Earthway

by Canisia Lubrin

zone one.

We open the door of a motherless city
Find the soil is bearable

Two lifetimes of extinctions swim into our mouths
The future—a figure of speech

We laugh ourselves into a bruise, a midday shadow
spills ruined copies of old cities at our feet

      Lobs their printed heads
      at the death-fetching sergeant

We meet in the procession on our way to something
      blue and scorching

Do I sound the Atlantic’s long rage?

Octave a girl’s symbol of a god’s
hatching toward god-shaped 

Invisible, this skip of a stone at night
toward a vision of the world tested
on saltwater though never earned

Dark cargo, long ago, bending today
where you could skip a stone on this light

The whole weak-eyed plan from dog
to woman, bicce fined to speak hourly 

What should we make of them…
the knotted strands of that last frame?

New distance between nouns and consolation
Or symbols: mother, caretaker, wife, a certain
something threading doors, lines of salt

Calcine an armoured eyebrow: lift any weight
and I am unprepared for anything you ask

The roots and air

We live in the everything else
The lower harbour where the tide erases
itself as would a photograph
entombed in its chemical wash

We erase the paper that marks us present
because we are nowhere with Lucille Bogan
in the earbuds

And being nowhere I have no plans but to blink
all day, I wash my mind in this rust of stars
that makes the shore, the cosmic effluvia yawns

Besides, I’ve given us both my teeth

My aerosolized liver, my once-crushed spleen
I gave us both my teeth, do you remember?
Both of them decayed:

 CANISIA LUBRIN

is a writer, critic, editor, teacher, and winner of the 2021 Windham- Campbell Literature Prize for poetry. Her book, The Dyzgraphxst (McClelland & Stewart, 2020), won the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in the poetry category, and appeared notably in such venues as The New York Times, Quill & Quire, Jewish Currents, Humber Literary Review. Lubrin’s international publications include translations of her work into four languages. Her writing has been listed for, among others, the Toronto Book Award, the Journey Prize, the Gerald Lampert, the Pat Lowther. She received a Writers’ Trust Rising Stars award in 2020. Voodoo Hypothesis (Buckrider Books, 2017) was published to wide acclaim, and named a CBC Best Book. Find her work in Poetry, Brick, Poetry London, Poets.org, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Lubrin’s debut fiction, Code Noir, is forthcoming from Knopf Canada.