In the National Gallery were buffalo standing with their coats
thrown over their shoulders like ladies at a tea.
In another room camels. Came upon them unexpected
between paintings and ideas tied with string.
I arrive as a frisson of vomit rising
to rust her throat. Pith growing
in the marshy confines of her belly,
tethered to her navel
and our game of tin can telephone.
All we knew at first was that the moon was brighter
that summer, dimmed the other lights in the sky.
When it started to seem unusually huge
some dismissed this as mass hallucination,
pointed to the etymology of the word lunacy.
A 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?
The young woman faces the difficulty of reading
a video translation
We are faced
with tech -
nological chaos
In the jarring feedback there is an uncanny home
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.”
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“Hard to separate the past from the present. This noose tells me we’re still dealing with the past.”
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he 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.”
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let 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.
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your 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.
Inhale. I take a deep breath in through my nostrils. The air travels through the cartilaginous rings of my trachea, divides at the bifurcation of the bronchi, rushes down smaller and smaller pathways. It expands my lungs, widening my ribcage, stretching my diaphragm, raising my collarbones. Seconds pass before I release the breath, letting it stream out slowly, whispering away to nothing. Exhale.
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