Undoing Hours
Nightwood Editions
2021
Copyright © Selina Boan, 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, [email protected].
Nightwood Editions
P.O. Box 1779
Gibsons, BC V0N 1V0
Canada
Cover Design: Angela Yen
Typography: Carleton Wilson
Nightwood Editions acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.
This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled, ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free and printed with vegetable-based dyes.
Printed and bound in Canada.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Undoing hours / Selina Boan.
Names: Boan, Selina, author.
Description: Poems.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210106107 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210106158 | ISBN 9780889713963 (softcover) | ISBN 9780889713970 (HTML)
Classification: LCC PS8603.O226 U53 2021 | DDC C811/.6—dc23
If I’m transformed by language, I am often
crouched in footnote or blazing in title.
Where in the body do I begin;
—Layli Long Soldier
the plot so far
ask / what is the history / of a word / a lake of commas / a pause in the muscle of night / a dry river and the snow it holds / i am afraid of getting this life / wrong / a thick- rimmed fence / coins settled in a drawer for food / eat half a lemon and you’ll feel fine / i promise
in the dictionary / the nêhiyawêwin word mahtakoskacikew / translates to / s/he settles or lays on top of everything / i’ll tell you a story / i stained my hands as a kid in the backyard where i grew / peeling open walnut shells / trying to find the part i could eat
at sixteen / i scaled the green water tower / settled at the top for a better view / dreamt mother wasn’t young / driving a VW van cushioned with gas / hands on the wheel / wearing fire / she was / and i wanted to believe
from the ground up / growing / i never learned the hul’q’umi’num’ name for the place i lived till i was gone / there are earned stories / names you don’t share / i once slipped into the bay / cracked my feet on dock barnacles and bled / i wanted so many ways / to settle / our hearts / a window / a plot / a piece of land we wanted to call our own but was / not ours to name
meet cree: a practical guide to language
tires on concrete motorcycle thrum pitch smack of shoe after shoe after shoe a podcast plays through a wall & a girl sits in a room with a window
she wants to learn her language but can’t find the noise wonders awe’na na’ha a girl bristled with sun fearless as shadows she wants to find kiya wants to read herself past syntax she is noun inflection light looking footsteps inside a word coming closer
she’s a tongue turned over her desk a muscled red flop half/ nerved not/knowing stumble stutter spill a difference between want & (l)earn how the tongue scrapes itself into sound the girl gathers what she does not know into noise
clip of a rez car revving lake laps & berry coke fizz bingo pings hill humming her roommate’s podcast fades out in a city near the ocean she sits in her bedroom looks up the word for lonely kakaskeyihtamihk eyes on the swing of traffic outside ears like tunnels where sound begins to wave
morning in our apartment, a small, wet funeral
i drown a rat in the kitchen sink tie back my hair and whisper sorry.
cassie on the plastic stool repeats the rat’s good life, hands on her knees
like we share the same body, hands that pinch and squirm.
cassie on the plastic stool is a lemon wedge,
soured and nervous, she repeats the rat’s good life.
i tell her, when i was a girl, i was given the tail of a baby squirrel by my dad.
first animal he ever shot, placed in a blue box under my bed.
for years, i slept over his story of a BB gun, a branch and his own dad barking to shoot.
for years, my roommates and i have been trying to catch the rat party
that surrounds our lives, the after-sound of heartbreaks and boiling water
through the drain of the tub. you can hear their teeth at night,
a loud shadow we brush our mouths to. we spit and bleed and polish.
cassie and i eat breakfast standing up. try to bleach
the death out of our walls, the brass vents. we chew cereal and our disbelief
like muscle on a plate, the rat is an exhausted blade,
a kneecap dislocating from soft tissue.
this morning, a light reflective road
disappearing behind us. i want to carry the rat all day
in the yellow no-frills funeral shopping bag
i want to take her to the grocery store and to the library to pick up a book,
suddenly certain she can read, the weight of her body swinging
so close to mine.
ongoing conversations with my acne
u are like a once-known animal in the sky of my face, a pattern of bloated stars
running the territory of my cheeks in wolf form, teeth that pop
snarl and grow only to eat away the day near mirrors
u feel so grand i could cry
a blueprint of oil on the bus ride home from work at night
i can barely see the planets burning above us bending through the window
in the thesaurus, constellation comes up with luck future and circumstance
my circumstance is mom driving her car into a culvert, seeing
photos afterwards—flash