What To Wear, The Black or the Yellow

I wake into the bitter sadness of the world / deciding who to be, how to participate.

I wake into the bitter sadness of the world
deciding who to be, how to participate.
I drink my coffee, listen to the news,
read James Wright's "The First Days,"
how the

    huge golden bee (ploughs)
     His burly right shoulder into the belly
     Of a sleek yellow pear


I consider fortifying my reclusion,
after all, each of us, born into being
through the whip of their mother,
is only a bulb condensing at the tip of a branch,
something round and pearly,
an isolated fruit or drop of water.

But something in the determination of the letters,
in how the words fill the mouth with a syrupy sugar
informs me that I am not only the poor pear, pendent,
but I am also eating the pear.

The poem shoulders me into presence,
cleans me as a river does, water over detritus, dirt.

About the author

Erin Wilson is from an island community of a couple hundred people. Her poems have appeared in Grain, Prairie Fire, EVENT Magazine, Freefall, The Antigonish Review, Dalhousie Review, Queen's Quarterly, Riddle Fence, Room, Vallum, and elsewhere internationally. Her second collection, Blue (whose title poem won a Pushcart and was long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize), is about depression, grief, and the transformative power of art. Recently, she was chosen by Lorna Crozier as a co-winner of Planet Earth's Poetry Spring Contest, A Tribute to Patrick Lane. She lives on Robinson-Huron Treaty Territory, in Northern Ontario, Canada, the traditional lands of the Anishnawbek. She refuses to carry a cell phone.