i learned to avoid going out for new years (a candle lit for Noelle) during countdowns i was always emerging: the washroom, the bar, or outside for some air with all the starry lights an auld lang syne is sometimes a shadow wanting to touch my hair my lips my partner expected my return his
Fall: to Become the Silence (in the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg) November has threatened to enter the room. We fear exposure with our necks. Boardrooms do not grow pretty words; flat, polished business shoes suffocate us right at the stem. Leaves tremble: mouthing, wordless, they curl into coloured deaths. Outside, the wind has picked
From Pyre to Ash: A Teacher’s Duty I’m sorry but I can’t write a poem about going back to school. My pandemic mind is a closet with twenty years of chaos. Unkempt as it is, everything will fall. My job is to hoard piles of artifacts – the art of facts: the tests, markers and
The Bird Did Not Return to Me In a dream I was a great oak tree. I was by the earth with stemmed roots deep. In isolation, I have let my hair grow. I am among the life-giving in this summer: the wheat and bearded barley also flow in their gold. The scars about me