Alina Stefanescu
I meet the birds on their
terrain, the gray of.

Chimney swifts smudged, sifted
from clouds like feathered

cinders, all is blurred or
wisps of smoke, an attendance.

We watch from the roof
of Birmingham's tallest building

& I imagine a flight without
knowledge of falling.

It may be spring. It may be
wind warming a given name.

It may be trapped inside
[naturalized] this thing

I wanted, a motion down-
ward, a foot driving stacks

of sustained Ds over a piano,
the arms of Rilke's terrible

angels. Even the holy cannot
be loyal to three flags

within Thee. I am severaled,
torn from my mother's tongue,

a world keeps calling wings wrong.
Once I ran through high grass

to greet a scarecrow, my hands
holding a skirt aloft. Now,

building, let me go. O
sky, make me stop.
from the journal KENYON REVIEW 
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The distance between falling and flying is unbridgeable. What one wants from flight exists in a perpetual relationship with the sensation of falling—but the cost of landing is exorbitant. To have control or lose control: but never both. To know the verbs that give us homelands without being able to inhabit them. To feel stranded in the space between motion and belonging. One goes to watch the birds from the roof of a building, and Rilke returns in the longing of mystics, in the cave that recreates a cosmos. I don't know what it means to be close to knowing the self in a language that holds me entire. May the byline be stars, scars, and sky, in this one. For now. 
 
Headshot of Vancouver poet, Lisa Gaston
"Lise Gaston Wins 2021 CBC Poetry Prize"

"Here is a poem written with the sensitivity of a monarch landing on the palm-side of a wrist. Its beauty and pain are expressed with a profound emotional intelligence that pulls the reader inward and outward again. In its appreciation of its subject, 'James' invites such wonder and asks what it might take to break the social taboo still attached to the loss of an infant."

via CBC
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Cover of Jorie Graham's collection, Erosion
What Sparks Poetry:
Devon Walker-Figueroa on Jorie Graham's "Salmon"

"This was a language not so much spoken as felt from deep within … and it made me, all at once, begin to ask myself new questions: what are the choreographies by which our consciousness might move—the patterns in which astonishments congregate? Can the poet witness her own inception? What tempos might our impressions take up—only to shed them later on?"
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