Two Poems by Lisa Baird

Permission

The stinging nettle patch behind the house 
greens up earlier than roadside or river 

nettle. A romantic gesture from a partner 
who planted them for me even though 

he doesn’t like the sting, wears thick gloves 
to gather them for tea, gets nervous in late 

summer when the entire nettle patch leans out 
tall and heavy over the walkway. But that comes 

later. This morning they were barely four inches. 
Urtica dioica. Little poem of a name: burn of two 

houses. I finally looked up the pronunciation. 
Dye-OH-ick-a. Hot ancient hum on my bare 

hands at harvesting, taught me to ask 
permission. May I take some? May I take more? 

Thank you. Keeper of the good fire, green-
arrowed signature written into wet earth,

each year since moving back I’ve said This might 
be the most beautiful spring yet and I said it 

again this May, and meant it, despite everything, 
despite it being the first spring I’d rubbed nettle 

on my skin, seeking the sting — May I? — just 
to feel something. 

Echolocation

I say hello in the parking lot to someone finishing up 
at the community garden. They say I thought I was the only one 

weird enough to be out here this late, loading tools into their trunk. 
I’m here for the meteor showers, I tell them. 

Did you know there are three different types of twilight? 
Civil. Then nautical. And, just before full night, astronomical. 

It clouds over as soon as I lie down in the field. 
A blur of bats wing above in the overcast gloom, bouncing 

their voices off insects, trees. I try to listen when people 
explain how space and time are the interconnected fabric of the universe 

or how our every atom originated from the flaming gaseous core 
of a star—born in the belly of a supernova—but I get distracted  

by how poetic it all is. I’m letting go of everyone who loved me 
once but doesn’t anymore. If that sounds sad, it’s not. 

For one leaping moment I see bright movement behind a thin patch 
of cloud. But it’s just a plane, blinking its way 

to somewhere. The bats cry out, alert to the shapes of prey, of other bats, 
attuned to the symmetry of their own returning voice.  

If I hardly have time to see my friends anymore, & we can’t touch 
when I do, am I still me? Everything I write now contains 

this distance. The pitch & tilt of it like a field where I sing out to the dark 
to learn where I am, watching the soft-bodied swoop 

of the bats that eat the mosquitos that have bitten me, my blood 
moving & warm in us all.

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Lisa Baird is a queer writer and community acupuncturist living on Attawandaron/Chonnonton/Mississaugas of the New Credit territory (Guelph ON). Her poetry has appeared in various journals, has been shortlisted for the 2020 Room Magazine Poetry Contest and longlisted for the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize. Her first book, Winter’s Cold Girls (Caitlin Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the 2020 Relit Award for poetry. She is building a new collection of poems. Find her online at her website.