Chris Bailey

Melt

The moon is made new while we sleep, while we don’t,
while we put our eyes out kitchen windows to birds,
cloud formations, trees shaped by wind. You dream
a highway while I’m under a sky of not-quite California
stars that hover above PEI, me trying to find surprise
in the line, something I haven’t gone over and over before
like my boots across fibreglass boat floors these last 20 years
or the scar on my forearm from the plate they slapped in
after Anthony, drunk on rum, rolled his mustang by my parents’
place and all I could do was brace for impact, crawl slow
from the wreckage. So many things could’ve took my breath
and kept it, but instead I get to follow it wherever I go.
The blind German shepherd lies at my feet wanting voice
and touch to show her there is more than herself
in this old house numbered like emergency, disaster.
Scent of clear night makes her long to see again.
There’s a melt on. Water threads brown grass,
bootprints, past the rawhide bone the raven will claim
come sunrise. It’s the shadow that arrives before the light.

Chris bailey

is a commercial fisherman and graphic designer from eastern PEI. His writing has appeared in Brick, Grain, FreeFall, The Fiddlehead, and has been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories 2021 and 2025. His first poetry collection, What Your Hands Have Done, was published by Nightwood Editions. His second, Forecast: Pretty Bleak, is out now with McClelland & Stewart.