SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
queen of great britain and ireland, by her commissioners the
honourable david laird, of winnipeg, manitoba, indian com
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
commencing to the place of beginning;
emptying;
in 1959 the South Saskatchewan river was dammed;
forever altering the boundary of Treaty no. 6;
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”
I
some towers are made of cladding
some made of ivory
some burn in the night
some built by slaves
wind rushes through coarse hair
What struck me first was the sheer numbers, queers everywhere.
Battalions of sailors and infantry, proud in their uniforms.
Eventually, I made uneasy peace with this equal right.
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
I am Charles Darwin. I eat owlflesh at Cambridge University.
I have discovered something, an entirely new species
with tropical fever in its reptile fingers. I am busy
with taxonomying its most peculiar and three-sided
You are light
when the sun is punched out
and darkness reigns.
You are the antidote
to what came before:
black blood, black heart,
hands tied, kneeling before
a ditch of human bones.
I.
It’s the season of wine, meadows, and Rose
The court of spring is cleared of choughs and crows
Generous clouds now water Rey[1] more freely than Khotan[2]
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
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
Unknown to you, I walk the cheerless shore.
The cutting blast, the hurl of biting brine
May freeze, and still, and bind the waves at war,
Ere you will ever know, O! Heart of mine,
people arrived from portugal. people arrived from africa. people arrived from
india. people arrived from england. people arrived from china. people
Out of their torments men carved a flower
which they perched on the high plateaus of their faces
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
The 31st day of August 1914
I left Deauville a little before midnight
In Rouveyre’s little car
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
this is the transsensorium
there are indo-robo-women fighting cowboys on the frontier
& winning finally
the premodern is a foundation for the postmodern
wintermute, tessier-ashpool, armitage
Whereas my eyes land on the shoreline of “the arrival of Europeans in North America
opened a new chapter in the history of Native Peoples.” Because in others, I hate the act
My Black heroes don’t drop names like Fendi Gucchi 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
for Alton Sterling, Andrew Loku, Philando Castile, et al.
I wanna live, son. But which son are you?
There where the rivers are made
of moonshine and the lights still wait,
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
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
(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
— say the names say the names
and listen to yourself
an echo in the mountains
Tulameen Tulameen
say them like your soul
was listening and overhearing
and you dreamed you dreamed
An ars poetica
I remember the death, in Russia,
of postage stamps
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
Who is this black coat and tie?
Christian severity etched in the lines
he draws from his mouth. Clearly a noble man
who believes in work and mission. See
how he rises from the red velvet chair,
I am awake between stiff
sheets tonight in room thirty
four, listening to the heat
Down a long, long corridor
I keep walking…
—A window straight ahead so bright it hurts the eyes,
Entirely windless, today’s sea; of these waters’ many names
the best seemed “field-of-pearl-leaves,” for it smelled like the air
in the house he built entirely of doors: pink school door,
If this brain’s over-tempered
consider that the fire was want
and the hammers were fists.
i am writing to tell you
that yes, indeed,
we have noticed
Dear Regret, my leaning this morning, my leather foot, want of
…
Sometimes we are led through the doorway
by a child, sometimes
by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing
60s pulled us from starvation into government jobs
antiquated Indians in Saskatchewan danced for rain
Manitoba Indian doings were hidden for a jealous
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
In my body flows the blood of Gallic
Bastille stormers and the soft, gentle
ways of Salish/Cree womanhood.
wandering to the other, wandering
the spiritual realities, skilled in all
ways of contending, he did not search
Calved from a glacier near Godhaven coast,
It left the fiord for the sea — a host
Of white flotillas gathering in its wake,
At the beginning I noticed
the huge stones on my path
I knew instinctively
More than a storey high and twice that long,
it looks igneous, the Buhler Versatile 2360,
possessed of the ecology of some …
a glass tube
for my leg says Hugo Ball
my hat a cylinder
All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
Sent to the ice after white coats,
rough outfit slung on coiled rope belts,
they stooped to the slaughter: gaffed pups,
I was ready for a new experience.
All the old ones had burned out.
They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
