Poems

Wow! You’ve Changed

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

From Injun

a)

he played injun in gods country

where boys proved themselves clean

dumb beasts who could cut fire

out of the whitest sand

he played english across the trail

Jacknife/2

Each day, I am apprenticed to the boy

I want to be.

He rifles the ball

and I catch it

or I fumble.

His red head ducks and weaves,

thinking, end zone.

Bad Brown Girl

i can barely speak in my mother tongues stutter

my accent is bad

i hate jalebi

but i like aloo samosa

i'm a bad brown

girl i didn't join the

SAA or the ISA

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”

Wolf Lake

It was down that road he brought me, still

in the trunk of his car. I won’t say it felt right,

but it did feel expected. The way you…

How She Read

Oh, how she read this. Girl

beloved daughter of daughters

Filament

Always that spectral fragment. Filament of line cast back there.

Where open-mouthed fish rise to gulp down shiny lures.

I sang once in an auditorium to almost empty rows.

From Silvija

If you can’t speak / write in a fissured / alter-language

Of nerve-matter / dura mater / orbit of the central axis

By a crevice / scattered / venous lacunae / lamina code

Hotel Centrale, Rotterdam

I am awake between stiff

sheets tonight in room thirty

four, listening to the heat

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

In Favour of Being Alive

    Twenty-four years ago
I tried to kill myself
but with my usual incompetence
did not manage to.

On Seeing a Photograph of My Mother at St. Joseph Residential School for Girls

A black and white picture

The sun is shining through a window behind you

Your hair black short Your small brown hands folded neatly on a tiny wooden desk

susiya

St John’s Burns Down for the Umpteenth Time

Let’s say the fix was in. Let’s say history,
Being human and thus short on ideas,
Made change from an old bag of tricks. Say this

Interesting People of Newfoundland

Newfoundland is, or was, full of interesting people.

Like Larry, who would make a fool of himself on street corners

for a nickel. There…

niya

Sonnet VII from ‘Sonnets Written in the Orillia Woods’

Packing for the Future: Instructions

Take the thickest socks.

Wherever you're going

you'll have to walk.

There may be water.

There may be stones.

There may be high places

you cannot go without

From Summer Grass

The willows are thinking again about thickness,

slowness, lizard skin on hot rock,

and day by day this imaging transforms them

Tide

Would I have seen her?

The tide tugging her gently past

the Comfort Inn; houses, tall and gabled,

First Time Smudge

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. 

mcPemmican ^TM1

first you get the grease from canola buffalo

then you find mystery meat

you must package this in

mixed tape

side a:

1. 18 and Life

her friend takes her to

Image-Nation 21 (territory

wandering to the other, wandering

the spiritual realities, skilled in all

ways of contending, he did not search

The Dark Stag

A startled stag, the blue-grey Night,

Leaps down beyond black pines.

Behind — a length of yellow light —

First Things

This doesn't have to go in order;

that's the first thing.

I looked inside

an egg,

poked and blown

pristine, made clean

by the passing of its own slime. Inside

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,

I have so many now.

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

my mother found herself

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

The Plot

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.

Père Lalement

I lift the Lord on high,

Under the murmuring hemlock boughs, and see

The small birds of the forest lingering by

The Cactus

You sit in the forgotten bone-dry hills

surrounded by sand and sagebrush

above Buffalo Pound Lake.

A day and a night, and then

three more days and nights.

Love is a Moontime Teaching

love is a moontime teaching

is your kookum’s crooked smile when you pick up the phone

is another word for body

body is another word for campfire smoke

campfire smoke is the smell he leaves behind in your bed sheets

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,

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 

A Stone Diary

At the beginning I noticed

the huge stones on my path

I knew instinctively

From Chapter I

Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink

this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism,

disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks — impish

Death of a Young Son by Drowning

He, who navigated with success

the dangerous river of his own birth

once more set forth

Blank Sonnet

      The air smells of rhubarb, occasional

Roses, or first birth of blossoms, a fresh,

Undulant hurt, so body snaps…