Eye use 2 dream in colour Prisms of inner eagle visions Pastel spring High Park bloom colour Rich velveteen Rouge Valley autumn colour Feathers of winged ones Bond between father sky and mother earth Eye use 2 dream in colour Prisms of inner eagle visions All my dreams are beginning to fade My days are cooler At night Jack Frost visits me Knock Knock Knocking on my window pane Driving me insane with his insidious laugh Cuz he knows our people never come back . . .
poetry
II. Blackbirds at the Money Mart
What sight could prepare us for
our children failing?
New mothers
flutter past meat markets on Bloor,
their mascara thick as lace, looking past
pensioners puffing by the sports café,
Eritrean men and their talk of progress.
Once they were girls who waited
behind counters, stacking custard tarts
& bacalhau fritters in Portuguese bakeries,
hanging up aprons to smoke on the stoops
of the Women’s Centre and Payday Loans . . .
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 6. Purchase the book to read the full piece.
these are things that grow in winter
cold weather birds redouble efforts, wrenching invisible crumbs from dirty ice; fake flowers bloom into expectant second faces, spring anachronisms against mint houses melting into peeling, pistachio porches . . .
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 5. Purchase the book to read the full piece.
the menu in my heart is all wrong
my stare
goes from the plate
to the dainty language on the menu Golden Baskets, a tiny quintet
of brittle pastry shells . . .
then back to my plate,
and I wonder what my spice-obsessed
hawker-stall friends in Bangkok would think
of defrosted veggies baked in cardboard-stiff pastry cups
on the Danforth, limits of Greektown,
middle of a snowstorm . . .
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 5. Purchase the book to read the full piece.
Toronto locations referenced in this piece
“I wonder what my spice-obsessed hawker-stall friends in Bangkok would think of defrosted veggies baked in cardboard-stiff pastry cups on the Danforth, limits of Greektown, middle of a snowstorm . . . ” —Danforth
Clinton Street Poem
Dear God, could you move the sun? It’s in the painter’s eyes.
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 4. Purchase the book to read the full piece.
Chinatown East
Keep holding me like this and help me untie my birth language my first language steeped in bruises, knotted up in a child’s still body petrified with fear words thrown at me alcoholic bodies raging into me embedded like ceramic shards all around my little heart me, so small and already convinced my home felt like captivity . . .