Taxonomies of Hope
Vulpes vulpes
This morning, a red fox
ran past the window,
brushing her cinnamon tail against the glass—
too fast for me to get a good look.
And just yesterday, I dug
a glove from the garden
where this fox had buried it—
a present to her future self?
A forgotten plan, safety
deposit box, revenge act?
Maybe she thought to herself,
If things get really bad,
at least I’ve got this glove here,
which should tide me over for a few days
while I figure out next steps.
Ode to a Rebound Breakup
The light reflecting off my neighbours’
shingled rooftops has not diminished,
nor has my gratitude for the way you held
tomatoes in your broad, gentle hands.
We talk less now, but you still dream
of electrifying the highway to the Arctic
Ocean, you want to build a new future
from sunlight and hydrogen, you wrestle
kilowatts from diesel one windmill
at a time and I like all that talk of energy.
Possibility feels like a strange synonym
for goodbye but when I look down
the hill toward your house I see it’s still
summer and there’s no sunrise, sunset,
or hailstorm; the sky, blue over your place
and blue over mine, is still holding up.
Spring Thaw
On the front hood of the buried
Toyota Matrix, a small
avalanche. Tiny, but snow is snow.
A crack opened at the crown,
the slab detached and slid
right off the body, leaving a sheer
ice glaze over red metal. Sometimes
skiers, sometimes dynamite, what else
triggers avalanches, my son asks, and I tell him
that if a cornice falls, if the weight
of accumulated powder leaning over
convexity pulls hard enough to release,
if the earth shudders, or the day warms
quickly in the bright sun after
a storm. We’ve seen these weather cycles
all year. Heaviest precip since 1972
and winter’s not over yet. We measure these
months in metres. Some days, these big
feelings can take you by surprise.
In a stand
of short spruce
you
wouldn’t guess each needle
breathes
its own mantra
twice a
week, works out
at the
discount gym downtown
or runs
the Black Street stairs
to take
the edge off November.
Though
just now as the blush
of
afternoon sunset begins
the boreal
forest forgets all that.
The
needles tinge pink, belly laugh
at one
another’s new jokes, blow
oxygen
smoke rings toward the late show
exploding
over the horizon
Jamella Hagen’s first collection of poetry, Kerosene, was published by Nightwood Editions and her second collection, Perfect Weather, is forthcoming with Gaspereau Press in spring of 2026. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Yukon University, and is an affiliate poetry editor with the Alaska Quarterly Review. Her poetry has won The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, and has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry. Recent work has appeared in Ploughshares, Canadian Literature, and The Globe and Mail. She lives with her eleven-year-old son, Rowan, on the traditional territory of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council in Whitehorse, Yukon.
