Paskwa Mostos

mostos ostes pokes her fuzzed
head through dry grass. the prairie
purples with crocuses searching
for their makers - it was said
each bloom represented the birthplace
of a baby bison.

paskwa mostos for a thousand
and a thousand years you kept
the Plains peoples strong and tall
and the government duly noted
the correlation. holocaust
of an ecosysemt, piles of bones

being shovelled into trains, sent eastward
lest your skeletons enrich the dirt, regenerate
your bodies atop the crocus. the plains people
herded and corralled in their prisons
of grass. sometimes I lie
on the ground near an old rubbing rock
and feel the earth singing your
travels, see the dust rising

in the east as you come home
trampling down barbed wire,
grid roads, caragana windbreaks,
grey-slanted outbuildings already tipping
into the dirt, piles of farm bones

ready to be shovelled into trains,
sent eastward to the people
who crushed you into the dust
you once raised in herds more
numbered than the stars, mirrored
in the fastest-flowing of rivers. paskwa mostos

they say you will return. I see
this promise in each star of paskwa ostes,
bison bellybutton, each spring crocus. sunset
and sunrise you are just
over the horizon. my eldest daughter dreamt
you ran over our roof, after standing
on one another's shoulders. sometimes
our walls shake.

Fridays

8:55 Take the boy to school.
9:05 Ride the no. 10 downtown.
9:20 Arrive at the Y, open a locker
in the second aisle, stow backpack and coat.
Say hello.

I know her code by now.

Weird today, isn’t it? Who are all these people?
 Is there a holiday from school? (these chicks make me feel so old!)
I’m sure glad to see you here!
(at least there’s one face I know)

She tells me— voice lowered—
I have to take these pills four times a day,
or I’d die (a solemn nod, blue eyes wide)
I had a seizure and it damaged my brain.

It was so hard when it happened,
she says. I couldn’t go out,
I couldn't find my way home.

She’s in gym clothes. I'm ready for the pool.
You’re such a speed-swimmer,
you and that other guy!
and I've given up trying to change
her mind. I smile, promise to show them
how it's done. I’m glad 

to see her, too.

In courtroom # 8: what won't burn

a bone
this is bone
also bone
also a bone
part of the skull
a bone
bone
bone
a bracelet
in 125 we see this oval shaped item is a carabiner
it had an inscription on it
this is a metal ring
surrounded by remnants
from possibly the contents of a purse
the end of a zipper
powdered makeup tins, my wife has something similar
a bone, bone
piece of a metal chain which is probably jewellery
buttons
some fabric
fabric

her spirit
tears on upturned faces
her spirit, her spirit, her spirit

Stock

     pinch

fresh or dried     seed

with leaves

         enough to cover

you

      discard skin and bones.

               strain the

good hand

everyone loves     strong     

          chickenback

tied in a knot like a pretzel

Source: Whole Foods for the Whole Family

Thanks for your comments. 

I made a few tweaks on this one. 

matted blue

acrid-laced spring

gravel shoulders

            seeds fleeced

            a highway robbery

hope hangs

on season’s lip

            a white shirt pinned

                                    to a wash line

plastic safe-way bags

flap in the breeze

            matted blue

a slipper skips foot loose

            (nothing fancy

                        or free)

bagged white ghosts

            smug sock-puppets

                        wired to dance on

            winter-worn fences

shuffle in ditches  

sun-seeds snapped

or matted in trash

this frost-bitten April

           

            spring hangs her head

Hallway medicine

Thanks!

A Slow Spring

winter throttled hard at her neck, trees still brownly bare in mid-May
but today I sat outside, sun warm at my back like a longaway lover
frugally I ordered the bottled water, but instead paid three
dollars more than the most expensive coffee
I told myself it was surely a magic potion
a homeopathic tincture
an alchemic brew
on reading the label the shapely blue-tinted bottle
was infused with inspiration in four elemental ingredients
which is surely why I'm writing this poem

millefiore 5

hiss gas,
white hot blooms,
selenium, gold,
cranberry glass

Greyhound

snow on the ground in Dryden

i skirt the Wendy’s in my Birkenstocks

trudge to the Extra Foods

aware of my clothes in messy layers 

unwashed hair

bring the clamshell salad back to my seat

opened with a pungent scream: onion

added to the notes of sweat potato chip

morning breath on the stale air

two or three bites in i see my lunch is mouldy

and the bus pulls out

nothing to eat again I take a drag

on a three-days-unwashed tea mug

open another book

Making sheep

Na so, Oma smiles. Her swollen

knuckles enfold an apple, and she

peels the skin, red

and ready. Her twisted fingers

slice the fruit toward her belly,

bleeding juices on her dress.

