Poems

The limpness of a bird’s legs in flight.

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.

Mariah according to my yt mama

when I try to talk to my mom about what it was like

to grow up surrounded by yt people in the prairies

in the 80s though it seemed like the 50s

she tells me in a so-there tone

I Lost My Talk

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

Poor Speaker

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

Day 62

Unless you believe in the eye of the needle

this kind of poverty will never be about material

it won't be about ragged clothing

or mud huts with broken walls

or river blindness

or murram roads

Tractor

More than a storey high and twice that long,

it looks igneous, the Buhler Versatile 2360,

possessed of the ecology of some …

How One Winter Came in the Lake Region

For weeks and weeks the autumn world stood still,

Clothed in the shadow of a smoky haze;

The fields were dead, the wind had lost its will,

From The Titanic: The Iceberg

Calved from a glacier near Godhaven coast,

It left the fiord for the sea — a host

Of white flotillas gathering in its wake,

71. Song for a Silent Treatment.

I told her, in plain language, how I felt. 

And by that I mean I mumbled a poorly 

paraphrased and…

mixed tape

side a:

1. 18 and Life

her friend takes her to

Homage to the Mineral of the Onion (I)

In the onion, there’s

something of fire. That fire known as

Fog. The onion is the way

On Identity

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 

urban NDNs in the DTES

had a dozen foster parents

                                   tell me to run from my mother’s truth

Glass Hands: A Eulogy on the Anniversary of the Pandemic

Hands pressed to glass

After Betty Goodwin’s The Memory of the Body (1993)

As Whitman sang the body electric

Goodwin sings the body forested:

dense stand of dark-trunked saplings

illumined by a blood-streaked sky,

ominous forest where

abandoned children wander

Homeworld

this is the growing of things birthing of skin

and bone stem     and leaf     this is planet

earth beneath snowlight and desert sand

If Our Bodies Could Rust, We Would Be Falling Apart

the law mandates that a hate crime only be classified as such if there

is ample evidence to show that one’s actions were motivated by

prejudice toward an individual’s nationality, ethnicity, sexuality,

gender, etc.

Portrait of Alice with Elvis

Queen and King, they rule side by side

in golden thrones above the clouds.

Her giggle and wide eyes remind him

Kiwetinohk Ohci

    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.
 

Sometimes I Find Myself Weeping at the Oddest Moment

sometimes I find myself

weeping

at the oddest moment

The Cinnamon Peeler

 If I were a cinnamon peeler

 I would ride your bed

 and leave the yellow bark dust

Black Sheroes

My Black heroes don’t drop names like Fendi Gucci Prada

My Black sheroes rock afros like Angela Davis and Assata

But my sheroes are more than a trend and they’re bigger than a hairstyle

What Do You Believe In?

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

RAINBOW ROCK-CLIMBING CLUB

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 

On High

There was busy air there, air

seething through the leaves so,

from farther up, the tree-line shone

like a single scintillating polyhedron.

Still, though ravens and wrens flaked off the top,

Tide

Would I have seen her?

The tide tugging her gently past

the Comfort Inn; houses, tall and gabled,

FLOOD

The hallway is an empty

riverbed, smooth and barren.

At three o’clock classroom

doors open like dams.

            Gullies of teens stream

out, to become one

Lake Baptiste Ungenders Me

upon contact / head first / baptismal

the rind of me / peels into ribbons

of foam / and pearls / i re-brown at the water’s

touch / its two-way mudmirror / hands me

its own name / earthliquid / bottomless

fluorine

arsenic in calculators, mercury in felt

hats, mad as a poisoned hatter

pyrophoric undercurrent in mundane

niya

Walking with Walt Whitman Through Calgary’s Eastside on a Winter Day

Blue-white afternoon. The Bow river churns and smokes

as the city rumbles, economy chokes and bundled homeless

build cardboard homes in the snow. Yes, Walt, this is the new

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

breakup

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

Mean Drunk Poem

Backward & down into inbetween as Vicki says. Or as Robin teaches

the gap, from which all things emerge. A left

handed…

The Wife

Living, I had no might

To make you hear,

Now, in the inmost night,

Rhizomatic Thinking

We're drinking coffee in January's

bed. It's raining. The harbour

hammers high at Lake Ontario.

What an inconvenience. The end 

times, I mean. Can I unwelcome

the undoing? There's burning beyond

Fast Commute

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

Death of a Young Son by Drowning

He, who navigated with success

the dangerous river of his own birth

once more set forth

I’ll Teach You Cree

with the tip of my spring tongue, ayîki         frog

your mouth will be the web

catching apihkêsis words,                        …

Thou Poem

Thou poem of lost attention and half try,

do you fear more the inner world or outer?

I do…