"In six, the seasons" by Selina Boan
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: May 12, 2017 12:54 PM | Last Updated: May 12, 2017
Summer
between the warmth of language
and a four-walled room, a girl clicks Beginner
Cree on the internet, a divided circle,
a laptop, a desk and a full screen
of a flat skyline hung below
the Cree word
Nīpin (knee-pin)
summer in northern Saskatchewan
thick with mosquitoes
July hatching
heat
learning the seasons into six
a girl listens to her father's first language
alone, never having been that far north
she hears sounds like a knee-pin
a forced fracture, fixed
with pins and wire
Fall
a girl grows up only to trip again
falls into her not knowing like a knife,
every season, a birth
father's blood balanced between
a want for words where no words are known
she'll imagine
takwākin (tak-wwa-a-kin)
how leaves commit themselves
to change
how grass rolls gold
moose velvet lost to the land
take away a kin is not the right way
to hear it, how her tongue tries and falls
from the outside of a window screen
and the inside of a room
Freeze-up
site to site her fingers touch glass
lake sheen zoom, a picture,
a frozen rain warning for the prairies
white letters against a red screen
on google, she searches
her grandfather's seasons into sound
mikiskāw (micki-scow)
for when language braids
the ground still again
and the ice moves in
cracks closing
a girl can search the space between
a season and a scow, a boat unbound
where words float rivers
swim the surface, here
and here and here
Winter
a girl in a room in the wrong month
can repeat one season two hundred and ninety-six times or more,
an elder's voice stretched
from the laptop screen, power speaks
Pipon (pip-oon)
water solid
and a thumb of trees
exposed
her lung sound
a vowel pulled into a room
a sound it out write it down
try try again,
long reasons to keep repeating
Spring
a bulb of light, a breath,
door open like a square of sun
the girl taps into a woman's voice
she's never heard before, a wish
the web an elder's word
Sīkwan (seea-gwen)
sound combed into lake water
goose necks
settled into the shape of questions
how to say when a word is more than a word
she hears a sequin of mother's English
disk-shaped bead
balanced
and weighed on the tongue
Break up
a girl between two dialects
still a screen and still a searching, learns
break-up can come before or after spring
depending on where you are
depending on where you are
online, back and forth between
knowledge and knowing
a difference of space
a word in the mouth
Miyoskamin (meeyous-ska-min)
birch sapped June
season snow spotted
river melt
running
her want for memory
where no memory exists
child again
all slim wrists and creek bone
a river-girl
slick with mud
frost and word melt
Miyoskamin me and you are s-kin
Miyoskamin me and you are s-kin
Miyoskamin
in grandmother's language
where the body never stands alone
a girl's tongue curls Cree into the nerves
and walks from a room
to where miyoskamin returns
and ice
opens