The 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology Read online

  sasquatch. In the winter

  the poor souls gather

  round him for warmth

  as he hugs them one by one.

  * * *

  He likes to smoke cigars

  and does so in his one room

  just off the main drag.

  As he blows the smoke,

  he brushes his long hair

  from his face and takes a sip

  of cheap wine and stares at

  his feet. He smiles, remembering

  his mother always telling him

  to keep his big feet clean.

  So he does as the cigar smoke fills

  his one room, his hairy hand raising

  one last toast to his mother.

  * * *

  Some nights he meets with the lost

  and they ask him for guidance

  and forgiveness. He gives them

  both, telling them it’ll be alright

  as they carry on with their misery.

  He brushes the hair out of his face

  as the next lost brother comes

  to show him his wounds. The sasquatch

  rubs his hands together and places them

  upon the wounds. The man is healed

  and says Thank you as the sasquatch

  turns and pukes out the poison

  he has taken from his brother.

  * * *

  One night the sasquatch does not

  come out so someone who knows him

  goes to his room and finds him

  in his final sleep. A cigar in the corner

  burns slowly and as the smoke

  goes up into the air, the spirit of

  this sasquatch also begins to float

  back to the sky. As he returns

  to his home, he looks back down

  to the people of earth

  and whispers, Thank you.

  I Don’t Know When I Am Going

  I put a stake into my arm

  to become Christ on the cross

  and all those thoughts and

  big desires come to me

  as I take myself off the cross

  and my hands and feet bleed.

  The blood drips onto the floor

  as I sit in this shithole of a city.

  For me it is more wonderful

  than any picture of heaven.

  * * *

  As the day mixes with torment

  and old blessings, I open my eyes.

  The first thing I see is the big city

  and all the evil. There in the distance

  I hear the wolves as they howl

  to the great moon. Up into the mountains,

  they sip the pure waters and move

  even higher to join a group of angels.

  Together they dance the night away.

  * * *

  As I sit in my squalor, I remember

  being a small child on an island upriver.

  We were so simple and all we had to eat

  was the fish we caught the last summer.

  I remember the salty smoked taste

  as my mouthful of new teeth chewed

  and chewed. When the drugs are all gone

  I know I will be sick so I go out and hunt

  for the blackness. When I find it, I stop

  and rest and stare up to the heavens.

  * * *

  To me it is just the dark skies

  of empty secrets and I smile

  as I remember being a child back home.

  But now I do not have any teeth

  to chew on smoked fish. I stopped

  eating long ago anyway and now

  inject my liquid dinner into an old arm

  and rest here as the heavens open up.

  All you can see are the angels and wolves

  as they dance upward and upward

  until they are no more. The sky

  blackens again as I sit here

  and chew away what is left of me.

  Songs of the Mountains

  There was this man who was

  a simple man. He loved his family

  and listened to his elders

  when they spoke about the past.

  Like all of us, this man had a gift.

  He could hear songs: he was able

  to pull the songs out of the air

  when he was on his boat fishing.

  He would share them with the elders

  and they’d tell him those songs

  were gifts and one day they will

  go back to where they came from.

  But for now, the man was told

  to share them in ceremony,

  at funerals and gatherings, where

  he was joined by drummers

  and singers. One day those songs

  went back to where they came

  from until another young man

  had the gift of song.

  * * *

  There was another man they say

  came from the sky a thousand

  years ago. He had many gifts

  but he was very strong and it was

  his belief that the people must

  listen to his teachings. When they

  did not, he would go to them

  and give them a choice—and

  these men would always

  choose wrong. Now they

  are turned into large rocks

  or mountains. Some were

  also punished because they

  overfished or hunted too much

  or they were just greedy and

  selfish. The mountains around

  the river grew and grew over

  the time he was among us.

  He gave us all his teachings

  but some of us, even today,

  do not listen.

  * * *

  There was this great woman

  who carried the gift of love

  and she also carried the gift

  of giving each child their gift

  and she would always travel

  by canoe. She would go up and

  down the river and she would go

  into a village where all the children

  came to her and she would touch

  each child upon the head and later

  in their lives they would find

  their gifts. She would also go

  to the mothers who had just

  given birth where she would kiss

  the child and lightly blow into

  the child’s mouth and each of

  these babies would survive

  all the diseases our people

  would suffer. Each baby would

  be given a name and a gift

  by this great woman as she

  would leave the village

  and paddle by canoe upriver.

  * * *

  As she passed by,

  a new mountain

  would appear

  and in the distance

  she could hear a song

  she had not heard

  in a long time.

  As she paddled

  and paddled,

  she smiled.

  The Sturgeon’s Lover

  In the deepest part of the river

  there lived a great sturgeon

  and she swam along the bottom

  and fed upon the dead who had fallen.

  She was about three hundred years old

  and when she was full, she came to

  the surface and jumped as high as
/>   she could and all the males came

  to her and she kissed each male

  and let them have her. Months later

  she quietly went to her favourite part

  of the river and there she released

  her eggs in the millions and then began

  again to swim the bottom and to search

  for any new bodies that had fallen

  from upriver, which she feasted upon

  with her old softly kissed lips.

  * * *

  The legend goes that a fisherman

  had fallen into the waters and was drowning

  when the great sturgeon came to him

  and asked him for a kiss. He agreed

  and the two fell in love and together

  they would feed upon all the food

  at the bottom of the river. One day

  her eggs came to life and created

  the people across the water.

