Poems

Badlands

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

He travelled the badlands, squatted below rocks, read books 

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

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

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

Shots Rang Out on My Street Today

Boyakka! Boyakka! Boyakka!

Boyakka! Boyakka! Boyakka!

Boyakka! Boyakka! Boyakka!

Shots rang out on my street today

Three Black yoots lay dead

shot inna dem head

Holy Ghost

We had no paper

then, or we had

no pen, or no words. How

to say it. We had

no voice. No listeners.

Just deaf night

dont worry yr hair

              dont worry yr eyes

         dont worry yr brain man th snow is

Low Tide on Grand Pré

The sun goes down, and over all

These barren reaches by the tide

Such unelusive glories fall,

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

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

In Favour of Being Alive

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

For You Shall Be Called to Account

The ancestors of everyone I’ve let into my body

are gathered in a small room with one window,

no lights. Yes, the room is crowded. Yes, there

are no chairs. Yes, they are talking. Why are we

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

At the Centre

Today doves flew from my head

and my hair grew

the longing is gone from my body

Echolalia

Once one gets what one wants

one no longer wants it.

One no longer wants what?

mcPemmican ^TM1

first you get the grease from canola buffalo

then you find mystery meat

you must package this in

Clouds

                                     My father’s green Pontiac

DNA

It is told and retold

of how Kohkum killed a bear with a river rock

an arm like Ronnie Lancaster (that old Saskatchewan Roughrider)

she throws with precision

at Muskwa’s third eye

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.

Harmony with all of you

the task given to me when all

the ice had melted was to

welcome the sky people to

the river and to show them

how to fish and how to

build a fire to warm

themselves.

I moved on and came across

Claim Laid

This is a prayer for the dead and dying - 

and those that may never know a life on the outside

I hope your sins don’t meet you at your grave - 

Livejournal.com/lonelyradio

We could read your words from anywhere

but you felt like the only soul sitting

in your swivel chair listening to your parents

dream-breathing down the hall while you typed

Unspeakable Acts in Cars

It’s the first day of summer and we’re so happy

To see the sun and the satchel of colours it schleps

All those dark kilometres. The sky is so blue

And the sea is blue and the small islands in the sea

Plenty

The sky, lit up like a question or

an applause meter, is beautiful

like everything else today: the leaves

susiya

Insomnia

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.

sturgeon

i twist and gasp

open and close my mouth

searching for air

whenever a sturgeon is caught in the rainy river

i know

the feel of strange hands touching my body

the struggle

to be free

Mama

When the horse picked Mama up by the hair

that time, was she scared? 

There is a photograph of her with this horse

in the brown family album. She stands

beside him, thin in the chilly wind

Family Affair

they say we are a family that is good at death / i make a decision to hold

a seminar on how to live / i schedule this party for my uncles on the first

day of spring / my dead uncles play hooky with the afterlife

400: Coming Home

You are still on the highway and the great light of

noon comes over the asphalt, the gravelled

shoulders. You are on the highway, there is a kind of

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

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

Sometimes a Voice (1)

Sometimes a voice — have you heard this? —

wants not to be voice any longer, wants something

whispering between the words, some

Image-Nation 21 (territory

wandering to the other, wandering

the spiritual realities, skilled in all

ways of contending, he did not search

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,

Ex Libris

I come from the land of

Where You From?

My people dispossessed of their stories

and who have died again and again

in a minstrelsy of afterlives, wakes,

the dead who walk, waiting and

Winter House

My father threw his language overboard,

a bag of kittens, waterlogged mewling:

small hard bodies.

My mother hung on to hers —

Wove the words like lace, an open web

Trillium

the animal in me

is constant.

thirst starts,

hunger answers.

sleep is uncertain,

restless limbs.

in the night,

I hear footsteps.

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…

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