Poems

My sister cries the sea

My sister is crying and crying

her tears grow to salt stormy showers

to rain and to rapids and rivers

they run to the sea to the sea.

My sister sobs softly she knows

Glass Hands: A Eulogy on the Anniversary of the Pandemic

Hands pressed to glass

If —

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, 

Rejected Text for a Tourist Brochure

“I saw my land in the morning

and O but she was fair”

- M.G. Smith, “Jamaica” (1938)

I

Come see my land

Come see my land

New Year’s

If you want to travel run

around the neighbourhood with an empty

suitcase in hand. At least once, full circle.

Wear yellow underwear

for the 31st, lest fortune oversee your cup

Visit from Mother

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

Ten Years and More

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,

One Art

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.

more treaty lines

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”

A Thousand Martyrs

A thousand martyrs I have made,

All sacrific’d to my desire;

A thousand beauties have betray’d,

With the Dying of the Light

I recited to him,

                      Now as I was young and easy,

and in the cough-afflicted wheeze that was left of my father’s voice,

Grief

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;

That only men incredulous of despair,

Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air

Buen Esqueleto

Life is short & I tell this to mis hijas.

Life is short & I show them how to talk

to police without opening the door, how

to leave the social security number blank

diaspora babies

diaspora babies, we

are born of pregnant pauses/spilled

from unwanted wombs/squalling invisible-ink poems/written in the margins

of a map of a place

called No Homeland

The World Is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; —

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

My Brother at 3 A.M.

He sat cross-legged, weeping on the steps

when Mom unlocked and opened the front door.

         O God, he said. O God.

Deto(nation)

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.

Duras (Poverty)

“The link with poverty is there is there in the man's hat, too, for money has got to be brought in, got to be brought in somehow,” M.D., The Lover.

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro

Kept treading — treading — till it seemed

Last Visit

Now I set out across a minefield,

space having taken all I owned, I’m starting over

from a point where every pebble may explode

beneath my shoe and the flowers blaze up

behind my body as I gasp for air,

Hap

If but some vengeful god would call to me

From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,

Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,

from Cross River . Pick Lotus

9

How to describe sea

To someone who’s never seen it?

He lives to ninety-nine, he wants it, to see it

To walk on its glass surface, to blow the seven trumpets.

The Dictator’s Message

The Dictator’s Message

O poets

return,

we have swept

your homeland clean

of thorns and splinters

O writers

return,

to make a record of your works

The Young Poets of Winnipeg

scurried around a classroom papered with poems.

Even the ceiling, pink and orange quilts of phrase...

they introduced one another, perched on a tiny stage

to read their work, blessed their teacher who

The Good-Morrow

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?

But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

When Winter Comes

Rain at Muchalat, rain at Sooke, 

And rain, they say, from Yale to Skeena, 

And the skid-roads blind, and never a look 

Badlands

Your father worked Drumheller while you ate and slept at home. 

He travelled the badlands, squatted below rocks, read books 

Sonoma

He totaled his blue truck — 

slowly spun out on an icy bridge, 

rammed it into a guard rail. 

You knock on the door

Lima Limón :: Madurez

I wear a peineta & pin a mantilla to my hair

I want to be Conchita Piquer warning women

about becoming lemons. The goal: tener alguien

quien me quiera. I want to be my mother singing me

Skins

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

The Men That Don’t Fit In

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

I am — yet what I am none cares or knows;

My friends forsake me like a memory lost:

I am the self-consumer of my woes —

The Days of the Unicorns

 I remember when the unicorns

roved in herds through the meadow

behind the cabin, and how they would

To My Dear and Loving Husband

If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Preludes

I

The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

K was supposed to come with the key, I was

K was supposed to come with the key, I was

to wait outside the gate. I arrived on time,

the time we had agreed on and waited, as agreed,

Family Reunions

The other people quit their stone fields to come here.

They slip in from nights that even the snow abandons.

They leave ashes in their glasses

Prose Poem (“The morning coffee.”)

The morning coffee. I’m not sure why I drink it. Maybe it’s the ritual

of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of

brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the

The Poet

Out of the deep and the dark,

A sparkling mystery, a shape,

Something perfect,