want to take her to the grocery store and to the library to pick up a book,
suddenly certain she can read, the weight of her body swinging
so close to mine.
ongoing conversations with my acne
u are like a once-known animal in the sky of my face, a pattern of bloated stars
running the territory of my cheeks in wolf form, teeth that pop
snarl and grow only to eat away the day near mirrors
u feel so grand i could cry
a blueprint of oil on the bus ride home from work at night
i can barely see the planets burning above us bending through the window
in the thesaurus, constellation comes up with luck future and circumstance
my circumstance is mom driving her car into a culvert, seeing
photos afterwards—flash bright on the underbelly of the engine parts unmoving and foggy at night
how u change is well documented in a selfie album
images of us angled toward light like fireweed
the future is my cousin in a dream where bugs leak from her body
teal beetles that reflect the syllabus of earth, rearranged
the luck isn’t always easy to find like my attempts to be funny
in a poem
auntie dries her hair in the bathroom kohkom’s slippers shuffle across beige carpet
dreams i keep having u float off my face like raspberry-red bubbles
remind me where we come from part prairie, part invasion
u are me made uneven pushing ur way into this world during sleep
i don’t always understand dreams tho even when i know i should listen
u heal over time into a lake into a latch of memory
a run, a burn, a beck
our bodies are our libraries—fully referenced in memory,
an endless resource, a giant database of stories.
—Monique Mojica
your name a story
of moss tiptoeing its way along the underbelly of language, river eyes like the crack of fat when a hide is peeled away, taste of elk, raw and soft in your teeth at easter dinner, pop of blood running on your plate, this is the half story of a boy, a man, a father who was tripped, round-lipped stumble a stream (a run, a burn, a beck), the ground and the getting up again, nuns marching across a field in the snow with their forgiveness and their stew, a girl, a woman, a mother who was making, this is you, daughter, all your quiet wants and none of your knowing, a feeling that wants to stick to the skin but can’t quite remember how, rock, paper, river, you girl are a gamble made during the planting of trees, a pickup truck and a bump of plastic beads stitched by hand, a clot of years you don’t know how to carry and the fear that this body is not where you belong
in six, the seasons
summer
between the warmth of language and a four-walled room, a girl clicks beginner cree on the internet, a divided circle, a laptop, a desk and a full screen of a flat skyline hung below the word
nîpin summer in northern saskatchewan thick with mosquitoes july hatching heat
learning the seasons into six a girl listens to her father’s first language alone, never having been that far north she hears a sound like a knee-pin a forced fracture, fixed with alloy and rods
fall
a girl grows up only to trip again falls into her not-knowing like a knife dreams every season, a birth father’s voice in nêhiyawêwin she’ll imagine
takwâkin how leaves commit themselves to change how grass rolls gold moose velvet lost to the land
she practises aloud, looks up to see her neighbours dart between rooms words bristle like the city at night live under concrete, a breath of letters take-away-a-kin is not the right way to hear it, her tongue tries and falls
freeze-up
site to site her fingers touch glass lake sheen zoom, a picture, a freezing rain warning for the prairies white letters against a red screen on google, she searches omosôma’s seasons into sound
mikiskâw for when language braids the ground still again and the ice moves in cracks closing
a girl can search the space between a season and a scow, a boat unbound where words float rivers swim the surface, here here, here
winter
a girl in a room in the wrong month can repeat one season 296 times or more, an elder’s voice stretched from the laptop screen, power speaks
pipon water solid and a thumb of trees exposed
her lung sound a vowel pulled into the snow a sound it out write it down try try again, long reasons to keep repeating
spring
a bulb of light, a breath, door open like a square of sun the girl taps in to a woman’s voice she’s never heard before, a wish the web an elder’s word
sîkwan sound combed into lake water goose necks settled into the shape of questions
she hears a sequin of mother’s english disc-shaped bead balanced and weighed on the tongue
breakup
a girl between two dialects still a screen and still a searching, learns the season of breakup another word for spring can come before or after depending on where you grew up online, back and forth a word in the mouth tumbles
miyoskamin birch-sapped june season snow spotted river melt running
child again wrists and creek bone a river-girl slick with mud frost and word-melt this poem takes place in her imagination this poem takes place
miyoskamin me and you are s-kin miyoskamin me and you are s-kin miyoskamin
in ohkoma’s language where verbs never stand alone a girl’s tongue curls nêhiyawêwin into the nerves and walks from a room to where miyoskamin returns and ice opens
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