The Present, Missing

a friend of mine, lovely to be-

hold for being decently real

reminding of my mother or her

sister who could not hold on

or that friend who could not ever

quite get Cree vowelling down

on the verge of making a few

changes when out of nowhere

the axe

fell.

No elder or pooh-

bah, therefore

MISSING

from political photo-

ops, even stock photo catalogues

and certainly never the protagonist

in novels or romantic comedies

celebrated as the “Strangler” for

not handling the Batoche Bell

with enough holy holy holy

reverence

landing in Regina

with her last few bucks, with

child without a father

and years

later when the young woman

went missing, the local sex

workers helped her search

but the police did not

though Native

folks go missing on snowy evenings

all the time

and sketchers modify

features to sell dying newspapers

because only the perception of a

victim can reach a demographic

but whether dead or vanishing

in the age of mechanical repo-

traction

the living are somehow

missing

from our syrupy hockey-

rioting six-packing cultural whoop

still not finding quite the right role

in our red-hot company romance.