We got our feet wet here,
cut our teeth as silences
sliced into the sea’s skin.
Our borders juiced. Our tongues
animal on the map, while English wrote us
with its pen, tattooed memory, engineered
reflex, and everything
we learned
to interpret
as danger
: a red sky, unable to dismantle grief, its thickness
rising
inch by inch,
terms we couldn’t
fathom.
This poem “Drown” originally appeared in New Work on Early Canadian Literature. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 213 (Summer 2012): 99-99.
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