Thursday, February 15, 2018

snow day (further excerpts from a work-in-progress,




                              see an earlier excerpt of the same piece here ; and here


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How many weeks from now: forty-eight years old. Party ‘till I break a hip.

Where we live on the continent. One remains, most often, where things are most familiar.

What my archive, accumulates. I pack boxes and folders for couriers to collect, sent forth into Calgary. All the way to the foothills.

Correspondence, notebooks, notebooks, postcards. Manuscripts. All apology.

Cole Swensen, On Walking On (2017): “If you walk in complete silence, other beings are not forced // to rearrange themselves into unrecognizable things.”

Ottawa Valley cold. Ontario cold. Cold anywhere. An approaching Arctic air mass.

What one might wish to unfold.

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Retweet Kaveh Akbar. Retweet Erin Wunker. Retweet Jane Eaton Hamilton. Retweet Eve L. Ewing. Retweet Natalee Caple. Retweet Hazel Millar. Retweet Natalie Eilbert. Retweet Metatron Press. Retweet Zoe Whittall. Retweet Amal El-Mohtar. Retweet Astro Poets. Retweet Christine McNair, the rare time she does tweet. We want significance, relevance. We wish to engage. We want an end to hostilities. We want an end to the dark ends of silence. To remember why we love, why we love poems, why we love writing. To return to that joy of creation, community. Connection.

I want to feel the love I want to love the poems I want the poems that sing and breathe and rage I want the giving and not the taking.

Return to small. Attempt, once more, to discover. What we came here to do. Revisit the idea. Revitalize. Sketch out. Absorb. Why we write in the first place.

Polyvocality is not cacophony. Is not a threat. A thread. Why can’t we listen.

To no longer feel exhausted.

Sometimes doing nothing and doing something exist concurrently, in a single gesture.

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Today in history.

When I repeat a story. Clickbait.

The days my mother had to force me out. “I don’t want to see you until ____.” A pain upon cheeks as we tore through the snow. Such cold. Wood smoke from the wood furnace up the chimney rolling down to the ground outside to swirl tumbleweed slow across yard and disperse.

“If you saw a bullet hit a bird — and he told you he wasn’t shot — you might weep at his courtesy...” – Emily Dickinson


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