10/18/2019 Poetry: Nisa MalliPRAYER FOR HOMESICKNESS We brought tetrapacks of scents so our children would know the smell of summer rain on earth, video to show them what life looked like before and after the heat boiled the rivers and soil was never truly damp. In gravity just loose enough to trip us, our children lost their parents’ hooked-necked gait, their fixed hip-flexors, their fixation on shielding themselves from the sun. They grew leggy and light-kneed in this light world, grew out of their hand-me-down flight-suits. In their new home, where there is no way back, we wanted them to know what it means to come from and to a place. WE SPREAD OUR MILITARY MISSION in a thin serum of science, sent our soldiers into the desert with dictionaries, our exobiologists armoured in exoskeletons. In movies, first contact is almost always a surprise: the alien among us, unveiled by inhuman behaviour; the ship shimmering into rush hour. Ours had the formality of a late-collapse climate summit: everyone avowing commitment to shared cause and collective consternation, the real debate ducked into side rooms and under- mined by ceremony. All the safety protocol of first dates or hiking in bear country: begin in daylight, in public, pull rank on the audience of predators pulling their tongues out in hunger. Nisa Malli is a writer and researcher, born in Winnipeg and currently living in Toronto. She holds a BFA in Writing from the University of Victoria and has completed residencies at the Banff Centre and Artscape Gibraltar Point. Her first chapbook, Remitting, was published by Baseline Press in 2019.
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