Great Canadian Novel

As if a country was not an ever-tightening feeling in my chest.
As if poetry was not an ever-tightening.

To love a man
I must become a good citizen
of my country.
See the problem?
Even when I am beautiful
I am an enemy.
If you see us kissing
in a forest as if the forest
was not already singed
by our guiltiness,
do not say anything,
you are too late, turn back.
Now is not the time for another war.
It is almost summer,
and I am a lost cause.
I promise
I have never been fit for battle.

*

A grandmother waits on her front porch for a half-dead boy to return from a war otherwise known as “the present.” She looks like a painting older than he will ever be. It is ordinary, and Canadian. Because the boy is Canadian his tenderness is always-already rotten. Because the boy is an NDN the future is the difference between plunge and plummet. She wants him to live at least a day longer than she will. Some nights she builds two statues that look like them from the clay of her grief; in a field full of April moonlight it appears as if they are dancing. What she knows is that proximity matters in loss, that a face too cold to be human nonetheless allows for a kind of caressing less brutal than solitude.

*

Canadian solitude:
Last night I was candle wax hardening around all ten of his fingers. This morning I did not add up to even one hand. What now? And with what body?

*

What now?
In Alberta a man threatens to transmit a deadly virus to my people.
Who else to tell this story to?
And what to do with the heap of metaphors that, if I do not move fast enough, someone will call “public art?”

*

History moves fast, gallops. I eat its dust in the name of poetry.
In the name of poetry, I eat just enough to survive.

*

What I am is what comes before the opposite of conquest.
I survive as if citizenship confers a chance at survival and nothing else.
As if a country was not an ever-tightening feeling in my chest.
As if poetry was not an ever-tightening.

*

Confession: I want to be a poem more than I want to be a poet.
With an open mouth,  my body the poem says, Enter.