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.
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.
It’s too late to rename NASA’s lunar program but never too late to wonder why it was called Apollo and not Diana
It’s too late to be the kind of boy who grows up to be an astronaut
It’s too late to be any kind of boy
(girls can be anything but first they should be quiet)
How would we know they were happy?
we might ask.
A tan.
A row of cedars speak in tongues,
“Ah, what’s for dinner?
I am coming out of mourning”
I really beat up on some cookie dough today
battered it with a wooden spoon
historically I find them hard to hold
the rough unfinished handle
feels like some crusty piece of felt that was left to rot