National Poetry Month : Trish Salah,

 

Marked out

 

when is one in a poem
            and not
in doubt? 

   if the page was always
untrustworthy
            have  you
as well?

   i would like to list the things i know
  it is a short list
                                                                        not quite equal
                                                                          to what i want 
                                                                                       nothing to do with       and there
                                                                                    i can’t even begin
and   we say the world
  is dying

who has time for a short list? 

the world is dying
             and tenacious
it returns
            snow now and ice
                        as perpetual
            forecast
                                    or         forests of fire
                                                            to have emptied the sea
                                                                invited it in to land
   as dim and fading hope

   what we hope
is that we are survivable
     for something beyond
            our own
awesome fatality

 

 

 

Trish Salah lives and writes in Tkaronto and is associate professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, located on traditional Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee Territory.  She is the author of Wanting in Arabic, which won a Lambda Literary Award, and of Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1. She is a Pushcart nominated poet and has poems in recent issues of Mizna and Tripwire, and in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. She is editor of the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, and co-editor of special issues of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, on cultural production, and of Arc Poetry Magazine, featuring poetry by trans, Two-Spirit and non-binary writers.