In our bed
we try to banish the bad luck
we’ve acquired. We open
all the windows and I chant
my sorrows into the sun-choked
trees. Your seduction technique
needs work, you tease. But naming
what weighs me down unsticks
the trauma of all that pins me
upright—our daughter’s stroke,
the days of care, the listening
for a fall, a cry, a rage.
Your tired tender arms await. How
you’ve waited. Your patience like dough
punched down and rising, like sap primed
for solstice, or a slumbering cicada.
How you trust the turning, watch me
shed my brittle skin to become
a winged thing. How we clatter
the skies with our arising.
Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes, lives, and caregives on the unceded Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). Find her work in American Literary Review, Passages North, Poetry Northwest, and The New Quarterly. She’s won some awards (2024 RBC-PEN Canada New Voices Award) and a gazillion rejections. She keeps writing.
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