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coaticook

By Rosemin Nathoo
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

sherbrooke

By 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.

acrophobia

By 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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