looks as if I could never
sleep again with that ruckus
from river ships, floodlights
cutting into cocktails
thrown overboard
for better luck. Though
I’d never grow lonely
conjoined with other bodies
of water in buoyant song
or riverine thrum, hands and tails
freshwater motion, gin fast
at the mouth, I may have said all that
over espresso doppio
and sugar beet toast when you side-eyed
a homeless woman
across a cobbled street in Prague
her thorax encased in sleeping bags, a lowering
gate for pedestrians to skip over, “seaweed
and tangles of oil spills for hair? That one?” Yes, if a woman
can splay herself out
across the grid like that, what if I lay
shallow and curved
across this map, undercut—
(nevermind the dashed lines of borders)
carved over our fathers’ scythes
our mothers’ flax hand-beaten
at the hip of the Danube,
pushing against drakkar rib
cages in black waters—
our own engagement trip
cut from the pages of travel guides,
the gentle lake
marshed and pitiful? So, better loved
then I take flow,
necking at the bend
making soft beds
in milky rapids, streamlined,
bypassing the shapes of caution
marking this trip: us, moths crisscrossing
the electric nerves of borders,
and their guards whose firearms
resemble night bones arranged
into chevrons of one-way arrows
orbiting blast zones of burnt-out capitals.
It’s all a question of systems.
How serpents glide splitting grass,
how rivers tongue the ears
of sandbags
touched by the fire of shaking hands
and yes: how I can be
drawn out in blue lines
but if history is written
into the vertebrae or borders—rivers
don’t hold on
to such things.
Bio
Aldona Dziedziejko
Aldona Dziedziejko is a first-generation immigrant writer and educator. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in Globe & Mail, CV2, Poetry is Dead, The Capilano Review, Fiction Southeast, and PRISM International, among others. Her work has been recognised through the Lina Chartrand Poetry Award (CV2), Magpie Poetry Contest and the Hummingbird Flash Fiction Contest (Pulp Literature), Lush Triumphant Literary Prize (subTerrain), Off Topic Poetry Contest, as well as Room Magazine’s Short Forms Contest. Recently she left her post as a guest and teacher in a hamlet in the Tlicho region belonging to the Dene people. She is now living near the Rocky Mountains in Clearwater Country with her partner, daughter and a dog named Henry.