She lays down spotless

shearlings, Schaefchen –

baby sheep she calls them,

and they follow one after

another, silent

and sound, herding

worrisome thoughts,

sweetening rumination.

(This is an oldie, but I'd love opinions on whether it has enough poetic weight for inclusion in a collection about my grandparents, or whether it's just a sweet personal memory.)

Homestead

The roof sloped, and that was why I felt safe:
it was like a tent made of house. Aunt Belle's
cooking wafting up the narrow staircase, adult
laughter as I read old novels from the 40's, snug
beneath a ragged quilt and sheets worn soft. When
the lights went out, my door swung open with a banshee
moan, and the collie who was a twin for Lassie
slunk across tile, flopped on my feet.
The dog I couldn't get, was my dog while we stayed.
Feet warm, I read until dawn edged the half-moon
window. Trixie the collie slipped out at six
to avoid a scolding, my first late-night liaison
unknown to adults, age seven. This went on forever,
the summer of eternal novels and a harvest never
quite finished, one day as the next except for
the time my brother tarred the neighbour's chickens.
Why we got to stay I don't remember, but ever after
it was my farm when I was accused of being a townie.
The only land still held in our collective families.
Part of me still lives there in that bedroom, untouched
by anything but the true story of Annie Oakley and her gun.
Part of me knows the farmhouse lies empty, boarded windows.
The same part knows Trixie was shot that summer, after growling
at a young cousin who reached for her bowl.
I never forgave the shooter, or the food bowl, or the cousin.
I never forgave the dog who warmed my feet and broke my heart.

Common sense

To make a marionette,

tie Christmas ribbon

to the closet rod,

wrap it around your neck,

and dance like wood. Close 

the garage door on the car as it purrs to save

sweet warmth. To light up your interior,

stare into the sun. Swallowing

erasers will correct

everything. But

never touch the needles

in daddy’s antique phonograph.

They’re poisonous – another word

for something

he can’t replace.

millefiore 4

forget-me-not little
butter-eye, little shoo-
fly violet sky, mm yes!

[no title yet]

"Considerable research supports the idea that nature is essential to the physical, psychological and social well-being of the human animal." —www.sciencedaily.com

If your home is near a park you'll live longer.

If you can see grass out your dorm window
you'll do better on tests.

If trees surround your subsidized housing complex
your family will be more peaceful.

If city crews cut an old tree down
the final thud of the trunk falling
will make your heart contract.

If you ride on a path lined with fallen leaves
on All Saints' Day, the rolling of your tires
will count off names, a dry recital
of the ones you've lost, each
a different story: brown, tan, 
russet, ochre.

If you come out to the lake you'll see

the little birch we planted.

hello!

I just had to get myself signed up and put something up on the blog. There. I started. Sorry I'm late. Nice to meet you. I hope to catch up on your posts over the next few days.

My last book was about mothering—having and losing and raising babies. I see some of you have been posting on these themes here, too. Lovely.

Now I'm wanting to try something different, but I'm not sure what. So, you'll probably see here my play with erasure poems. Maybe some other poems.

I look forward to trying to keep up with all of you!

Melanie

Swedish pancakes

lemonegg

allow to sit

before each pour

over

bottom

Turn only once.

finished.

Keep warm in 

everyday company! Roll

up after whatever else strikes your fancy.

Source: Whole Foods for the Whole Family (Plume, 1981) 13.

millefiore 3

inside the crystal hive
the bee, the hummingbird
the lilac tree

Knitting

Thanks!

Lady G

tree before sky
darklaced and wide
galloping green beneath
to make you weep, had you
tears left. heart hammering
with the horses hooves. they
thought they'd lead you, tame
and trotting across the campus
green, but you kicked your naked
heels and clung with bare thighs,
breasts bounding, elbows down. you
said yes to this job because like a fish
leaping to the light on the end of a line
flashed the times you'd rode your uncle's horse
- the few enough times in your life you'd ever had
something hard/soft between your legs that responded
to your own command. The students yell Go Godiva Go and
your heart pounds, pounds, pounds, pounds with the hooves
of this nag-turned-Pegasus. Tomorrow you are back to turning
enough tricks to pay the debts addictions have incurred, the addictions
debts have incurred. Above you trees and a sky bluer than his eyes, your
wide-eyed child you haven't seen since sixteen; bluer than blood-in-veins;
bluer than the blues you sing when you shower alone; bluer than the five dollar bills
you earn the easy way. Easy now, easy and your mount slows and you head between the buildings
and into the lot, they got their money's worth of naked women on horseback, five hundred dollar tradition
and a freedom for you that slides in your veins without a syringe, a remembering, a letting, instead of forgetting.

matted blue

Introductions

Hello everyone.
I've decided to join the May Day Poetry group blog; this is the first time I've ever done any blogging, so it may take a bit to get used to. I have been writing poetry more seriously since 2006. I just launched my first book of poetry, published through Turnstone Press, entitled "What Lies Behind."  I look forward to engaging with the group.
--Luann Hiebert

Courtroom Number 8

Uniformed guard whisks us through the security system
and I wander a maze of halls as dense as a legal brief
the chamber is quiet and church like
except for the armed guards, the lack of windows.

Even the benches are wooden and carved like pews. A collection
plate is never passed, and we rise for the judge but remained
seated for the accused, judging his bland demeanour, his shaved
head, the roundness of him so very alive and present.

The judge holds forth on why there will be no media ban, not even
for the child whose mother has been killed. The public
deserves to know justice is served, he says. The mother
of the deceased, grandmother
of the child in question leaves the courtroom, her wail
heard from two rooms away. The men continue their ritualized
dance. A series of bows and flourishes, a sword fight over a witness
until his reputation is a tattered poster
on a pole outside a disreputable bar. He shrugs his way
out. Court is adjourned after the lineup is sorted
until the weekend. "We'll be playing all week, folks."

Friday is medical records of the deceased; in case
her medications or her history prove
she deserved or caused what was coming to her. I want
to bring up the history of this country, to talk about
the attitudes of the accused, the system that upholds
these travesties, the patriarchal bullshit posturing.

Instead I walk home and make chicken noodle soup for supper.
And I spoon some on the ground for her hungry spirit, unfeasted,
unrested, lit on fire and left in a small town dump. Those men
with their eyes and mouths open wide and gulping. Justice was never

a blindfolded woman.

millefiore 2

a thousand little flowers glass
spun, craft, kisses of light, kisses
of heat, white, cobalt, forest, cane

Rail coach

Thanks!

(This is a revision of an oldie. I don't want to give up on it, but even my poet friend who adores Finnegan's Wake found this one too vague!)

Once you learn, you never forget

Thanks!

Notice re deleting

I ran Andie's suggestion (that I post poems and then delete them) by the chapbook editor I'm working with, and he was fine with that. So about once a week, some of my poems will disappear. Hopefully, if I just edit the post, the comments will remain.
Jonina, this blog doesn't appear in Google searches, but past participants have the address, and I know of at least one writing blog that lists May Day in its blogroll, so more people than us can see it. Most editors don't care, but a few are sticky. 

Famished

Sprinting from task to task my sugar shakes tell me
nothing was ingested today but coffee, but a friend
has dropped off a loaf of braided bread, herbed
goat cheese. I eat standing, my humble/decadent Pesach. Today
I worked on a play about Residential School Survivors
and the many more lost. I finished a tiny pair
of beaded vamps for the children who died of
starvation and (mal)nutrition experiments. My grandmother
had one sister and two brothers who lived, and
more than that
who never saw adolescence, I don't know exactly
how many. There's a lot
I don't know.

She spoke about her school experience once,
when I complained about my homework. I had to read
that book in French, and if we misspoke the words
we were punished. That was all. Even then
I knew there was more to the story. Her eyes
spoke a closed world to me I can still almost see. Her
baby sister told me many years later, your grandmother
once whispered to me at school, if she didn't have kids
by the time she was 18, she would die. Starving
for love and family, a hunger for permanence. My hands
stop shaking now, and I taste the bread she never could
(a celiac who spent most of her life deadly sick until
it was diagnosed, then baked for her dozens of grandchildren
while eating
plain meat and rice.)

Earlier today at Yom Ho Shoah the horn sounded for six million dead
1.5 million children.
I mumbled the parts of the Kaddish I am beginning to learn
one year at a time, and hummed the Israeli music in snatches
of breath filled with pebbles. Robbie Waisman
implicated us with his stories as a survivor
tying the Holocaust to Canada's Indian Residential Schools, please pleas
to the blind-headed and the lame-hearted
to make it stop, make it one day truly be
never again. Skeletal pictures on the screen of people still somehow alive.
In the basement of the synagogue, stories of resistance.

In and after 1885 more women and children died of disease or starvation
than casualties from both sides. With no homes or guns
we ate gophers or our own dogs.

Robbie's spirit had come to me while beading; memories
of his little nephew Nathan and Nathan's mother Golda -

"I fell in love with her when I was eight, but gave her up
when my oldest brother Chaim married her. She had a curl in the middle of her forehead
like an upside down question mark."

- who refused
to leave her three-year-old and went to the gas chamber with him
in her arms.

"The famine ships from Ireland were floating coffins," my cousin said to me.
Like other family members, he tried to find our relatives back in Ireland,
but they were all long dead
with no descendants but those who survived the death ships. Here.

Not an unusual story, Robbie said to me two years ago, wiping away tears
that his own mother had gone to the same chamber in Treblinka. Robbie was her baby.
At 11 he watched his closest brother climb into the truck to be shot, and ran after it.
I wanted to tell him his mother was surely that life-force that stopped him
from being loaded in, that he was the comfort to her in death
and life, that her will to live was still present in his body, but instead
I said then and today, when we hug again, "Your family is proud of you. They see you."

"My name is Nya, I came to the Yom Ha Shoah today because
I am from Kenya and they are killing my people there. I have lost
most of my family."

I showed him the vamps saying they are also for Nathan and Golda.
One is thinner than the other to represent starvation. They are both

too tiny.

Then I go home to find the braided bread,
ram's horn echoing
in the gas chamber of my heart
and I eat and I eat while I peel potatoes for supper. Because

I'm famished.

mille fiore

the grain of sand, the grain of glass

mille fiore, the blossom of light

the blossom of white, hot furnace

Hello and a title TBA

I am so pleased to have been invited into this May Day Poetry Project. When it comes to writing I am a late bloomer. I began to take writing seriously in 2006 and what a ride it has been. I am of Metis/Icelandic descent and currently live in New Westminster,BC. Most of my Metis ancestors are from the Red River settlement and one is credited with "settling" the Quesnel Valley in BC. I have a book titled, "page as bone - ink as blood", coming out with Talon Books in the Fall of 2015. It touches on this ancestry. In my next book I would like to dig deeper into these stories.... I have not written anything today so offer you a poem that I wrote for an event called Mashed Poetics. It was in part inspired by the theme for that particular Mashed Poetics but more so by Katherine Vermette's Northend Love Songs as the title reminded me of my disco days back in Winnipeg.

Title tba

“Your body is the place your memory calls home”
Deepak Chopra

divergent lives meet at the border

Bogart’s on the edge, where North End meets downtown

Winnipeg’s Studio 54, an old bank building

where deserters of their lives cross over

meet on the dance floor

Tuxedo boys, rich      looking to drown out the voices of obligation

needed the drugs that the arsonist and the boxer provided

Portage and Main an intersection where need meets want

and amid the inner rubble, the marble pillars

we are all playing a transactional game where everyone is trying to trade up

in his tower the DJ - a demi-god of nightly worship

takes us into trance dance

encoded in our bodies a collective history

of days when we hung mirrors on trees

where pain and pleasure reflected visceral truths

we are all crows     like shiny things

the mirror ball spinning light    offers flickering fractures      

but never invites reflection

heavy with memory my body finds wordless ways

to stir cellular recall      my turtle mind slow steady

walks me to the dance floor

where my snake body dances me

I am in a moving sea of sound

within the beginning of time

an Elemental dreaming     Born of Water

inside the oracle divines my salvation

but I am still suspicious of my body’s story

leave a trail of marooned memories      frozen fragments

parts of me are scattered on the altar of one night stands

once home haunted by my losses, I weep     water meets wood

as I lay on the hardwood floor, contemplate the collective curse in our genes

a shame carrier      I am doomed to wander

      I am a “vortex of empty space”, where

my bitterness and brooding calls out to the Hag

our dark truths passed between us like a smoldering joint

shared suffering never articulated leaves residues on my skin

causes an itch that cannot be scratched

I am a curious contradiction like the ‘sun and its shadow’

trying to forget my own fragility

suspended between two worlds

I exist between night and day where ‘salt becomes wisdom’

and at the end of my bed a pack of black dogs

on my lips a thickening scar          tastes of a toxic soup,

a fog and within it a spell cast over the victims

we carry our shame to the dance floor  

the crimes of our ancestors     a collective illness    

their ‘original sin’ follows us to the after hour clubs

this time rich boys and bikers       occasionally an allergic reaction

earthbound alchemists we all learned that the rising of smoke cannot be hastened

that sometimes ‘passions are their own punishment’

~ Jonina Kirton

Home from the D&C

Thanks!