coaticookBy Rosemin Nathoo
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god gave a child a micron pen
asked her to draw the horizon-line and she made the wobbly coaticook hills. I try to be like her, too large to belong to anyone when I run unsteady when I trip on a root when I ask the hills for a mother forgetting myself all their cradles. I try on the girl who drew the world, mud underneath her fingernails, toes the size of a cornfield, I remember where I’m from from my own hopeful invention, I try to reflect the girl drawing the world because I was asked because from the hills I was given sherbrookeBy Rosemin Nathoo
in a river-dream
she stopped the river and tried to stop me, too— to pause the root-hairs dreaming water streaming, breed instead an air plant to display at a market fair, afraid of the implications of closeness whether shared or separate. acrophobiaBy Rosemin Nathoo
to my staggered step,
you look moose-still so I stop— just for an instant. beyond me, some gentle available lovers must move with the whispering aspen leaves, their petioles giving like passerine feet in a dream I have stumbled away from, some gentle lovers acquiesce to the callous and random fate of rain on the continental ridge, to the cruel stochastic dichotomy that feeds me such gravel-road vertigo. but watch me walk on the other side, futile continual wander, body butchered down thighs wide, watch me untouchable utterly sprouting spruce needles severe, the pain in my knees pounding quieter as they carry me up to earth’s womb as they carry me kindly away from you as if you didn’t exist someplace, as if I were more sacred: if anything were larger than the wind’s sudden swell up here, than the rush of soil’s emerge, I’m sure it would be my idea of me, and if you sure-footed were to pass, could it be slow as a spiralling catkin on dwarf birch in northern may or june or the sudden shock of saxifrage (as you choose), I might not even recognize you the air is so full with the shades of my healing, the massive scented song of my healing, that your name is only a charm which may turn weedy leaves magenta bloom if we dared to be precious— but I am afraid of heights, you know, and every raindrop is catastrophic. Rosemin Nathoo is a wildlife biologist in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, Northwest Territories. She likes to get lost in wildly unrelated rabbit-holes, like physics, human rights, postmodern literature, editing and publishing, and the biology of tropical plants, very small rodents, and very large bears. Her most important ambition is to build clear bridges between different worlds, and she still has no idea how to do such a thing, but expects that poetry may have something to do with it.
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