Kwe: Standing With Our Sisters

by Joseph Boyden

  When I became a woman …

  When I became a woman …

  When I became a woman …

  When I became a woman …

  HOW WE FELT ABOUT IT

  A NOVEL IN PROGRESS

  ~ David O’Meara ~

  Outside, I dropped my skateboard on the driveway and had just placed my foot on the deck when I heard the door of the family’s camping trailer creak open. They had bought it four summers ago but rarely moved it beyond the property. Mostly it was permanently parked on the side of their driveway. We used it as a summer bedroom. We’d have little barbeques, play board games or cards, listen to the shortwave transmitting new punk and trance music throughout the night. U.S. college stations in Michigan and Vermont, Syracuse and Ithaca. It was necessary to know the bands no one had heard of, no matter how bad. “Sketchy,” Nat would say as the chords faded. “Definitely sketch.”

  It was Nat’s brother who appeared from the trailer door. He was holding a dustpan and looked at me without any expression. “Hi Matthew,” I said. It was all I usually said to him. He was two years younger than us, a lifetime.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I said, which was the truth, and the way of saying something.

  He nodded and clenched his jaw. I could see the muscles move, tighten and shift. He looked down at his hand that was holding the dustpan, glancing back inside the half-open trailer door, then looked at me again. He picked something off the dustpan and held it out. “Do you want this?” he said.

  He was holding a joint in his palm. Nat and I didn’t smoke them in the camper but would roll them there and walk to a park a few blocks from the house.

  “I found it between some cushions,” Matthew said.

  I lifted it from his hand and held it between my fingers. We must have rolled it months ago. It was dry and brittle. Ancient as spring. I couldn’t remember losing one, which should have been the case. Maybe Nat had done it and then lost it. Maybe that’s what Matthew was thinking too, though his face showed no trace of his thoughts. He was a quiet kid, but kinda cool for a younger brother. His hands looked strong. He was on the swimming team.

  I didn’t say anything. I don’t know why. I’ve been trying to figure that out these past months. I wasn’t embarrassed exactly, but something. There was an edge of exposure to all this. Death and youth and pain. The tidying up of it. And the sudden formality of being alive.

  I gripped the joint in my hand and pushed my board down the driveway. It was only a year ago. And I am sitting here, now, in the departure lounge of Kimpo airport, and I want to tell you all about it. I want to tell you about the whole thing.

  ~ Colin McAdam ~

  FROM BELOVED OF THE SKY

  A NOVEL IN PROGRESS

  ~ Eliza Robertson ~

  No one but Odette lived in the house, but others turned up for parties. Mack saw them in the hall some mornings. Once, a man blinked at the kitchen window. Like a moth, he knew the window led out but could not pass through the glass. She had to open the door for him and nudge him over the step. The somnambulists haunted the house like ghosts, and to her surprise, she found she did not mind them.

  She and Odette climbed the stairs and entered the room at the back of the hall. Odette dragged the chair from the writing desk and lodged the seat-back under the doorknob. Mack stood on the mattress and unpinned the yellow blanket from the window. Odette sat across from her on the bed. Her shoulders hooked forward as she unfastened the bag of pears. Mack had so many questions for her. Where do you go, when you leave for entire days? Who do you see? Do they steal these items for you? Do you steal? Do you walk into supermarkets and leave with pears under your shirt? Do you remember when we slid vanilla Charleston Chews into our snowsuits? You tucked yours into your hood.

  She wanted to ask these questions but did not trust who would answer. Odette sat like she always sat, her knees opened, legs splayed on the mattress. Her hair remained a creature on her back, part of a wilder organism, the tail of a colt. Yet she sensed this was not the same girl who chipped the chocolate off the Charleston Chew with her teeth. Who softened the nougat with her tongue, then stretched the candy into a thin slab. It felt natural to see her, but she did not know what to say. An eyelash had fallen onto Odette’s cheek. She felt she could lick her finger, press the pad to Odette’s skin and remove the eyelash, and that action would be more familiar than speech. They could sit spine-to-spine and align their backs and fill the notches of each other’s vertebrae. Their bodies had matured together like trees, she thought. Two trees shovelled into the same soil, competing for sun, limbs warped and forking, needles interlocked. A year ago, Odette had uprooted, but their limbs still wound the same loops, the same spacepaths around each other’s elbows. Their bodies matched. What changed were their minds, and she needed to fix that.

  “What?” said Odette. Her eyes shone blackly. “You’re staring.” She lowered her gaze to the pears in her lap.

  Mack leaned forward and wiped the eyelash from her cheek. She blew it off her finger. The thin spike drifted to the pillow case. Odette passed her a fruit. Around them, the bedsheets matched the paint on the walls, green as the underside of a leaf, or bathwater. They knelt in the bathwater and smelled the bellies of the pears before they bit them. They were overripe, the skin bruised and gold. The fruit weighed in their palms like heavy bells.

