RUNNER UP: "I had to get out"

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"Great storytelling takes place here. In each section, in a few masterful lines, one can hear an entire community. We are opened up to a world, rich and colourful. This is an honouring of family, but it is also unrelenting in its reality, and refusal to ignore the painfulness of growing up and finding one’s way in the world. The poet balances both joy and despair wrapped together in evocative images that linger, on the tongue, in the nose and in the mind."

—Faith Arkorful

     1

     It was how those suburbs    sang. Cannabis stores sprawling
            through plazas like a plague. It was the Greenbelt.
The way we could walk a kilometre
     in every direction and still  end up
nowhere. It was the train tracks opposite the soccer field rocking
         my bed at night. How I’d fall asleep to crossing
         bells. That you didn’t teach me Tagalog—let alone
                spoke its name in our house, so all I can remember
                           of our mother
              tongue was how many ways it could beg for
         forgiveness. How could I even describe it to you?
     No beginnings. All ends. What was
left of the hospital on Queenston Street where I stole my first breath
     and ran with it
            was rubble, and a single stone archway that opened
     to a close.

     2

     It was the elementary school with no rooms. Makeshift dividers
separating open-air classes, angry words
       rising like heat setting the building ablaze. How we stopped
     dropped and rolled, hid snickers
under paired desks, while Mr. G     smacked
     his pointer against the chalkboard with a piercing
        snap—shrapnel sent bouncing to the rhythm
           of the national anthem. Remember
when my first-grade teacher gave us baby hamsters in a cracker box?
                    Laughably irresponsible.
                    Returning home from school one day you said
             they died and buried them
                   in the garden. That summer
       the hydrangeas grew double in size.

     3

       It was the vacant parking lot a block over.  The perfect
           altar. How I’d get on my knees and pray
backseats like pews, and tell you: I’m just going
            for a walk, while I dressed myself pretty
               for slaughter. Did you watch me? Stand
            at the kitchen sink like an unwilling
                     guard tower. It was Christmas break,
        then. You drove me to the Walmart walk-in clinic at our local mall.
                             Sidewalks so slushy  shit
        brown footsteps marched down every aisle. But the doctor
pulled my pants down and shame
     carved itself onto my jack-o’-lantern face. It’s ok baby
     you said—just be careful. But what if I told you
             I liked it? What if I told you the thrill
             was not being caught but being   seen
          for the first time?

     4

     It was how those pigs wailed outside your childhood home
          in the Philippines. Remember that?
                Tito pulling the mother from her children.
            It was way past our waking hours, and I was five at the cusp
                       of memory. Noose around her
          neck. I wouldn’t understand it all immediately. I didn’t know
we were poor. Let alone your name
            was your mother’s  first.
         It was only until I woke up the next day and walked out to piles
         of fresh meat for sale that I knew: there was a cost
for hunger. An ocean settled between us on the drive home
       from the walk-in clinic. I checked the requisition form again
       and realized the doctor had filled in the box for SEX WITH
       WOMEN. I laughed so hard I thought I could   sing,
       but you peered through me—an island
behind us, a stop light
       ahead—and slammed your foot so hard against the gas pedal
      we flew past   tomorrow,
        we flew past      this country.