This isn’t the house.

This isn’t the house I grew up in.
We’re both set in our ways.
I’ve walked on trails that pass uncomfortably close to trees.
I’ve walked on trails that humans don’t use.
I found the head of an animal with fur still on.
This isn’t the house I grew up in.
We’ve both gone our own ways.
I spooked a grouse and set him running.
I found the house of an animal with fur still on.
I walked past the feathers of the caught grouse, tumbled.
She’s gone to feed the fox.
This isn’t the head I grew up in.
I walked past feathers, loose, and lasting after everything alive has left.

Past/oral by Brenda Whiteway

Unregulated Waste Management Facility

Listen, all kids love
to play at the dump.

I have no sister, but
the trash is flesh to me.

We all have normal dreams
of empty roll-on deodorant.

I have no brother, yet
I’m wearing cast-off shoes.

Kids like it. It’s
a chicken-bone graveyard.

Each one could be
the finger-joint of the gone twin.

Listen to Dawn Macdonald read “This isn’t the house.” and “Unregulated Waste Management Facility.”

Song for Barbie

Why do I suspect it did not
go well for you, bright light?
In our four-corner village, you
flared briefly.

Radiant Walker by Nicole Bauberger

If I coloured in the lines, you
barely noticed the page,
crayoning instead the windows,
the skies beyond. Wild child,

I remember a circle of girls
in gym class, asked in turn
to invent a dance move,
yours a full-body slide none

of us would try, you laughing,
plumped into cut-offs and tube
top. Tall poppy, when I worked
in the general store, customers

by the meat cooler
gossiped about the woman
at the counter covered in love bites.
Black sheep, of course the woman

was you – free love, free rein, free
form, freedom just another word
for outside the circle, off the
charts, over the edge, nothing left

to lose.

Song for Leonard

He has visions too, our Leonard. He saw the Queen
of Heaven and will build a cabinet for her of black
cherry wood, with seven drawers. And there’s the
mountain lion that comes to have its paw bandaged,

and a key broken in its lock. We call them visions.
Visions is the kinder word. Where Leonard sits
in his chair at the front of the general store
he may not appear to be a prophet. He’s not

shaving much now. Or washing. He put his car
in the ditch – the deep, steep, water-filled one
along Chiswick Line – and walked away. He shouldn’t
be driving, we all agree, but whose job is it to stop

him? We will laugh behind his back or to his face
but come to him when needed, with rides, snow-
clearing, casseroles; community’s rounds of damage
and undoing. Leonard, Leonard: this is the mercy,

the frayed and beautiful mercy in this world.
Leonard, here’s your coffee; here’s your
chair. Sit. Talk a while.

Behind Me, My Footprints Fill with Powder

 
A mouse-gray sky dusts the hills,
softens the silhouettes of evergreens.

I walk alongside my adult daughter,
our words tiny clouds between us.

In the bay, the island is disappearing,
a ghost in the mist of whirling white.

When she was a child, I could gather her up,
say, the dark is just an empty room.

Fresh snow covers the blue woods,
paints each branch, each needle.

My daughter weighs my experience
against hundreds of google facts.

I catch a flake on my tongue,
taste the sharp crystalline beauty.

Behind me, my footprints fill with powder.
In this cold, you can’t feel yourself.

Still Standing by Rebecca St. Pierre

Persephone

 
I cradle the phone as I listen
to my daughter
she’s Down Under
whisked away from me

outside a doe eats acorns
last spring two speckled fawns
followed her on wobbly legs
I left the grass uncut a bed
safe from wolf and coyote

with words my daughter paints a box jellyfish
its pulsing translucent body afloat
under the waves
pale poison tentacles
reach for her soft belly
I want my daughter home

safe

I only say
I love you

the doe moves on

Nocturnal

Birches by Jo Power

If in the silence of the earliest
morning, before the sun cracks

across the sliding glass
of the wide Red River – If in that hour,

like a pocket, the cat quiet, curled
against the inner, ragged hem,

I laced on my running shoes, slipped
into my mud-caked rubber boots,

and took myself outside – If I lay on the lawn
under the wagging fronds of the wolf

willows, silver leaves snagged on the moon
we are waiting to fatten to full – If I did that –

Entered the tunnel of night,
fumbled inside its silence – If I did that,

pressed an ear against the earth’s cool
skin, opened to the muttering whisper

of wind. – If I did that –
What would I bring back?

From the iron silence.
From the night’s thick ink.

What would stain,
what truth would stick,

like starlight
scrawled on sky.

Yepsen

 
Burn blisters from the woodstove,
the whole of my dog’s snout, a
frost-shattered axe blade and the
fine thread between what I want
and the ditch of sky.

The fine line
between my silence and splinters
in my palm. A mouthful of thistle.

The burden of indifference, difference;
an indefiniteness of standing. A bird’s
eye view of the shoreline and a pocket
book of birds. A gift.

The blood of my
ancestors. The burden: the fork in my
blood. The fine line between being who
I am and getting what I want.

The View from Here by Sabine Kearns