folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets
Awake
After Ross Gay’s “Sorrow is Not My Name”
I wake with a start – a late-night phone call,
an overturned car, a blade slicing a wrist.
It’s like my mind trips over an uneven step.
The feeling that I’ve lost something – my wallet,
my phone, the one person who went through it all
with me. So how is it, that even in that lurching
moment, I think – isn’t the breeze sweet at 2 am?
The leaves in the yard shiver like sea spray. And doesn’t
the start – the misstep – sharpen that moment too?
Yeah, yeah – the news is shit. We don’t feel right
in our skin these days. The usual ways of numbing
no longer work. But stay with me to see
another
night sky like this. Someone somewhere is painting
a canvas, writing a song that will make you catch
your breath. All your old love notes
will spill
out at your feet. It will soon be
sunrise
on Barrachois beach. And look!
We’re here – wide awake for it all.
The
beaver swims past our canoe
His
sleek head moves through the mist,
like our paddles, like water off his back.
He’s disinterested in us. We dock at our
campsite – tarps tied to trees, logs
dragged to the fire pit, and tented.
How easily the lodges we make ourselves
can be breached – a rupture, a flood
of regrets, an early check-out time. Home
can be rebuilt – retractable tent poles,
boxes flattened from the last move,
family photos ready to be rehung.
I’m not sure if it’s a shame or a sign
of strength how practiced we’ve become
at rolling up sleeping bags, forwarding
mail to a new address, updating ID.
Too
soon, the sun burns off the mist.
The beaver disappears in the log jam.
We pack up our gear, every piece
placed in the car with care – a dam ready
to burst when we open the door home.
In terms of what I’m working on… I’m “on the verge” of putting together a full-length manuscript, but it feels a bit too early to say anything more about it lest I box myself in.
Lana Crossman is an Ottawa-based poet who grew up in rural New Brunswick. Her work has been published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Bywords.ca, flo., Room, Untethered, and other journals, and in her chapbooks, Buoyant, at last (Rose Garden Press, 2022) and Pics or it didn’t happen (Pinhole Poetry, 2024). Lana was shortlisted for the John Newlove Poetry Award (2018) and is a member of the Bywords.ca selection committee.