"No one belongs here more than you"

By Gabriela Halas

Blast
                oh
cyst
like that time
 
her hand erupted
marble under the skin
 
a cyst as hard
as a meteorite’s offspring
 
she made a fist
kissed my face with it
 
                & it’s like girl
                interrupted &
                                                isn’t that just the story we tell ourselves?
 
I am my own Brene Brown
of self-help-dom (I am dumb)
 
crumb path
to past devotions &
                                                I’m sorry but I can’t come to the phone right now but please leave a mess
                                                                                mess (message)
 
“don’t regret a thing /
lesson learned wish me luck”
 
                & it’s like girl inter            up
                                                                                up!
 
Blast it!
 
oh lovely cyst
oh frozen impossible
               
microscopic ocean
I hold a hornet’s nest of hope
 
in my hand
Dark as a chimney swift’s gulp
 
                                                & the hold music hordes the hopeful to the phone
 
from some strange place you
do not want to belong
 
But.You.Do.
And Brown & July both said
 
No one belongs here more than you
So I steal my embryo emperor
 
arrested in division
tell the story
 
of how she made it
uninterrupted
                                                from some place of madness

---

Barb hook barb

By Gabriela Halas

I never told you the words that pierced
                    like gunmetal
                              hawk-claws
 
My head slick with tar
                    a tailings pond
                              disguised as water
 
Claws spin through my esophagus
                    I write the lineage
                              of my family’s racism
 
Generations of isolation
                    where a ‘disobedient’ daughter
                              means she loves
 
the first black man
                    in this white family 
                              The hate that comes
 
barb hook barb
                    spike of long shaft
                              through the body
 
                    //
 
          The same hate built a wall
          inside my birth country
          to shield whites from the Roma.
          My grandmother looked
          the other way
          when a white woman
          & a black man walked,
          hand in hand, next to us. She spit
          out the side of her mouth,
          hissed That is not right.
          My cousins drew swastikas
          on their school pencil cases,
          binders scrawled with the sharp
          claws of the SS. The pen-prick
          of Heil Hitler & their severely
          slashed hair. My family speaks words
          I cannot repeat. The way stench
          from an open mouth
          begs for attention.
 
                    //
 
          Tenderly you pluck the salt
          from my face. Place each precious crystal
          up high for safe-keeping.
          You are patient
          through the hate of others. 
          Understand blame
          is too simplistic,
          you watch me call them
          nearly every day
          to say:
          Everything is fine/
          Is everything fine?
          You offer dark chocolate,
          buoy me up with laughter,
          a vital kind of humor.
 
                    //
 
I never told you what I saw
                    in the surf foaming gray
                              like mangled iron
 
I soared for a moment
                    then another
                              I never told you
 
how when my wings tucked
                    to dive below the surface
                              I mistook the choke
 
of an oiled lagoon
                    for water I thought
                              we could swallow

---

Greta Thunberg joins my family for dinner

By Gabriela Halas

His words crack the seal of parched
grain. Fall to the floor. They knock
against my ankles. Shudder, leaf-blown,
needle-pressed, in the swell of my breast
as I grieve. My mother & I exchange glances.
 
My father’s voice is a cascading
saw, a clearcut across rising slopes,
valley floors. I trace my eyes
along the knots sliced flat,
the dead tree we eat on.
 
He slams the salad bowl to the floor,
hollowed wood & the slick face
of oil—claims lack of space
on the table it was just placed on.
 
                    What happens to a young girl’s body
                    when men watch her willow buds
                    fuzz-filled & eager to erupt?
 
She —  
                    he cuts me off — 
 
                    What happens to a middle-aged woman’s body
                    when men watch her mouth
                    tangle with air, pulped root ready to erupt?
 
The salad bowl stays on the floor.
Another glass of Chardonnay.
 
                    What happens to a man
                    when he describes braids as line
                    to twist about a neck? A mouth
 
                    with no business opening? Breasts
                    beating heart beneath. What happens to a man
                    when he thinks of her hands? Her voice lit from within.
 
We continue to eat. Salad a neglected
memory. My mother changes
subject. Another glass
of Chardonnay?
 
The steady soft rupture
of grain that never seals. 

---

Gabriela Halas immigrated to Canada during the early 1980s, grew up in northern Alberta, lived in Alaska for seven years, and currently resides in B.C. She has published poetry in a variety of literary journals, including Inlandia, About Place Journal, Prairie Fire, december magazine, Rock & Sling, The Hopper, among others, and forthcoming in Cider Press Review; fiction in Ruminate, The Hopper, subTerrain, Broken Pencil, and en bloc magazine; nonfiction in The Whitefish Review, Grain, Pilgrimage, High Country News, and forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review. She has received Best of the Net nominations in poetry (2021 & 2020). She lives and writes on Ktunaxa Nation land and is currently completing an MFA at UBC. www.gabrielahalas.org.