughing.
There’s another where I was racing the old ones in a game, and we stopped
it’s hard to feel power from my ancestors when i don’t know
who they are,
where they come from,
what their stories are
we share blood
blood shares memory
what a glory feeling it is to sit in the sun by the oceanside
as tulugait and naujait sing circling above
and scrape skins with centuries of arnait guiding my ulu
first you get the grease from canola buffalo
then you find mystery meat
you must package this in
Boyakka! Boyakka! Boyakka!
Shots rang out on my street today
Three Black yoots lay dead
shot inna dem head
commencing to the place of beginning;
emptying;
in 1959 the South Saskatchewan river was dammed;
forever altering the boundary of Treaty no. 6;
1790 → treaty 2, district of Hesse (step into wolf)
province of quebec
“We do herby certify that the following goods were delivered to the
several Nations”
I
some towers are made of cladding
some made of ivory
some burn in the night
some built by slaves
wind rushes through coarse hair
Do you believe in the ghosts of aunties and uncles that drive old sin-
gle-bench pickup trucks spotted with bullet-hole rust, sweetgrass and
It takes eight matches, a burnt thumb, and a quick Google search
to light the sweetgrass braid Mom scored for me from an elder
at work. Always use matches, she said. Spirit likes matches.
Do you speak your language?
I stare — I just said: how are you?
I thought English was my language
apparently it isn’t
I thought Halkomelem was gibberish
the devil’s language
…
i wanted bitumen to be made of dead dinosaurs. why did i want these
ancient kin to be passively implicated in the fossil fuel industry? it
on the day the chief of kâ-awâsis announces they have confirmed 751
bodies in unmarked graves outside the residential “school” in their
community, i google things like:
For thirty-one years, my mother tried not to miss her. Every week,
a little water or the trickle of a few ice cubes
dropped
in black earth. Years back, in the muck of Toronto, April,
When the horse picked Mama up by the hair
that time, was she scared?
There is a photograph of her with this horse
in the brown family album. She stands
beside him, thin in the chilly wind
my mother found herself one late summer
afternoon lying in grass under the wild
yellow plum tree jewelled with sunlight
she was forgotten there in spring picking
rhubarb for pie & the children home from
I am Charles Darwin. I eat owlflesh at Cambridge University.
I have discovered something, an entirely new species
with tropical fever in its reptile fingers. I am busy
with taxonomying its most peculiar and three-sided
You wouldn’t fit in your coffin
but to me it was no surprise.
All your life you had never fit in
anywhere; you saw no reason to
begin fitting in now.
When I was little I remember
I’m a gecko on a wall
that simulates a cliff
with rainbow grips
I’ll touch any colour
that’ll have me
midway is high enough
wary of emotional
i want to complicate the term sacred, she told me
to make holy
sacerdotal: priestly
sākris: to make a treaty
a girl between two dialects
still a screen and still a searching, learns
the season of breakup
another word for spring
can come before or after
depending on where you grew up
online, back and forth
it was very sad the day we heard that dad would die but it was
also fun because all my friends came over and we went driving
in the blue Toyota that kelly’s sister terry drove
and i was the center of attention
The meteorologists are pleading with us
to keep checking back through the storm,
ice pellets making a carpet two, three inches thick,
this pale beach we walk on, this wind that passed
The sludge-slow flow of the visible current
opens a path we can’t continue, tugs
at what no hand can pull along.
It’s how even water loses memory,
travels a direction it cannot find,