  CHRIST IN THE JUNGLE

  ~ John Vaillant ~

  In the jungle

  there is no trinity

  for him to lean against,

  only a multitude

  of creatures

  he was warned as a child

  to avoid

  Snakes are drawn to him

  for reasons

  he does not fully understand

  And he curses the bugs

  in spite of himself

  Many gather around him

  to listen

  but he does not know

  they are there

  Only the monkeys howl

  and hurl their disapproval

  Thinking he speaks

  to no one but himself,

  he stops and leans against a tree

  so large

  he does not know what it is

  He does not know what it is

  that makes the blood stream

  so strangely

  through his body

  He does not know what it is

  that makes him feel

  obliged to answer

  for what he has not done

  Where, he wonders,

  did everyone go?

  Morning finds him at last,

  cradled in a tangle of roots,

  a shaft of sunlight

  creeping toward him

  across the forest floor

  NOVEMBER 2014

  ~ Diana Davidson ~

  Istand still in front of a display of five red dresses hanging against a backdrop of poplars. I can imagine the quiet hush of a boreal forest. I can imagine the sun shining through the trees on a frigid afternoon, much like this Saturday, as the snow falls and swirls to the ground. I imagine the women who wear these dresses. One woman worries about fitting her sagging breasts and expanding hips into her favourite dress that covers her arms. One woman glides matching crimson lipstick across her mouth and adjusts spaghetti straps as she sprays on perfume and races out to meet a lover. One woman frets about navigating the drifts in heels but is ready to laugh, sing, and love against winter.

  But these red dresses are not a display of celebration. They are a reminder of women lost. Jaime Black’s moving REDress Project offers these blood-red gowns as stand-ins for missing and murdered Aboriginal women in our country. These dresses are red ghosts telling too many stories. I need to listen.

  I think about my own position here today. I am a writer who tries to share stories of Northern Albertan women in my work, including Cree and Métis women, even though I am white. Last night I walked from Fort Garry thr
ough Winnipeg’s downtown core to my hotel named after Louis Riel, and while I was alert to my gender and sexuality, I did not think about my race. I am a Canadian who doesn’t know what to do about the epidemic of missing and murdered sisters except retweet links and write letters to politicians. I am spending Saturday in a museum rather than wondering about how I can provide for my kids or how I will survive the night if I end up on a “bad date.” I can see the Red River outside the window, the river that gave up two women’s bodies just before the surface froze and the snow fell in all its ambivalent whiteness. I am safe inside.

  I want to do something. I want people to change. I want men to stop perpetrating sexual violence. I want women to stop being seen as disposable. I want everyone to have more choices. I want to do meaningful work on race and poverty and colonialism and injustice and healing. I want to do work that acknowledges that over 1200 missing and murdered Indigenous women is a societal tragedy in a too-long line of failure in this country.

  Stepping back, I imagine the dresses are mountain ash berries frozen red against poplar branches covered in hoarfrost. I imagine they are drops of blood. I imagine they are hearts beating, resilient whispers we need to hear. I imagine the dresses swaying against the poplars like leaves rustling in the summer sun. They may be out of my reach.

  DAWN, AFTER THE FUNERAL

  ~ Patrick Friesen ~

  dawn, after the funeral, out of a rainy night,

  the boy rolling in grass, calling out, who will

  father me? who is my mother? laughing with

  the memory of it, and remembering almost

  nothing in the presence of so much beauty,

  rising to stand on the river’s bank, who knew

  a small stream could carry so much light, all

  those languages from the trees, understanding

  not a word, but singing them anyway, unravelling

  the old mystery into the new.

  GHOST, RETURNING

  ~ Patrick Friesen ~

  dark alley rain, streetlamp, a passing shadow,

  guttural talk, something like talk, rising steam,

  a serpent hiss, go where thee liste, leaning back,

  barefoot in his shoes, a speechless ghost, return,

  waking backward, into stone, into an ancient calendar,

  unriveting time, inelegant, unknitting, slipping slow

  through riven air, through cities, language, and love,

  and the dead, unsparing, arriving, revving the womb.

  THIS SWEET OLD WORLD, SINGS EMMYLOU

  ~ Patrick Friesen ~

  this sweet old world, sings emmylou, neil’s

  harmonica wavering, sweet and mournful,

  my body alive, overcast skies, almost a breeze

  at the window, flesh and blood, tooth and claw,

  it’s what they say, desire, the dog on its leash,

  and the world going, one of these days will be

  like this one, a body carried home, washed and

  settled, ready to be ash, the wheels of the cars

  turning slowly, traffic lights changing and changing

  again, there is no hubbub, only the weather, always.

  NOVEMBER 24, 2014

  ~ David Chariandy ~

  Tonight, I watch the city of Ferguson ignite. It happens after a grand jury decides not to indict a police officer for the killing of Michael Brown, a black youth. I watch the live coverage of the riots and think of those vulnerable families ever more invisible, tonight, in this live-streamed spectacle of flames. For weeks before I had been listening to and reading about the despair of black youth in America over the everyday discrimination they face, over the lack of real security and opportunity in their lives. I don’t know what I was hoping for this evening. I know it wasn’t just a successful indictment.

