10-22-2024

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Ellen Chang-Richardson​

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PLEASE TELL ME THIS

               WILL NOT LAST FOREVER

 

 

               chapel street shifts pitch deep winter

 

               its edges, sharper; its scents brighter, brittle

 

               like peppermint                 or bone

 

               where fever     bush frozen

 

               berry holly    reaches its thorns to bristle

 

               my fingers with its bitter tang

 

               where deep –

                                                                              

               beneath       permafrost and

 

               rust and dirty snow slush lies     me

 

               covered, cold in remnants of

 

               an old white school song              

 

 

                                                          our home

 

 

               and native land            haunting

 

               my memory of spring.

 

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WHITE ROOMS

 

                       locked

  to   us young, stirs

 

imagined   landscapes

of       shifting     stone.

 

white   cubes

no fissures, sky-

 

scrapers               

over   pastures of

          weeping

willow

 

 

slowly

seeps

 

like biases 

   
                 ooze

       

 

these white names

 

       in white   porcelain

 

     & white    

                frames

 

 

      whitelists
 

     & broken

 

    wrists         

 

     in white

 

 

          white

                  

   

                       rooms.

 

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BETWEEN BRANCHES

 

I want to sit where

living incites

no violence

 

where you, where I 

exist as the leaves 

of my Zamioculcas do;

 

I want to breathe not crumble 

beneath our burdens

 

where controlled burns sustain

not destroy;

 

I want to swim 

in oceans, in lakes, in rivers 

devoid of trash

 

where choking hazards are just

carnal fantasy;

 

I want to dance but

not on the bones of migrants

visit the shades of my ancestors
in spaces between pine

and sky;

 

 

I want to spin

& spin & spin & spin

& spin & spin & twist
 

until time

 

 

rewinds.

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-from Blood Belies, selected by Fall 2024 PoemoftheWeek.com Guest Editor Hollay Ghadery. 

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ELLEN CHANG-RICHARDSON is an award-winning poet of Taiwanese and Chinese Cambodian descent whose multi-genre writing has appeared in Augur, The Ex-Puritan, Grain, Plenitude, Watch Your Head and more. 

​Born in Toronto, Ontario, they were raised in Oakville, Ontario and São Paulo, Brazil, and spent their most formative years growing up in Shanghai, China. A third culture kid at heart, Ellen's writing is informed by their love of contemporary art, their concern with the climate crisis, and their experience moving through the world as they are.

The co-founder of Riverbed Reading Series, an editor for Room and ​long con magazine, and a member of the poetry collective VII, Ellen is currently based in Ottawa, Canada, on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg.* You can usually find them baking. sourdough bread from their starter, Bubbles, or biking the riverside trails on their single-speed.

They are a full member of the League of Canadian Poets and the Writers' Union of Canada.