For an (ig)Noble Cause

Gathered at a community fundraising gala, a local first nation’s Elder shares her story of surviving Residential school. It is not my story to tell, nor do I have permission to do so. Survivor of Residential school.

There is small town politick at play. The mayor’s wife has been distributing literature refuting the level and gravity of the child death and nature of removals of children from their families in Canadian Residential schools. A momentum builds: the Mayor does not disavow this behaviour, more stories emerge, a local business is implicated, the plot thickens. Our citizenry, the gala attendees some of the more prominent historical family fixtures, is divided. Divided on the merits of “free speech” about the death of children.

Tables in the gala quiet when the Elder speaks - as quiet as wild grasses growing over unmarked graves.

All but one. Two wealthy families carry on their conversations. They must know. They draw looks of consternation, but with the brevity that only wealth can compel. The monoliths of logging and the old money stand unmoved against the battering tides testimony and truth.

Walk by the unhoused -

I play the Fool

my spring-crisp gala suit

Field School

I search the faces from the passenger seat for your angularity and uneven distribution of freckles. I know I won’t be able to make out the freckles, but thinking about it this way makes you mine, crafts you into a uniqueness that ties you to the grief of prolonged loss. I get to search for you hardest when I am a passenger. A friend taking their turn to drive this week allows me to fruitlessly scan the bodies on Hastings. I am looking for your too-tallness, your swaggered step, your hustle. Dad says you once told him you prefer it here, the “king of the gutters” or some such nonsense. It feels like a game where neither one of you is willing to call the other one’s bluff.

heart jumps

silhouette-come-brother, then:

“another fucking junkie”

I learn what I am capable of -

missing your scent

cigarettes and vomit

biglove/littlelove

Vipassana

exhale cinder

inhale the morning dew

Wake up scared. Crying but without tears. For just a moment, the images on the news last night felt real. But the kind of reality twisted by dream-logic where all things happen at once. All the moments that other people have lived (the ones of flesh and bombs, of torture and fire, of platitudes and otherness) have happened, are happening, will happen. It envelopes, casts away the security of distance and in the moment between sleeping and wakefulness he implodes. He is a supernova sending it’s scattered light across the galaxy, a warning for those who feel too much, too quickly.

Reaching out

across morning birdsong

rest a hand on her breath