The Pedicurist

I pass by the spa each morning
when it is empty and I can see her
placing fresh fruit at the feet of the Buddha
in the little red shrine she keeps by the door.
She lights the candles that surround him.
This is part of starting the business day,
alongside counting the money in the till
and turning on the OPEN sign.

When I come in for a pedicure,
she doesn’t look into my face.
She bows her head and bends
her body toward my feet.
This is a strange posture of power
that she and I do not like, and we both spend
the next hour pretending it is not happening.

But she is tiny and powerful.
She is very good at what she does.
She barely has to think. I trust her.

She is sweet and rude. To the other pedicurists,
she speaks suddenly, and seemingly angrily
in their language, though she does not turn
her body to them, and her body expresses no anger.

One time, she tried to speak in English with me.
“How many kids you have?” she asks me.
“None,” I say. “How many do you have?”
“Three,” she says. “All boys.”
“All boys?” I ask.” Yes,” she says.
She shakes her head.
I shake my head, too, in support of her.
She bows her head and bends her body
toward my feet because of – and for – these boys.

She rolls up her sleeves,
and I see for the first time that there is
a long white scar along her left arm.
I wonder what could have happened …
I can see where someone has folded
together the two banks of skin and,
in and out, sewn them tight to dam the blood,
leaving a deep dry river bed,
footprints of holes along the banks
where the government needed to know something,
and then where her boys, perhaps, played
childish games, digging for treasure,
without knowing
how much she suffered for them.

Genuflect by Deb Wiles (30×37 cm; oil on board)

Women in Prison

Because it’s 2015.
And there’s women in the cabinet
But that might not seem so adequate
To women in the custody of the state
It might not seem that late for black women imprisoned at ever rising rates
Positioned by the colour of her skin to be a criminal by definition
Or it might just seem too soon for indigenous teen girls in Saskatoon
Kicked out of school in the afternoon
At night she’s trafficked on the streets and arrested as suspicious
Should we measure if our progress is finished
By the number of women ministers
Or maybe it should be the number of women prisoners
Perhaps we should consider the condition of women denied tampons or conditioner
Or something even simpler like extra squares of toilet paper.
Her body on camera so demeaning
In addition her visitors
Can be turned away for no particular reason
So pardon me if I save my celebrations for at least another season
Because we’ve come a long way baby sounds a lot more sinister
If you’re a mother behind bars having her baby seized
Without her signature
And then she’s punished for grieving
We might not think then that we’ve achieved
gender equality so easily
Just ask Renee Acoby.
Or you could if she’d ever be allowed to be freed
Because indigenous women get labelled a social disease
Would you believe that men who murder women are given regular sentences
But women imprisoned for non violent crimes end up as dangerous offenders
When it was prison that created all their violent acts
Or let me go back to the fact that 80-90 percent of women in prison
Are victims of physical and sexual abuse
And the men who commit violence against them remain on the loose
Yet we take young girls and place them into custody as youths
And we deliver them straight from care to adult institutions
And maybe that only seems like a solution
Compared to the execution of Tina Fontaine
Seen by police in the company of her killer
Only for her body to be found a week later in the Red River
Does it make you shiver to think that the state
Would rather pay to hold women in jail
Than to pay half the cost to house and educate.
And so many women become lost
But let’s debate
Whether Sophie Trudeau should be granted a staff
While women who need mental health care end up with an epitaph
Can we grapple with the fact that Ashley Smith
Was imprisoned only for throwing apples
And in her battle with mental illness
She was held in solitary confinement in shackles
Until she strangled herself with her sheets
But nobody beats down the doors for women
Once they’re serving time.
The guards who watched her die for 45 minutes
but it was decided not to be a crime
And the records were sealed
A publication ban in place against revealing
Never mind cracking the glass ceiling
It’s a cell of glass walls when you’re on suicide watch
With no chance of healing
And most women are in prison for crimes of poverty like stealing
Or because they have a boyfriend who’s dealing
And black women get convicted because we’re seen to not have feelings
We’re just assumed to be more guilty at every point in the proceedings
And it’s so hard for women without money to get the help that they are needing
Which is why there’s so many women in the cells with cuts on their arms bleeding
And there’s bruised women appealing their sentences because they murdered their abuser
And all people will say is why didn’t she leave sooner
Trans women housed with the men because her birth certificate doesn’t prove her gender
And let’s remember there’s still sex workers in the back of the cruiser
And when the treatment facility for women isn’t funded
Is it any wonder that users cycle in and out of jail
When all the systems fail her.
We ignore women’s pain and blame it on her behaviour
And women are placed in provincial facilities that are overcrowded
It’s hard for the women to count when they’re surrounded by men
Women pray for long sentences just to get federal housing
Shouldn’t we be doubting that so much progress has been made
When so many women aren’t waving but drowning
And we are rounding up refugee women for not having papers
It’s ironic that Canada has webpages for Americans who want to come to Canada
If the election doesn’t go their way but women from third world countries are deported without wages
As if nannies and cleaners are really a danger
To the same society that won’t charge women’s rapists
But spends millions of dollars locking up blacks and natives
And please don’t think that prison makes her safer
When male guards are allowed to see her naked
Have we forgotten Kingston where the women were degraded
We refuse to believe women when they give their statements
But when they won’t testify against gangs they end up with prison placements
And we put women away for misrepresenting a few welfare payments
Black women working for corrections in conditions like enslavement
Making 5 dollars or less a day with 9 hours on the clock
Native women in prison sew blankets in sweatshops
For the same military that gave their ancestors smallpox
And after work they go back to the range and then the doors are locked
Oh tell me again at how inequality has dropped
If you’ve ever mopped a cell with your facecloth you know it never stopped.

