folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets
tortoise reintroduction
on the way here, city
billboards read 34°C,
but forest enclosure
won’t let go of morning
that easily: downs damp
shadows like dew. pulls
sixty-foot monsteras
straight up the ground.
in quiet light, you
cradle a baking tray jam-
packed with papaya
slices, orange rounds an echo
of the sun. seeds
slipped between folds of
greens. titan meets us
at the door, then draws
into his shell when we
open the latch. on his
back, a dormant radio
antenna sticks out long
neck. c used to walk
transects. shows us, now,
where to put the food
while titan watches. they
spent the pandemic
together: the tortoises ambling
through forest, the
researchers flipping to each of the
channels in order. let
an animal loose & then spend
hours listening for
their radio signals, the long spine of
you turned tuning fork
amid the vines. we nest leaves
at the careful feet of
trees, watch titan move his mouth
around the cucumber. in
the end, he couldn’t go.
his bones aging, soft
lumber across enclosure. radio
static against the
fence. papaya sunk like sun-
light by the trees. c
brings him breakfast when
she visits. tells us
where the other tortoises went,
their scatter, long
movements folding forest
back into itself in
layers. bass line tuned to
trophic web. she’d
walk the transects, write
notes when she found
the animals: coordinates & feeding
habits. now you crouch
next to titan. now i watch him
swallow fruit like a
song. the radio sleeping. the
number 61 scrawled
tight on his back. the radio silence.
hinged duplex for william gunn
after william gunn’s mid-century bird recordings
in the clearing, there you were with
your ears:
steel cartilage pressed to the forest
like a shell.
you
shelled the forest, stole soundbites like nuts.
carried
magnecord in station wagon’s trunk.
recorder carried birds to radio
station.
our soft ears are never the right
shape.
don’t
shape time like fishes’ ears, which harden
around
years. once, i listened to your worn tape
of a manitoban bird. cupped trilling
phone in my hand on bunkhouse porch,
echoes
of
my home before it was home. i hear you
over
the din we’ve each made of collecting,
our own collected dens of sound. there
you were in the clearing with your
ears.
As I put the final touches on my manuscript about sound transmission in ecological and cultural landscapes (neither the first nor last round of “final touches,” but perhaps final enough for its next life stages), most of my poetry work has been to round out its edges: thinking about a newly-speciated trout, measuring error, home-building. Between these edits and spending significant linguistic energy on improving my Portuguese for the first couple of months of the year – not because of this manuscript, but thematically related to it – I have been in a bit of a new-poem lull. That being said, I have been dipping my toes into fiction and am drafting a novel about (more or less) earthquakes, swimming, and the friendships and family forged in isolation.
Tazi Rodrigues is a writer and aquatic biologist from Winnipeg who lives on the unceded land of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation in Ottawa, ON. She won the 2024 Diana Brebner Prize. Her work has recently appeared in Grain Magazine, filling Station, and the anthology I'll Get Right On It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis.
