Poem by Anna Mark
Birthplace
It was the hayloft’s aerial devilry— stench of rot in the heat,
barn boards strewn with excrement, swallow and bat,
littered with too many winged corpses for a child to revive—
that compelled her
to startle the nestlings’ dormant balconies into a frenzy
of throats, ablaze at her pounding steps’ command,
to exhaust their instincts.
One thing leads naturally to another in the hayloft
and she tests the sagging boards, judges if they’ll hold
and dangles her burdened legs, weightless now, free as a bird,
soothing figure eights stirring everything
into the cauldron, the barn below, which is her way out,
where she steals a nestling and cradles its listless body,
barely alive, and she didn’t, couldn’t— can’t put it back, but
cradles the hallowed hollow where it belongs.
About the Author – Anna Mark
On the territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, Anna’s poems appear mostly in Canadian Journals: Literary Review of Canada, CV2, Spadina Literary Review, Pinhole Poetry; forthcoming in Canadian Literature, Prairie Fire and others. She enjoys writing as a practice of transformation, and watches for those mercurial words in herself, others and the trees!
Keep Reading…
- Birthplace
It was the hayloft’s aerial devilry— stench of rot in the heat, barn boards strewn with excrement, swallow and bat, littered with too many winged corpses for a child to revive— that compelled her - Whispers
There are whispers. They call like echoes in empty space, So that we may find a semblance of shapes amongst the darkness. Only here, on the precipice of passing, are we forced with the honest truth. Like rivers, we ebb and coil and stretch far beyond the measure of our bodies. - Motherhood in the Plague Year
Sometime between the murder of George Floyd and the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, I started to think about killing myself.
Meanwhile, at Dreamers…
Fireside Writing Retreat
It’s simple; a set of prompts, a loose structure, and time set aside to move through it at your own pace. You can follow it closely or not at all. There’s no expectation to produce anything finished.
Dreamers Writing Farm
Dreamers Writing Farm is the physical home of the Dreamers community, a quiet, creative space on the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario. Writers, artists, and travellers stay here throughout the year in simple, literary-themed cabins, tents, and studio suites.