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​12-9-2024

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Canisia Lubrin

RETURN #2

 

What am I to make

 

Of two or three small sons

 

Of anger with its talent for mixtures

 

Of thank yous that slide on the present-like a sl(h)ope

 

Of the sweetly ordinary: take this small son, his red wafer

 

Thin chalk drawing of the other son, them making things making

 

White hymn of all the hymns to all the sons, and what by this green world

 

Up as early and as well as anyone, up until Uphood, as well the bee, the kawé

 

In the drizzle and in the tune of the dragonflies and in the tune of the two or

 

Three small sons lit up with the same charge of what the world heaves in

 

The night desks and the advances of the lost who leap into age, father

 

Into a mother and an honest word for keeping the talents

 

Whether or not to combine whether or not to bring

 

Anger with the small mass of a clean life-small

 

Son and so on, present-like of what

 

What am I to make

 

DREAM #3

 

says you too

 

live borrowed

 

on minor eases

 

you bow before

 

the nulling wall

 

lower every hurt

 

so geometric, every

 

crude word a hard

 

line in the dirt, I

 

will talk less

 

the perseverance,

 

you’d like what else is that wounded sense

 

of kneeling, or else waking up diffused

 

funny as the need to be more explicit

 

funny as the scathing and still

 

to decide to play

 

a joy

 

in the unlocked note already enough This sweetness is atomic Is candlelight or conflagration Say you are wise to be alert Say please look out for strange

metaphors seeking lodging in your temple Say they, god-like and impure

 

DREAM #17

 

let them say I have seen the long days

I have seen them rising from the huts

as smoke, I have seen them, as forests

turned brown & flat for remembering

themselves, wishing that we had not

factored into their algorithms, & now

I have seen the long days arrive with

Things I do not know, nothing too much

If I’m lonely, nothing too little if I’m

Able to drain the desert & leave the ocean

Empty long enough for a new beginning,

Why have the long days arrived far from

The valley of the kings, still with the machinery

bearing the insignia of ruling governments,

what monotonous pride if they say

I drank milk they bought with a fraction

of our natural selection, believe

them such reckless regard for a few

hours over the long reach of us into some

hot place, a future perhaps? I have seen

us with their machinery & watched them

arrive knowing our desires and leaving

with our deaths, and now you have too

where is your problem with dream

-from The Dyzgraphxst, selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Fall 2024 Guest Editor, Hollay Ghadery

Canisia Lubrin is an acclaimed poet, editor and writer. Her writings explore ideas of social justice and the limits and possibilities of art, form, and language. Her books include the story collection, Code Noir (Knopf, 2023). Her first book Voodoo Hypothesis (Wolsak & Wynn, 2017) was named a CBC Best Book. Her second book, The Dyzgraphxst (M & S, 2020) won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and the overall Literature prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Derek Walcott Prize. That same year, she was awarded the Canada Council’s Joseph S. Stauffer prize for literary achievement and the Windham-Campbell prize for a body of work. Among other honours, her writing was finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Anthologies that include her fiction were finalists for the Toronto Book Award and the Shirly Jackson Award. She was twice longlisted for the Journey Prize. 

 

Lubrin is a 2022 Civitella Ranieri Fellow and has held writer residences at Queen’s University and the appointed inaugural 2021 Shaftesbury Writer in Residence at Victoria College, University of Toronto, where she has taught creative writing. Lubrin previously taught at the Banff Centre, multiple community and literary organizations, and universities and colleges in Toronto. Her work is widely published and anthologized and has been translated into four languages. In 2021, the Globe & Mail’s named Lubrin Poet of the Year. She is poetry editor at Canadian press McClelland & Stewart.

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