Untitled illustration by Rachel Derrah

Under the Law

When my mother was born
In Canada
On January 12, 1924
She was not a person
Under the law.
She became a person
Under the law
In Canada
On October 18, 1929.
My father was always a person.

Ice So Thin

I find myself walking on ice so thin
Ice too timid to expose what goes on
Underneath the truth.
I tread lightly in an effort to placate your anger
Your rage
To mitigate that withering look you flash my way
The one that lets me know you are not pleased
And you are rarely pleased.
My courage
My sense of worth
Like ice so thin
Melt before they have time to shatter.
You make every effort to preserve that studied image of control
That practiced look of superiority and invincibility
The one that always cuddles up to your contempt
Transparent
Like ice so thin
Threatening to shatter before it has time to melt.
You give life to a lie
A lie so vital
So desperate
So contagious
That in my fragile need to be included in your life
To keep the peace at any cost
I choose to forget
That the lie is a mirror
Porous and unworthy of trust
Like ice so thin
Ice so thin.

Frosted Aurora by Kas Stone

Butterflies by Ildiko Nova

incested girl

room with pink walls
filled with pink things
pink accessories, clothes, shoes
dolls, toys, stuffed animals
plastic telephones, balloons, books
each item carefully arranged and displayed
a pink shrine
pink bed, bicycle, chairs, table, toy oven
toy washing machine, doll house, doll stroller
crowded against the door

Academic Dialogue

He wants me to listen to
his story, his pain, his ideas
but not to mine
He says, “You are cold”
I open my mouth
yes, a heavenly freezer door
a sudden frosty wind
where no words live
then quickly close it
mindful of my sweet preserves
walk away

Etuaptmumk

I lost my talk, said Rita Joe.
For me, I was never given the option to know.
The feel the flow of the words as they rolled off my tongue.
Giving me the lyrics of how our world was sung.
My perspective was spun using the threads of both your world and theirs,
Left to cobble together a spirit from rags and tears.
Painfully aware that I was different.

Through hard work and determination
I found my Indigenous articulation,
A compilation of two ways make up the sum of me.

You have two eyes.
Yet you only have one view,
Your way is best you would argue.
Centuries of being in the position to subdue those who would aspire.
They say that the sun never set on the British Empire.
And because we recognized the hubris that defines your story.
We have a sunrise and sunset in our territory,

With my heart and eyes, I have a completely different view,
The consequence of my skin comes in an entirely different hue.
Don’t you see? Although you represent us,
We think very differently than you.
Because we see the world not through one set of eyes,
But through two.
Thousands of years long, we were independent, proud and strong.
We belonged to this earth, the way power belongs to money and privilege to birth.
We put our communities first.

But then came the fleets.
Filled with those, YOU would ironically define today, as “come from away.”
To invade every inch of our world.
To break our spirit and pull the threads that would unfurl us to catch the way you speak.
But this is not the poem for the retelling of a one sided history.
Each of our worlds has its strengths.
Yours is in power,
It gets to eat its cake and define race.
It has the ability to unapologetically take up space.
If societal progress is linear, this society is top tier.
Terra nullius, as though we were never here.
It must be nice to be so confident.

Your strength is that this society is ubiquitous
Built on reified rubrics of tradition and rhetoric.
Your notions of diversity are ad hoc in nature.
An after thought feature to an immovable structure.
This isn’t a conviction or an acquittal,
Just the voice coming from an eye honed to be critical,
Who does not shy away from the opportunity to be political.
If you push our two sides of a Venn together you’ll get a circle.

We were never meant to be static.
Like the rivers around us, we shift and change and remain dynamic.
We bring to the table something that is able to change your worldview and show you what we are capable of.
That a lot can come from a holistic concept of the Earth.
You are not a plague nor we a curse or a problem in need of a solution.
But we’ve got to rid ourselves of the spiritual dissolution.
The dilution of our treaties written to share this land.
And we ask that you understand that we are the experts on what we need.
Don’t feed us your good intentions
Carefully laid apologies will not get you an historical exemption.
We plan out our actions for the next seven generations and we ask that you do that same.
Open your other set of eyes
Recognize the pain you have caused
Take a pause and start breathing.
Welcome to the world of Two Eyed Seeing.

Keeper of the Spark of Life by Melissa Sue Labrador