Poems

Exculpatory Lilies

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,

Dear Dolphin

The shaman at Broadway and Main

with a plastic shaker and some sage

says you’re my power animal. Says

we both have big brains, like to chatter.

Please Write a Poetry Book in Syllabics¹

i want to complicate the term sacred, she told me

to make holy

sacerdotal: priestly

sākris: to make a treaty

Boy Remembers in the Field

What if the sun comes out

And the new furrows do not look smeared?

This is April, and the sumach candles

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 

From Verso 4

I was nine and I stood at the top of the street for no reason except to make the descent of the gentle incline toward my house where I lived with everyone and everything in the world, my sisters and my cousins were with me, we had our bookbags…

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.

The Swimmer’s Moment

For everyone

The swimmer's moment at the whirlpool comes,

But many at that moment will not say

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.

How to Tell If a Poem Is Trans or Not

Look directly at the crotch

Gently wave away all

thoughts about how

you never cared about crotches of poems

before this poet

Consider the subject

Dream Jobs

Random Link Clicker.

Royal Bath Taker.

Receiver of Foot Rubs and Praise.

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,

a good day

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

urban NDNs in the DTES

had a dozen foster parents

                                   tell me to run from my mother’s truth

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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

bhater mondo

my mother used to make little rice balls

for me. she steamed and clattered about the 

cramped mustard kitchen, filling a pot with 

water, swelling and salting and songing

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.
 

A Hundred and Fifty Pounds

In some, the luggage lies open

like a mouth mid-sentence.

In others, closed zippers grimace:

What would you have brought?

Slippers, a stuffed platypus, a gold watch

Weed Killer

Our mother gave us a sack of weed killer

the size of a toddler, and told us

to spread it on the front lawn.

My sister and I lugged it there.

A light cloud of white powder

Cowboy Story

The books sit on the shelf, a row of coma patients

in a ward, a series of selves no longer able to learn

and trapped at the point of injury: the last page.

Perennial

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,

Dinosaur Economics

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

Two Words: A Wedding

There are things you have words for, things you do not

have words for. There are words that encompass all your

feelings & words that…

Wishing Well

My fist holds as many coins

as I can carry. All are stamped with the Queen's effigy;

Elizabeth, D.G. Regina, the resident of pockets,

a woman I've never met though I always know

Kay in Summer

Someone waiting in the lobby of a Hotel Imperial amid

the spaciousness tourists and peeling gold leaf

might see it all as too hesitant for truth

Tractor

More than a storey high and twice that long,

it looks igneous, the Buhler Versatile 2360,

possessed of the ecology of some …

The Potato Harvest

A high bare field, brown from the plough, and borne

Aslant from sunset; amber wastes of sky

Washing the ridge; a clamour…

Money

Coin Exhibit, British Museum.

Their misshapenness strikes the table in tiny splashes,

like still-cooling splatters of silver. Stater and shekel,

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…

Clouds

                                     My father’s green Pontiac

Trust Fund Witches

A Thunderstorm

A moment the wild swallows like a flight

Of withered gust-caught leaves, serenely high,

Toss in the windrack up the muttering sky.

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 

Dear Updike

No, nothing much has changed.

A year later, the world is still one you’d recognize —

no winged cars to clog the air,

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

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.

Nuisance

Only the thickness of log

and triple-paned glass

between my children and

the open maw

of a bear.

I slip warm chocolate chip

cookies from the pan

I’ll Teach You Cree

with the tip of my spring tongue, ayîki         frog

your mouth will be the web

catching apihkêsis words,                        …

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