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It is the story of the falling rain
to turn into a leaf and fall again
it is the secret of a summer shower
to steal the light and hide it in a flower
and every flower a tiny tributary
I understand you.
I get what you’re trying to say.
What you’re trying to say is you want me to get it.
I get it. You want me
to understand. You want me to know
I lost my talk
The talk you took away.
When I was a little girl
At Shubenacadie school.
You snatched it away:
I speak like you
I think like you
I create like you
take the moon
nd take a star
when you don’t
know who you are
paint the picture in your hand
nd roll on home
take my fear
nd take the hunger
take my body
Hello from inside
the albatross
with a windproof lighter
(for the Chinese maroons, British Columbia, 1999–2001)
if you arrive in the belly of a rusting imagination, there are grounds to
outlaw you. but Canada is a remix B-side chorus in the globalization
The place, the question, the question.
The place, the interest, the question.
There is the place.
There is what you do in the place.
There is your belief.
There’s a joke that ends with — huh?
It’s the bomb saying here is your father.
Now here is your father inside
your lungs. Look how lighter
the earth is — afterward.
— say the names say the names
and listen to yourself
an echo in the mountains
Tulameen Tulameen
say them like your soul
was listening and overhearing
and you dreamed you dreamed
In the empty classroom, at sunrise, a girl
sits on the floor, staring at a glockenspiel.
She’s shredding the cuticles on her left hand
Yes, injured Woman! rise, assert thy right!
Woman! too long degraded, scorned, oppressed;
O born to rule in partial Law’s despite,
Praise the rain, the seagull dive
The curl of plant, the raven talk-
Praise the hurt, the house slack
with the tip of my spring tongue, ayîki frog
your mouth will be the web
catching apihkêsis words, spider
Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips, decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.
As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,
You ran naked out the door. The neighbours laughed; I chased you down. I hardly see you anymore.
The calendar marred with birds and you are kik-kik-kik-kicking all the way into June.
180 days scratched with black X’s and crow’s feet: bird-of-two minds (goodandevil
goodandevil);
It is never easy
Walking with an invisible border
Separating my left and right foot
i am writing to tell you
that yes, indeed,
we have noticed
Your father worked Drumheller while you ate and slept at home.
He travelled the badlands, squatted below rocks, read books
Sure, there’s a spell the leaves can make, shuddering,
and in their lying suddenly still again — flat, and still,
like time itself when it seems unexpectedly more
oh papa, to have you drift up, some part of you drift up through
water through
fresh water into the teal plate of sky soaking foothills, papa,
the re-invention of oneself
through the tongues of whispering mountains
the re-arrangement of the universe
Once one gets what one wants
one no longer wants it.
One no longer wants what?
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
I have not lingered in European monasteries
and discovered among the tall grasses tombs of knights
who fell as beautifully as their ballads…
Rain at Muchalat, rain at Sooke,
And rain, they say, from Yale to Skeena,
And the skid-roads blind, and never a look
When I put my finger to the hole they’ve cut for a dimmer switch
in a wall of plaster stiffened with horsehair
it seems I’ve scratched a…
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.
Susie Asado.
More than a storey high and twice that long,
it looks igneous, the Buhler Versatile 2360,
possessed of the ecology of some hellacious
There are things you have words for, things you do not
have words for. There are words that encompass all your
feelings & words that…
If I were to sleep, it would be on an iron bed,
bolted to the floor in a bomb-proof concrete room
with twelve locks on the door.
The sky, lit up like a question or
an applause meter, is beautiful
like everything else today: the leaves
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam
and…
ONE
Late at night in Oklahoma, a very small, an extremely small man ran across the road in front of my friend’s car. He does not doubt this is real, though the rest of us do, and it doesn’…
So I’m an alcoholic Catholic mother-lover
yet there is no sweetish nectar no fuzzed-peach
thing no song sing but in the word
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
Beat! beat! drums! — blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows — through doors — burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
I am the people — the mob — the crowd — the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.
They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw — I could not bring
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
Living, I had no might
To make you hear,
Now, in the inmost night,
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
When I was fair and young, then favor graced me.
Of many was I sought their mistress for to be.
But I did scorn them all and answered them therefore: