12-9-2024
Canisia Lubrin
RETURN #2
What am I to make
Of two or three small sons
Of anger with its talent for mixtures
Of thank yous that slide on the present-like a sl(h)ope
Of the sweetly ordinary: take this small son, his red wafer
Thin chalk drawing of the other son, them making things making
White hymn of all the hymns to all the sons, and what by this green world
Up as early and as well as anyone, up until Uphood, as well the bee, the kawé
In the drizzle and in the tune of the dragonflies and in the tune of the two or
Three small sons lit up with the same charge of what the world heaves in
The night desks and the advances of the lost who leap into age, father
Into a mother and an honest word for keeping the talents
Whether or not to combine whether or not to bring
Anger with the small mass of a clean life-small
Son and so on, present-like of what
What am I to make
DREAM #3
says you too
live borrowed
on minor eases
you bow before
the nulling wall
lower every hurt
so geometric, every
crude word a hard
line in the dirt, I
will talk less
the perseverance,
you’d like what else is that wounded sense
of kneeling, or else waking up diffused
funny as the need to be more explicit
funny as the scathing and still
to decide to play
a joy
in the unlocked note already enough This sweetness is atomic Is candlelight or conflagration Say you are wise to be alert Say please look out for strange
metaphors seeking lodging in your temple Say they, god-like and impure
DREAM #17
let them say I have seen the long days
I have seen them rising from the huts
as smoke, I have seen them, as forests
turned brown & flat for remembering
themselves, wishing that we had not
factored into their algorithms, & now
I have seen the long days arrive with
Things I do not know, nothing too much
If I’m lonely, nothing too little if I’m
Able to drain the desert & leave the ocean
Empty long enough for a new beginning,
Why have the long days arrived far from
The valley of the kings, still with the machinery
bearing the insignia of ruling governments,
what monotonous pride if they say
I drank milk they bought with a fraction
of our natural selection, believe
them such reckless regard for a few
hours over the long reach of us into some
hot place, a future perhaps? I have seen
us with their machinery & watched them
arrive knowing our desires and leaving
with our deaths, and now you have too
where is your problem with dream
-from The Dyzgraphxst, selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Fall 2024 Guest Editor, Hollay Ghadery
Canisia Lubrin is an acclaimed poet, editor and writer. Her writings explore ideas of social justice and the limits and possibilities of art, form, and language. Her books include the story collection, Code Noir (Knopf, 2023). Her first book Voodoo Hypothesis (Wolsak & Wynn, 2017) was named a CBC Best Book. Her second book, The Dyzgraphxst (M & S, 2020) won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and the overall Literature prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Derek Walcott Prize. That same year, she was awarded the Canada Council’s Joseph S. Stauffer prize for literary achievement and the Windham-Campbell prize for a body of work. Among other honours, her writing was finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Anthologies that include her fiction were finalists for the Toronto Book Award and the Shirly Jackson Award. She was twice longlisted for the Journey Prize.
Lubrin is a 2022 Civitella Ranieri Fellow and has held writer residences at Queen’s University and the appointed inaugural 2021 Shaftesbury Writer in Residence at Victoria College, University of Toronto, where she has taught creative writing. Lubrin previously taught at the Banff Centre, multiple community and literary organizations, and universities and colleges in Toronto. Her work is widely published and anthologized and has been translated into four languages. In 2021, the Globe & Mail’s named Lubrin Poet of the Year. She is poetry editor at Canadian press McClelland & Stewart.
