sasquatch. In the winter
the poor souls gather
round him for warmth
as he hugs them one by one.
* * *
He likes to smoke cigars
and does so in his one room
just off the main drag.
As he blows the smoke,
he brushes his long hair
from his face and takes a sip
of cheap wine and stares at
his feet. He smiles, remembering
his mother always telling him
to keep his big feet clean.
So he does as the cigar smoke fills
his one room, his hairy hand raising
one last toast to his mother.
* * *
Some nights he meets with the lost
and they ask him for guidance
and forgiveness. He gives them
both, telling them it’ll be alright
as they carry on with their misery.
He brushes the hair out of his face
as the next lost brother comes
to show him his wounds. The sasquatch
rubs his hands together and places them
upon the wounds. The man is healed
and says Thank you as the sasquatch
turns and pukes out the poison
he has taken from his brother.
* * *
One night the sasquatch does not
come out so someone who knows him
goes to his room and finds him
in his final sleep. A cigar in the corner
burns slowly and as the smoke
goes up into the air, the spirit of
this sasquatch also begins to float
back to the sky. As he returns
to his home, he looks back down
to the people of earth
and whispers, Thank you.
I Don’t Know When I Am Going
I put a stake into my arm
to become Christ on the cross
and all those thoughts and
big desires come to me
as I take myself off the cross
and my hands and feet bleed.
The blood drips onto the floor
as I sit in this shithole of a city.
For me it is more wonderful
than any picture of heaven.
* * *
As the day mixes with torment
and old blessings, I open my eyes.
The first thing I see is the big city
and all the evil. There in the distance
I hear the wolves as they howl
to the great moon. Up into the mountains,
they sip the pure waters and move
even higher to join a group of angels.
Together they dance the night away.
* * *
As I sit in my squalor, I remember
being a small child on an island upriver.
We were so simple and all we had to eat
was the fish we caught the last summer.
I remember the salty smoked taste
as my mouthful of new teeth chewed
and chewed. When the drugs are all gone
I know I will be sick so I go out and hunt
for the blackness. When I find it, I stop
and rest and stare up to the heavens.
* * *
To me it is just the dark skies
of empty secrets and I smile
as I remember being a child back home.
But now I do not have any teeth
to chew on smoked fish. I stopped
eating long ago anyway and now
inject my liquid dinner into an old arm
and rest here as the heavens open up.
All you can see are the angels and wolves
as they dance upward and upward
until they are no more. The sky
blackens again as I sit here
and chew away what is left of me.
Songs of the Mountains
There was this man who was
a simple man. He loved his family
and listened to his elders
when they spoke about the past.
Like all of us, this man had a gift.
He could hear songs: he was able
to pull the songs out of the air
when he was on his boat fishing.
He would share them with the elders
and they’d tell him those songs
were gifts and one day they will
go back to where they came from.
But for now, the man was told
to share them in ceremony,
at funerals and gatherings, where
he was joined by drummers
and singers. One day those songs
went back to where they came
from until another young man
had the gift of song.
* * *
There was another man they say
came from the sky a thousand
years ago. He had many gifts
but he was very strong and it was
his belief that the people must
listen to his teachings. When they
did not, he would go to them
and give them a choice—and
these men would always
choose wrong. Now they
are turned into large rocks
or mountains. Some were
also punished because they
overfished or hunted too much
or they were just greedy and
selfish. The mountains around
the river grew and grew over
the time he was among us.
He gave us all his teachings
but some of us, even today,
do not listen.
* * *
There was this great woman
who carried the gift of love
and she also carried the gift
of giving each child their gift
and she would always travel
by canoe. She would go up and
down the river and she would go
into a village where all the children
came to her and she would touch
each child upon the head and later
in their lives they would find
their gifts. She would also go
to the mothers who had just
given birth where she would kiss
the child and lightly blow into
the child’s mouth and each of
these babies would survive
all the diseases our people
would suffer. Each baby would
be given a name and a gift
by this great woman as she
would leave the village
and paddle by canoe upriver.
* * *
As she passed by,
a new mountain
would appear
and in the distance
she could hear a song
she had not heard
in a long time.
As she paddled
and paddled,
she smiled.
The Sturgeon’s Lover
In the deepest part of the river
there lived a great sturgeon
and she swam along the bottom
and fed upon the dead who had fallen.
She was about three hundred years old
and when she was full, she came to
the surface and jumped as high as
to her and she kissed each male
and let them have her. Months later
she quietly went to her favourite part
of the river and there she released
her eggs in the millions and then began
again to swim the bottom and to search
for any new bodies that had fallen
from upriver, which she feasted upon
with her old softly kissed lips.
* * *
The legend goes that a fisherman
had fallen into the waters and was drowning
when the great sturgeon came to him
and asked him for a kiss. He agreed
and the two fell in love and together
they would feed upon all the food
at the bottom of the river. One day
her eggs came to life and created
the people across the water.
