Kaie Kellough

… a two-day bus ride to the northern border where the family crossed into Canada, suitcases in hand.”

– CBC News, September 13, 2017

welcome turning selves in, selves traveling through space, turning being in to paper

flesh becomes white fiber for deliberation, legality in question, self a question mark

welcome signatures, boxes checked on forms welcome dossiers deconstructed

sequences of numbers queued up to be filed, sorted, detained, catalogued, welcome,

interrogated, archived, speculated upon in the news, counted, and either welcome,

accepted, rejected, re-counted, queued up again, filed into a different queue, chased,

fled, welcome, or stalked in limbo in borgesian bureacratic labyrinths, trash-talked

by pundits, welcome, whispered about in polite living rooms, opined on from the

middle class on down, welcome, debated in wood-paneled parliament encircled by

welcome, by words, invoked to stoke fear, vilified as terror, as other, welcome, now

tossing on narrow army cots chrome and canvas reality, minimal without aesthetic,

the furniture of state aid of newsflash

people arrived from portugal. people arrived from africa. people arrived from
india. people arrived from england. people arrived from china. people
predated arrival. people fled predation. people were arrayed. people populated.
whips patterned rays into people. people arose. people rayed outward to
toronto, london, boo york. people raided people. people penned the past.
people roved over on planes. people talked over people. people rented places.
people planted people in people. people raided plantations. people prayed.
people re-fried. people died and didn’t get second glances. people won
scholarships and vanished. people lived atop people. people represented
people. people drain-brained. people studied for the common entrance.
people paraded. people stumbled and tranced. people took two steps
backward. people simmered and boiled over. people plantain. people orphan.
people sugarcane. people undocumented. people underground. people never
lauded, landed. people arrived but. people             . people departed and
arrived again. people retreaded. people stole knowing. people plantation.
people horizon. people done run from people. people arrived not knowing
their patterns. people arrived riven, alone in the world. people made their
war from time. people hailed from climes. people fanned their spreading.
people cleaved unto people. people writhed over / under people. people
arrived over / under people

the truth?

is the white cursive issued from a brick chimney

is a skeleton in brown gabardine

wandering the underground city, an accent

adrift in its second language

over a b-side version of empire

i speak french. i am a sovereign state drifter

winter hinterlander with a mortgage

and expired aeroplan points, a vacation blazing

on the credit line

unnecessary to my history, my culture extracurricular

creole vernacular stutterer, i ride the metro

underground with my fur

collar tickling my chatter, metro shuttle station to station,

but i don’t matter, carapace of white earbuds contains my rude –

redemption, i go to work in the heart of a conquered

devotion, a thin mist descends over me

a blown surrender,

snow falls through me. it is always snowing inside me.

my hand is a blue fleur-de-lys torched by autumn

my sap is slow, it hardens glistening in its circuit,

the sharpness of pine and spruce tingles

on the yellow edge of my breath

i find refuge from winter in the hudson’s bay

boxing day sale. born in a corporation, i can’t pretend,

i was not born on the equator,

i died in the upholstered ease of a sedan, and here is my after, city blistered

gray by salt and winter, work in a tower, a payment plan carrying anonymous

class aspirations, and this

is my squalor, an abstract longing to cruise the foothills in a lincoln continental

hearse, bleached teeth chattering nonsense as the zero of winter ascends