For more than two decades, April has been designated in Canada as National Poetry Month. At Canthius, poetry is not a 30-day affair, but rather a way of life. It is a way of understanding our world and our place in it. It is a vehicle through which we drive through memories, instances, moments and futures. With musical language, sharp imagery, and vulnerability, we use poetry to open not only ourselves a little further, but our readers as well.
Read MoreA binary will not solve the oil,
Cannot stop the Qallupilluit’s cold hand.
Can you crack the hoary ice?
From salty lumps and fissures,
Rise like an old answer,
Blowing?
Before the blood, we dug tubers from the garden, but my palms tore on shapes harder. “These bones are my mother’s. If we throw them over our shoulders we’ll re-seed the soil.”
Read Morehe pulls his teeth through the pages
clean of the blood spilt by the words
sorrow hanging in the corners of his
mouth
There’s a term for vanishing. Occupational hazard.
Or womanhood.
Or wrong place, wrong time. Or there’s no place for
the state in the bedrooms of the nation.
sweet unbecoming
and becoming, ravelling and
unravelling, hand woven womb
shifts, water breaks, gushes
like blood
spring swells abruptly in vaudreuil
leaf
flower and scent
he
he the coming shadow
triangled at my heel . . .
There are always secrets in small towns.
The wizard misses his ex who cursed my henhouse,
the black egg laid heavy on the incubator
All my knowledge is not enough to stop dead men
from reaching out for a handful. On this head,
wildflowers grow in surplus. Dead men with soft hair
reach out and try to pluck at my head for flowers to
lay at their graves.
i am walking the edge of the winter forest.
you, behind, preoccupied. i am gathering thin
dry branches. bark weather stripped. sun
bleached. will they snap dry. i am getting to
the heart wood with this knife.
I began “she testifies” after Tina Fontaine’s body was pulled from the Red River in 2014. In the poem, water itself speaks back on behalf of womxn/girls about the multiple violences done to them, and on behalf of Emmett Till, whose black body was at the centre of a 1955 racially-motivated murder in Mississippi. Water refuses to collude with these killers or to participate in their heinous settler-colonial/patriarchal attempts at silencing: “like glass, I drove her fragments to shore.”
Read Morelet my ashes fly
w/ the pigeons
or blend into the
burnt lime of cement
erasure as palimpsest
bird claw prints in
fresh grey slabs
Incidentally, the tip of a sharpened pencil settles beneath my skin and I freak because lead is poisonous and my body now houses the slow potential of danger.
Read Moreyour back leaning over a glass display
where traces of bodily fluids
from a real autopsy splatter. I look, but cannot
touch. We meet again like careful delegates
A copy of Caravaggio’s Deposition
in the Chiesa Nuova
is too dark to see.
No lamp to feed coins into a box,
no lux ambulatory.
Guinea-pig whole and splayed on the plate.
The room they put you down in
bright, table-banter light.
This fear of death, it must be green. I see it
often, wrapped around her finger, a laurel film,
translucent, kind of pretty, darkened in dishwater
on days she can’t be brave.
The fly on my windowsill
crawls towards a hot sunbeam
between the dried raindrops
In public libraries,
she took to draping
strands of hair
across her spines
only to come back
years later to find
the grey intact.
How would we know they were happy?
we might ask.
A tan.
