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”]