Seeds

I pray to catch
on fire, to get caught
up in a lightening storm,
burn my body back
to earth. The woods
are overcrowded. Stillness
lost, boardrooms and clearings.
We competed for the sun,
reaching out for the last
solar flare, arcing slowly
over you lying still on the couch.
Mortgage research and persistent fungi.
Abortions whispered
into rotting logs and deer hooves.
I nearly slipped hard
in the rain water,
the thick coating of mustard.
Just missed
disturbing a mosquito
nest brimming
with potential babies.
What kind of father would you have been?

Bios

Conyer Clayton

Conyer Clayton is an award-winning writer, editor, musician, and arts educator living on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe land. She is the author of But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. (A Feed Dog Book by Anvil Press, 2022), We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Guernica Editions, 2020, Winner of the Ottawa Book Award), and many chapbooks, including two with the Ottawa-based poetry collective VII, of which she is a member. [provided for the poem “Seeds”]