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…
- Gossedel the Wily
El’s house, like her, sat on the fringes of a polite community. Where the town ended and the fields began, a few houses, including El’s, barely remembered how to belong. - Concussed
My eyeballs twitch to blink, they dry out before I remember, staring but not seeing, To Blink. - Is This The Place?
The taxi drops me off in front of monumental Victorian gates of stone. The guard hands me a tourist map and directs me to the genealogy office when I tell him I’m looking for family.
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.