PEOPLE'S CHOICE
SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
I wear a peineta & pin a mantilla to my hair
I want to be Conchita Piquer warning women
about becoming lemons. The goal: tener alguien
quien me quiera. I want to be my mother singing me
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
Only the beginning is true.
There was an island
and an orphanage
and a boy.
There was a train and a country
to cross.
A view from two sides of Polaris, it is said:
I've dreamt of you so often that you become unreal.
Is there still time to reach this living body and to kiss on its mouth the birth of
the voice so dear to me?
We’re all aware that human hair is dead
Yet we spend thousands taking care of it.
It’s like an endless funeral.
The moment your hair hits air, it’s toast.
It only lives inside the follicle.
When Daniel Harris stepped out of his car
the policeman was waiting. Gun raised.
I use the past tense though this is irrelevant
in Daniel's language, which is sign.
No one else rescued me. Not my father
or my brother or, years later, the gentle man
who became my husband. Not my mother
or my best friend or any of the women
who listened to me tell my story
You can't be an NDN person in today's world
and write a nature poem. I swore to myself I would never write a nature
poem. Let's be clear, I hate nature — hate its guts
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
Here's how you make pemmican
1. wiyâs
2. pânisâwân
3. kâhkêwak
4. yîwahikanak
5. pimîhkân
Slim, slight. Sinew and bird bones.
Cords of her hands like spruce roots.
Came from Ship Cove to Crow Gulch
with little more than the child inside her,
landed in a small shack flanked by
After learning “me” and “I”
but well before my father learns
a restraining order's
between him and our home,
we share some good times.
Remember the back of his bicycle.
He wakes up naked and drunk as a bear
on sun-fermented garbage.
Hungover and queasy and riled up by
bees.
Nothing going well today, he moans,
life being short and the craft, ah, long.
Out of their torments men carved a flower
which they perched on the high plateaus of their faces
Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
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…
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
power lines held by birds
of prey the hostile expanse above
ditches teeming floral invasive
wayside fleurs
late summer the shoulder sang
holds breeze by
the spirit of
your flowers is
my favourite shelter
The 31st day of August 1914
I left Deauville a little before midnight
In Rouveyre’s little car
He sat cross-legged, weeping on the steps
when Mom unlocked and opened the front door.
O God, he said. O God.
i ask mama
about residential school
she says no
i ask her again
the third time
i stop listen
to her silence
for M. Maylor
Dear Anne Carson:
My friend read me the poem where your mom
said that the dead walk backwards.
You thought this myth arose from poor translation.
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
I recited to him,
Now as I was young and easy,
and in the cough-afflicted wheeze that was left of my father’s voice,
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
We are losing the intensive care unit waiting room war
We were doing so well
So well we got sleepy
Should lanterns shine, the holy face,
Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,
Would wither up, an any boy of love
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
In my dream my mother comes with me.
We are in the meadows we call
The Flats, walking the dogs.
Walk straight past the water trough,
she says, do not engage the moss.
Please read all the instructions carefully before proceeding.
Use only permanent blue or black ink.
If you have special needs that require accommodation,
please explain.
During two hours on the train
I rerun the film of my life
Two minutes per year on average
Half an hour for childhood
Another half-hour for prison
Love, books, wandering
take up the rest
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.
You’d have to pay us
Could you pay us enough
To live for a stretch
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.
There’s a joke that ends with — huh?
It’s the bomb saying here is your father.
Now here is your father inside
your lungs. Look how lighter
the earth is — afterward.
— 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
This is our welfare half
a duplex with mint green
siding shrugged between
An ars poetica
I remember the death, in Russia,
of postage stamps
I have a picture of us when we are seven
but we aren’t in it. At the time it was taken
we thought we were. We posed with our wide
1
an urban image from the eighties
when we hung out at Chez Madame Arthur
You ran naked out the door. The neighbours laughed; I chased you down. I hardly see you anymore.
Wheat daughter, prisoner of sneaky pigweed, mother
to the five corners of the world and your three hectares,
beak-nosed carpenter’s wife and the potter’s lover,
We were combatants from the start. Our dad
Bought us boxing gloves when we were ten —
Champions like Euryalus, say, or Epeius
Where is the word I want?
Groping
in the thicket,
If this brain’s over-tempered
consider that the fire was want
and the hammers were fists.