  The people lived there for centuries

  and the sturgeon and man would visit

  from time to time, bringing them food

  to survive the cold wet winters

  until the people too walked into

  the water and fell to the bottom

  as the man kissed his lover.

  * * *

  Today we do not fish for sturgeon

  as their numbers have been decimated

  by overfishing and loss of spawning

  grounds. Whenever I catch a sturgeon

  in my net I let her go and she always

  turns back and smiles as she flicks

  her mighty tail and splashes me.

  My son always laughs as I stand there

  stunned and wet, while the great sturgeon

  slowly swims away and turns back

  to blow us a kiss. We both wipe

  our lips as the great sturgeon

  falls to the bottom of the water.

  There, waiting for her, is her lover.

  He kisses her one last time.

  She cries as she begins to eat him.

  Days into Days

  Days turn into days and hours well they

  just creep on and today nothing really

  happened, no angels falling and all that

  and that poor guy still sits on the cross

  in our old church where no one from

  our village goes to and kneels and that’s

  okay too as the day turns into another day.

  * * *

  When you walk with depression

  the world can sometimes play tricks

  on you and one moment you can crack

  a smile and the next your eyes fill with

  tears but you fight them off as you are

  not ready to sob out loud and that too

  is okay, so you try and appear happy

  but really your whole being just

  wants to scream because life is

  sometimes unfair and that poor guy

  on the cross he weeps in our old church

  where we choose not to kneel

  * * *

  For my children I can only imagine

  what they are going through after

  losing their mother and I am there

  for them and they know me pretty

  good and we carry on the best we can as

  our days become days and the hours fall

  as if they were angels from up above.

  * * *

  Let us pray for our children of this

  village as the river that surrounds us

  spills its tears into the salty ocean

  and our children stand up and say

  their names and shout out the words

  to their mother who is now on the other

  side and sometimes they say that God

  is there but we have never seen him

  and his son sits on a wall in our old

  church where we will never kneel.

  Canisia Lubrin

  The Dyzgraphxst

  The Dyzgraphxst is Canisia Lubrin’s spectacular feat of architecture called a poem. In this book, built with “I” — a single mark on the page, a voice, a blade, “a life-force soaring back” — and assembled over seven acts addressing language, grammar, sentence, line, stage, and world, the poet forms, invents, surprises, and sharpens life. Generous, generating, and an abundance of rigour. A wide and widening ocean of feeling are the blueprints of this book. It is shaped to be “the shape of the shape / of the shape of a thing that light curves over time / length to width to depth and all of us its information.”

  here—beginning the unbeginning

  owning nothing but that wounding

  sense of waking to speak as I would

  * * *

  after the floods, then, after women unlike

  Eve giving kind to the so-and-so, trying

  to tell them it is time to be unnavigable,

  * * *

  after calling them back to what

  the tongue cuts speaking the thing of

  them rolled into stone

  * * *

  speaking I after all, after all theories

  of abandonment priced and displayed,

  the word was a moonlit knife

  * * *

  with those arrivants

  lifting their hems to dance, toeless

  with the footless child they invent

  ain’t the monstrous always intimate

  and before any protest turns it inward

  inmate into a vineyard, ain’t there a moan

  * * *

  digging one thousand years into the past

  as by this interruption: do you accept

  this collect call this collect that call

  * * *

  accept the charges how, I, now the daughter,

  is here forgetting the voice of her father

  or whomever the father voiced

  * * *

  magnum me facit dominus, dwindling

  away some rubbery word for fire

  or a glance back to something sincere

  * * *

  Jejune, all of these words inflate our undivided lives anyway

  Dream # 27

  I can feel an offer

  * * *

  a voice and the nightwork

  * * *

  merely inviting sightseeing, or I can

  * * *

  again be the daywork opening dull

  * * *

  if the new forts don’t care the sky is dark

  * * *

  what we make of a more basic abundant black

  * * *

  is not the same as marking the intruding light

  * * *

  or feeling bad, don’t name it leftover-sky, interloper

  * * *

  or call it foreign shelter, porous as I am elsewhere a dream

  someone’s eyesword you left here

  * * *

  * * *

  * * *

  * * *

  * * *

  * * *

  ————————

  word with the wing of a monarch butterfly

  protruding from a tear duct, radioactive

  * * *

  and fallen on the ridge of a cheekbone,

  or a cathedral blocking traffic,

  and now the whole banana

  * * *

  economy my hand scrubs means

  never to name this derangement

  of spent hours, the many revolutions

  * * *

  I have lost, I could not

  number them, though

  I haven’t the heart t
o

  * * *

  leave them (un)numbered

  or to most of all deny

  that numbering at their core

  * * *

  Jejune, all of these words are of people, anyway

  where i have found my good sense

  by its reach into my acceptance

  or omuamua o moo ah moo ah

  * * *

  tout long kod ni bout how this must end

  how dare the undead nerve in my ear

  that does not behave as its length, it exists

  * * *

  to think about the echo one loses as a spaceship

  elides spaceshit, we’re responsible for the decom­-

  posting as the things I calls strange, things called mad

  * * *

  we give to no-one the shape of the shape

  of the shape of a thing that light curves over time

  length to width to depth and all of us its information

  I was that speck in the halogen confusion of myself

  If I were once planted in dirt, if I were once the taste

  of wood after mourning, the split-tongue of the long

  * * *

  beast out of water, another bête belonging to something

  bigger than a point of view, wider than this expanse

  of doors mapping the incalculable coasts of Black continents,