  Tonight, I read a text sent from a friend. A year ago, he was violently assaulted on the streets of a Canadian city for being black and gay. His attackers have not been found or prosecuted. In the hours after the Ferguson announcement, he sends me a message explaining that he will no longer be following the website and hashtag #blacklivesmatter. He simply cannot bring himself to believe in this ideal today. “That black lives matter,” he writes, “what a wishful desire.” Normally he is an optimistic person; and he ends his text by expressing his love for the black men in his life, and for all others who deeply care for him. But the bitterness still radiates from the touch-screen of my phone. He quotes to me the African-American poet Sonia Sanchez, who writes “Do not speak to me of living.”

  Tonight, I open an email from another friend who invites me, among many others, to offer some words on the “ongoing crisis in this country” most sorrowfully illustrated in the murder of Tina Fontaine and the attempted murder of Rinelle Harper. And I want to contribute. I want to write something fierce and persuasive about the reluctance of our government to support a national inquiry into the long history of murdered and missing Aboriginal women in Canada, even as our government seems prepared to spend billions of dollars on military hardware in the interest of national “security.”

  Tonight, I want to write something patiently revealing about the “security” imagined by nation-states, about whose security is a priority, and whose expendable. Tonight, I want to write about the denigrated, and of their struggles and alliances and enduring love. Tonight, I want to show how black and Aboriginal lives really do matter. How we all equally matter. It’s just hard, right now, for me to begin.

  THE PRESENT, MISSING

  ~ Garry Thomas Morse ~

  a friend of mine, lovely to be-

  hold for being decently real

  reminding of my mother or her

  sister who could not hold on

  or that friend who could not ever

  quite get Cree vowelling down

  on the verge of making a few

  changes when out of nowhere

  the axe

  fell.

  No elder or pooh-

  bah, therefore

  MISSING

  from political photo-

  ops, even stock photo catalogues

  and certainly never the protagonist

  in novels or romantic comedies

  celebrated as the “Strangler” for

  not handling the Batoche Bell

  with enough holy holy holy

  reverence

  landing in Regina

  with her last few bucks, with

  child without a father

  and years

  later when the young woman

  went missing, the local sex

  workers helped her search

  but the police did not

  though Native

  folks go missing on snowy evenings

  all the time

  and sketchers modify

  features to sell dying newspapers

  because only the perception of a

  victim can reach a demographic

  but whether dead or vanishing

  in the age of mechanical repo-

  traction

  the living are somehow

  missing

  from our syrupy hockey-

  rioting six-packing cultural whoop

  still not finding quite the right role

  in our red-hot company romance.

  LIKE A FLOWER

  ~ Stan Dragland ~

  My friend Al Cottreau was taking German. He found the language perfectly hilarious and loved to amuse me with it. I still remember some of the sentences he thought were so funny: “Ich freue mich, Sie kennenzulernen” (I’m very glad to meet you). “Nehmen Sie da drueben Platz. Es ist sehr bequem” (Sit over there. It’s very comfortable). “Du bist wie eine Blume” (You are like a flower). That’s about all the German I ever did learn, except for the odd word like “krankenschwester” (nurse) and “ausgezeichnet” (excellent) plus some of the words to “Die Lorelei.” Where would I have learned those? Not from Al. Probably from my first year French prof,
who hosted a kind of international singsong one day of the week at noon.

  Ich weiß nicht, was sol les bedeuten

  Daß ich so traurig bin;

  Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten

  Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.

  Beautiful! “Sie kämmt ihr goldenes Haar.” Lovely!

  Anyway, one day on the bus back from work at Oliver Mental Hospital that summer, I was sitting with another fellow, a summer replacement like me, when Al’s German welled up, along with my natural sense of the absurd, so I turned to my seatmate and said, counting on his ignorance of German, “Du bist wie eine blume.” The woman sitting just behind us burst out laughing and there I was, caught apparently courting another man in German. It was the classic moment of comedy, the old triangle (comic/straight man/witness) nicely arranged, as if by God. We don’t hear nearly enough unexpected stuff. Those of us who can handle the weird, the bizarre—irony, non sequitur, pun, et cetera, et cetera—we want more, don’t we, more snap in the language, more harlequin surprise in the day-to-day.

  Aimee Mullins has said that poetry is important, as is whimsy. Her legs were amputated below the knee at the age of one because she was born without fibulae. And talk about the glass half full! As a college student, she had a pair of springs made for her stumps and became a world-class sprinter. Now she has an impressive collection of artificial legs, ranging from the functional to the funky, including a pair that raises her height by half a foot, while most of us are stuck with the same pins we got at birth.

  GATHERING VOICES

  ON RECEIVING SUBMISSIONS FOR MOTHERS JOURNEY

  ~ Joanne Arnott ~

  Beautiful ladies

  spirits shine through words

  on thin pages, laughter shakes me

  grief glistens

  adding lustre to my view

  indignation

  hot

  rises within

  what spills over

  is love

  love and conviction