Dear Eat


Dear Eat, dear gather, dear hoard, I’m gored by the world as it is, all the space it makes for waste. She stashes, I stash, spill cash to hold off the crash. What are you saving all this stuff for? Do you think another world is coming? I’m summing, filling forms with data so the man can track me, hack me, crack me like any old egg instead. I made my bed. I dread lead in water, the pig to slaughter, the daughter I might have had in the toast of the social, if my spatial relations had rolled another way. That’s so gay, said my student when. The classroom’s just the half of it, a whole state sits in the six feet between my desk and the first row. Crows gather for their evening flight to the power station at the city’s other end. I mend with slip stitch and flower knot, a bit of thread to hold it all together for now. How do we get there from here? Right wing Buddhist asks Shirley’s Maliseet greet to accept that the white man won. When all the boys try the doors of those who fear, we wall and stall to push back against the winners. I’m stunned, blunder my buss, fuss in my truss, because I don’t know what to say. To call them by their bodies into the room as it is makes a whole other clay. I don’t have the broom to sweep this much dust. I crust, I bust, tongue lolls another call of the wild. What child? Only dice to roll another play.

 

 

 

Bird on telephone
Cable cries to stall
Thought       caw      caw      caw



This poem “Dear Eat” originally appeared in Pandemics Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 245 (2021): 184.

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