The people lived there for centuries
and the sturgeon and man would visit
from time to time, bringing them food
to survive the cold wet winters
until the people too walked into
the water and fell to the bottom
as the man kissed his lover.
* * *
Today we do not fish for sturgeon
as their numbers have been decimated
by overfishing and loss of spawning
grounds. Whenever I catch a sturgeon
in my net I let her go and she always
turns back and smiles as she flicks
her mighty tail and splashes me.
My son always laughs as I stand there
stunned and wet, while the great sturgeon
slowly swims away and turns back
to blow us a kiss. We both wipe
our lips as the great sturgeon
falls to the bottom of the water.
There, waiting for her, is her lover.
He kisses her one last time.
She cries as she begins to eat him.
Days into Days
Days turn into days and hours well they
just creep on and today nothing really
happened, no angels falling and all that
and that poor guy still sits on the cross
in our old church where no one from
our village goes to and kneels and that’s
okay too as the day turns into another day.
* * *
When you walk with depression
the world can sometimes play tricks
on you and one moment you can crack
a smile and the next your eyes fill with
tears but you fight them off as you are
not ready to sob out loud and that too
is okay, so you try and appear happy
but really your whole being just
wants to scream because life is
sometimes unfair and that poor guy
on the cross he weeps in our old church
where we choose not to kneel
* * *
For my children I can only imagine
what they are going through after
losing their mother and I am there
for them and they know me pretty
good and we carry on the best we can as
our days become days and the hours fall
as if they were angels from up above.
* * *
Let us pray for our children of this
village as the river that surrounds us
spills its tears into the salty ocean
and our children stand up and say
their names and shout out the words
to their mother who is now on the other
side and sometimes they say that God
is there but we have never seen him
and his son sits on a wall in our old
church where we will never kneel.
Canisia Lubrin
The Dyzgraphxst
The Dyzgraphxst is Canisia Lubrin’s spectacular feat of architecture called a poem. In this book, built with “I” — a single mark on the page, a voice, a blade, “a life-force soaring back” — and assembled over seven acts addressing language, grammar, sentence, line, stage, and world, the poet forms, invents, surprises, and sharpens life. Generous, generating, and an abundance of rigour. A wide and widening ocean of feeling are the blueprints of this book. It is shaped to be “the shape of the shape / of the shape of a thing that light curves over time / length to width to depth and all of us its information.”
here—beginning the unbeginning
owning nothing but that wounding
sense of waking to speak as I would
* * *
after the floods, then, after women unlike
Eve giving kind to the so-and-so, trying
to tell them it is time to be unnavigable,
* * *
after calling them back to what
the tongue cuts speaking the thing of
them rolled into stone
* * *
speaking I after all, after all theories
of abandonment priced and displayed,
the word was a moonlit knife
* * *
with those arrivants
lifting their hems to dance, toeless
with the footless child they invent
ain’t the monstrous always intimate
and before any protest turns it inward
inmate into a vineyard, ain’t there a moan
* * *
digging one thousand years into the past
as by this interruption: do you accept
this collect call this collect that call
* * *
accept the charges how, I, now the daughter,
is here forgetting the voice of her father
or whomever the father voiced
* * *
magnum me facit dominus, dwindling
away some rubbery word for fire
or a glance back to something sincere
* * *
Jejune, all of these words inflate our undivided lives anyway
Dream # 27
I can feel an offer
* * *
a voice and the nightwork
* * *
merely inviting sightseeing, or I can
* * *
again be the daywork opening dull
* * *
if the new forts don’t care the sky is dark
* * *
what we make of a more basic abundant black
* * *
is not the same as marking the intruding light
* * *
or feeling bad, don’t name it leftover-sky, interloper
* * *
or call it foreign shelter, porous as I am elsewhere a dream
someone’s eyesword you left here
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
————————
word with the wing of a monarch butterfly
protruding from a tear duct, radioactive
* * *
and fallen on the ridge of a cheekbone,
or a cathedral blocking traffic,
and now the whole banana
* * *
economy my hand scrubs means
never to name this derangement
of spent hours, the many revolutions
* * *
I have lost, I could not
number them, though
I haven’t the heart t
o
* * *
leave them (un)numbered
or to most of all deny
that numbering at their core
* * *
Jejune, all of these words are of people, anyway
where i have found my good sense
by its reach into my acceptance
or omuamua o moo ah moo ah
* * *
tout long kod ni bout how this must end
how dare the undead nerve in my ear
that does not behave as its length, it exists
* * *
to think about the echo one loses as a spaceship
elides spaceshit, we’re responsible for the decom-
posting as the things I calls strange, things called mad
* * *
we give to no-one the shape of the shape
of the shape of a thing that light curves over time
length to width to depth and all of us its information
I was that speck in the halogen confusion of myself
If I were once planted in dirt, if I were once the taste
of wood after mourning, the split-tongue of the long
* * *
beast out of water, another bête belonging to something
bigger than a point of view, wider than this expanse
of doors mapping the incalculable coasts of Black continents,
The 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology Page 4
