Issue 50: Summer 2020

Living

Hear the rainstick rush of elm seeds/ seeking a soft place to begin the pain of living.

 

Hear the rainstick rush of elm seeds
seeking a soft place to begin the pain of living.

The red-winged blackbird calls You’re a lot like me.
The tender reed his cord and he the sleeving.

My daughter believes movies are real.
She has a hunch where all the dinosaurs are living.

Phone cords under the bed make me think terminal.
Lines drawn between the live and leaving.

I remember. I remember when you were never born.
Still. What if you are among the living?

I keep my window open, despite the wind.
My wings are wide enough for you to live in.

 

About the author

Angeline Schellenberg’s full-length debut about raising children on the autism spectrum, Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016), won three Manitoba Book Awards and was a finalist for a ReLit Award for Poetry. In 2019, she launched chapbooks with Kalamalka, JackPine, and Dancing Girl Presses, and received nominations for The Pushcart Prize and Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year. The host of Speaking Crow, Winnipeg’s longest-running poetry open mic, Angeline has read at festivals and reading series across Canada. Her new collection of elegies is Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press, 2020). She is currently working on a Manitoba Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts-funded poetry project in response to odd questions people ask the internet.