G-20 summit protest, Toronto, Ontario
To deny sight is to lay an ear to rail,
its couplings – white noise ringing
in flange that steadies the line,
the echo that frames the city’s arrival.
We choose no kin but adopted
strangers, a coda of arms
that tear at the back of a woman’s
neck, the lineaments that linger
as she’s divided, sense by sense.
Past eight Union’s platform rises
to meet the rush of bodies paused
in daylight’s corneal scratch—they pass
in an arc of sweat, sibilant disarray—
not the ground, but our legs moving away.
This poem “To Carthage Then We Came” originally appeared in Asian Canadian Critique Beyond the Nation. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 227 (Winter 2015): 37.
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