National Poetry Month : Annick MacAskill,

May 6

Birthday at Bow River: the water sea glass

beneath the threat of clouds,

sunk below the neglect of their houses.

An imperative of crows emerges

from the pines in a whirl of black arrows,

and the broad paintbrushes of magpie wings

appear in a shock of white on green. You hunt

for the smooth perfection of skipping stones,

but others have come before. I watch as the Australians

clutch the long necks of fly-fishing rods, cast

into the river, the lines slinking through the air 

in the confused elegance of ampersands. We walk

along the shore under the humps

of Sleeping Buffalo, to where a controlled fire burns

at the west edge of the property, seeping

a single thread of smoke—trusted because benign.

Annick MacAskill's poems have appeared in journals and anthologies across Canada and abroad, with recent publications in Riddle Fence, Literary Review of Canada, The Humber Literary Review, Best Canadian Poetry 2019, and The Stinging Fly. Her debut collection, No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau Press, 2018), was shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Award and nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her second collection, Murmurations, will be published by Gaspereau in spring 2020. She lives and writes in Halifax on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq people.