​LOVELETTERS TO THE DEEP
 
My eyes & conscience are clear.
 
I filled my backpack with rocks
& loveletters to the deep & swung
it into the lake. I grew up with hardened
shoreline instead of sand between my toes.
Myths become less plausible every day. Mermaids
pulling twist ties from their gills & kraken choking
on plastic bags mistaken for squid, limbs shredded
by propellers.
 
Oil slicked wings hold no air, no matter
the skies they fold into themselves.
 
Rivers choked with plastic like my father’s arteries,
dredged from the bones of sleeping giants, cling wraps
the voice to my throat
for a species that worships gods of convenience.
 
I sunk a knife into a tree trunk &
it bled. I tore open my calf on a
rusted nail & tried to stop the
sap leaking through my fingers.
 
I raised a rifle to my shoulder,
shot the expectant moon & felt the
spray on my cheek. Felt the
sky recoil.
 
I set fire to the sea & built
palaces of salt.
 
Our futures have gone from picket fences
to picket lines. Youth is its own burden.
I explain to an old white man why having
children would feel immoral, & he suggests
I trust that they will fix this, as if that was not
what his generation already did. Blind faith in
false gods, hope an offering left at their shrines.
Myths become less plausible every day.
 
My eyes & conscience are clear.

​Qurat Dar (she/they) is a spoken word performer, poet, multi-genre writer, and environmental engineering student. She has had work in Augur Magazine, The Temz Review, and Anathema Magazine, among others. Qurat was a 2019 recipient of the Ron Lenyk Inspiring Youth Arts Award and is a Best of the Net finalist. She was also recently crowned the 2020 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam (CIPS) National Champion. Their debut poetry chapbook is forthcoming with Coven Editions.

Find them on Instagram: @itsnotquart and Twitter: @itsnotquart

NOTES TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOCENE FABLE AT A RUSSIAN SAUNA IN MISSISSAUGA

Rumpelstiltskin’s first wife, I enter and exit
the steam room in a eucalyptus cloud.
 
My rumpled robe scratches. Silt rises
to skin surface. I scrub my pores with sea salt.
 
I pull a rusted chain and a wooden bucket
tips cool torrent on my head.
 
No one in these microclimates has a name
big enough for forests, for air.
 
I am trying to outrun my recurring
daymare, the one with the turret.
 
This olive string bikini, once sinuous,
is now only fit for sweating myself alive.
 
I beg a sauna man in a wool cap
to wave his parched birch wand.
 
My inner bitch wakes up, whining.
I haven’t fed her in too long.
 
My cells realign themselves, spread
around. I eavesdrop on the heat,
 
practice different pronunciations. He ate,
she ate, we ate all the sun’s treats,
 
licked black seeds from slit vanilla beans,
plucked gold croaks from toad throats.
 
I am trying to escape the king’s wealth,
the kind that slashes and slinks through holes.
 
I get to stay here longer than all the white rhinos,
the bees. Will I hand a firstborn to the burn?
 
Infused with cedar scent, buzzing, I lower
myself into a barrel of glacial water.
 
I imagine a cryogenic prince charming
carrying me, limp, into the next ice age.
 
Soothed, I shower. Calmer and slower, I sit
in the tea room afterward, drinking
 
vodka and kombucha, replenishing
my salt sea with pickle brine.
 
A television screens our ever after, a nature
documentary about bleached coral reefs,
 
all those fabulous bows and rainbows
frozen white in the sunshine.


 
Originally published in PRISM International (Issue 57.4: Spring 2019)

​Catriona Wright is the author of the poetry collection Table Manners (Véhicule Press, 2017) and the short story collection Difficult People (Nightwood Editions, 2018). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Walrus, Fiddlehead, and Lemon Hound, and they have been anthologized in The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry and in The Best Canadian Poetry 2015 & 2018.