PEOPLE'S CHOICE
SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
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
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.
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
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
Do you speak your language?
I stare — I just said: how are you?
I thought English was my language
apparently it isn’t
I thought Halkomelem was gibberish
the devil’s language
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.
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
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
When I was five I was put on a bus
and sent to Catholic school
not unlike my mother who was five
when she was put on a train
and sent to residential school,
both feeling that gut feeling
There, the bolting black kale,
taller than it has any right to be
and not the twitter troll who asked
if you were on your period.
In the corner, a pile of dead
zucchini leaves, spotted with rot
What's it like at the centre of the AGO?
Hmm. Imagine being coloured, drawn, and placed
in a wooden frame, another hung woman, positioned
just so in the middle of a landscape surrounded by rocks,
Oh, how she read this. Girl
beloved daughter of daughters
I used to liken a poem to praying. Is that right?
Not the woo and gratitude praying served by queer witches.
Childhood praying. As a girl I genuflected to the tabernacle
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
What is this this crossing?
In the photo just in front of the train with the crane at the edge of the drop
brash talk on sidewalk
brethren to irreverence
short teeth long stories
~
aspirations high
rolling tape decks tweeters six
by nine speakers deep
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
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
I threw away your letters.
Years ago, just like that.
The tight black swirls,
circles and strokes
filling fine sheets —
I would not see them again.
The last items I had left.
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
(for the Chinese maroons, British Columbia, 1999–2001)
if you arrive in the belly of a rusting imagination, there are grounds to
outlaw you. but Canada is a remix B-side chorus in the globalization
Would I have seen her?
The tide tugging her gently past
the Comfort Inn; houses, tall and gabled,
Praise the rain, the seagull dive
The curl of plant, the raven talk-
Praise the hurt, the house slack
with the tip of my spring tongue, ayîki frog
your mouth will be the web
catching apihkêsis words, …
He totaled his blue truck —
slowly spun out on an icy bridge,
rammed it into a guard rail.
Where is the word I want?
Groping
in the thicket,
creation stories are lullabies for grown-ups
they remind us of all the possible ways & means
that worlds…
Random Link Clicker.
Royal Bath Taker.
Receiver of Foot Rubs and Praise.
Queen and King, they rule side by side
in golden thrones above the clouds.
Her giggle and wide eyes remind him
you are unaware of your obscure sources
but you are explicitly sure of the vast sea
as your final destination
No, nothing much has changed.
A year later, the world is still one you’d recognize —
no winged cars to clog the air,
In my body flows the blood of Gallic
Bastille stormers and the soft, gentle
ways of Salish/Cree womanhood.
These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
wandering to the other, wandering
the spiritual realities, skilled in all
ways of contending, he did not search
Breathe dust like you breathe wind so strong in your face
little grains of dirt which pock around the cheeks peddling
against a dust-storm…
arsenic in calculators, mercury in felt
hats, mad as a poisoned hatter
pyrophoric undercurrent in mundane
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…
The snake can separate itself
from its shadow, move on ribbons of light,
taste the air, the morning and the evening,
At the beginning I noticed
the huge stones on my path
I knew instinctively
I remember when the unicorns
roved in herds through the meadow
behind the cabin, and how they would
Backward & down into inbetween as Vicki says. Or as Robin teaches
the gap, from which all things emerge. A left
handed…
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are…
There are things you have words for, things you do not
have words for. There are words that encompass all your
feelings & words that…
I was ready for a new experience.
All the old ones had burned out.
They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside
The willows are thinking again about thickness,
slowness, lizard skin on hot rock,
and day by day this imaging transforms them
About me the night moonless wimples the mountains
wraps ocean land …
In the middle of the night Matt would fly to Vancouver so he could take a walk on the sea wall the next day, then go home.
Wouldnt tell anyone, no telephone call, just run a…
