Billy-Ray Belcourt

i fall into the opening between subject and object

and call it a condition of possibility.

when i speak only the ceiling listens.

sometimes it moans.

if i have a name

let it be the sound his lips make.

there is no word in my language for this.

sometimes my kookum begins to cry

and a world falls out.

grieve is the name i give to myself.

i carve it into the bed frame.

i am make-believe.

this is an archive.

it hurts to be a story.

i am the boundary between reality and fiction.

it is a ghost town.

you dreamt me out of existence.

you are at once a map to nowhere and everywhere.

yesterday was an optical illusion.

i kiss a stranger and give him a middle name.

i call this love.

it lasts for exactly twenty minutes.

i chase after that feeling.

which is to say:

i want to almost not exist.

almost is the closest i can get to the sky.

heaven is a wormhole.

i first found it in another man’s armpit.

last night i gave birth to a woman and named her becoming.

she is four cree girls between the ages of 10 and 14 from northern saskatchewan.

we are a home movie

i threw out by accident.

all that is left is the signified.

people die that way.

1. my body is a stray bullet. i was made from crossfire. love was her last resort. his mouth, a revolver. I come from four hundred no man’s lands. 

2. “smell my armpit again/ i miss it when you do that.”

3. his moaning is an honour song i want to world to. 

4. one of the conditions of native life today is survivor’s guilt. 

5. it is july 2016 and the creator opens up the sky to attend a #blacklivesmatter protest. there, she bumps into weesageechak and warns him that if policemen don’t stop killing black men she will flood america and it will become a lost country only grieving mothers will know how to find. this, she says, is how the world will end and be rebuilt this time. 

6. haunting is a gender. gender is another word for horror story. 

7. “i can hear him screaming for me, and i can hear him saying, ‘stop, honey help me.’” 

8. i am trying to figure out how to be in the world without wanting it. this, perhaps, is what it means to be native. 

2: from Lilting (2014, dir. Hong Khaou).

7: see :h ttp//www.cbc.ca/news/canada/Calgary/rcmp-gleichen-christian-duck-chief-excessive-force-1.3521620

make my mouth into a jar 

spit inside me 

throw me into the air 

leave me there 

pretend that this is love. 

whisper: tonight, we will be children 

tomorrow, the feeling of being in two bodies at once. 

pray, if it gives you a tongue

a book for words that fall flat 

a book that does not like to be written in. 

where do you come from? 

i am from the back alley of the world.

after tomson highway

girl of surplus. girl who is made from fragments. she who can only

be spoken of by way of synecdoche. she whose name cannot be

enunciated only mouthed.

mother of that which cannot be mothered. mother who wants

nothing and everything at the same time. she who gave birth to

herself three times: 1. the miscarriage. 2. the shrunken world.

3.the aftermath.

sister of forest fire. sister who dwells in the wreckage. she who forages

for the right things in the wrong places. nothing is utopia and so she

prays to a god for a back that can bend like a tree splitting open to

make room for the heat.

aunt of the sovereignty of dust. aunt of that which cannot be

negated entirely. she who is magic because she goes missing and

comes back. she who walks upside down on the ceiling of the

world and does not fall.

kookum of love in spite of it all. kookum who made a man out of

a memory. she who is a country unto herself.

father of ash. father of a past without a mouth. he who ate too much

of the sunset.

1. follow me out of the backdoor of the world.

2. how do you tell someone that they are helping you stay tuned into life?

3. what does it mean that her first breath was also her last?

4. i am so sad that i burrow into the absence of every boy who has held me.

5. i kiss him knowing that when i wake up i will be in a body differently.

6. the future is already over, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have anywhere else to go.