Today, Here
Brandon Wint
Gash my belly like a hunter
fill me with lances, arrows, oiled boughs
open me, beloved
even if it resembles death
even as I doddle through nights like
an ant saddled with too-heavy wings.
I am saying each prayer
is a plea to make this body an opening
did you know
every nakedness can be touched
into a grin? Goosebumped into the opposite
of a bruise. How divine green is, purple is
even the jaundiced eye holies yellow, kins chamomile and honey
yes, all my grief tunnels
through my hips; it is hard to rise from a chair
surmount stone steps, but grief is only one chorus
singing in my legs even here in a city
where none of my ancestors walked
there are others my footsteps echo
the gazebo at the mouth of False Creek.
Beloved, beloved — look at my face
how much softness it still holds, how much I look
like my father who, thank God, is still tallying birthdays.
Whatever is beneath my feet could be full of blood:
bats are falling dead out of the sky, overcome by heat stroke
elsewhere, elsewhere, mornings choke in white phosphorus.
I am breakable as moth wings, incidental as cruelty.
All this body promises is its leaving, but beloved
today, here.
fill me with lances, arrows, oiled boughs
open me, beloved
even if it resembles death
even as I doddle through nights like
an ant saddled with too-heavy wings.
I am saying each prayer
is a plea to make this body an opening
did you know
every nakedness can be touched
into a grin? Goosebumped into the opposite
of a bruise. How divine green is, purple is
even the jaundiced eye holies yellow, kins chamomile and honey
yes, all my grief tunnels
through my hips; it is hard to rise from a chair
surmount stone steps, but grief is only one chorus
singing in my legs even here in a city
where none of my ancestors walked
there are others my footsteps echo
the gazebo at the mouth of False Creek.
Beloved, beloved — look at my face
how much softness it still holds, how much I look
like my father who, thank God, is still tallying birthdays.
Whatever is beneath my feet could be full of blood:
bats are falling dead out of the sky, overcome by heat stroke
elsewhere, elsewhere, mornings choke in white phosphorus.
I am breakable as moth wings, incidental as cruelty.
All this body promises is its leaving, but beloved
today, here.
Brandon Wint is an Ontario-born poet and spoken word artist who uses poetry to attend to the joy, devastation and inequity associated with this era of human and ecological history. Increasingly, his work on the page and in performance casts a tender but robust attention toward the movements and impacts of colonial, capitalist logic, and how they might be undone. In this way, Brandon Wint is devoted to a poetics of world making, world altering, and world breaking. For Brandon, the written and spoken word is a tool for examining and enacting his sense of justice, and imagining less violence futures for himself and the world he has inherited. For more than a decade, Brandon has been a sought-after, touring performer, and has presented his work in the United States, Australia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Jamaica. His poems and essays have been published in national anthologies, including The Great Black North: Contemporary African-Canadian Poetry (Frontenac House, 2013) and Black Writers Matter (University of Regina Press, 2019). Divine Animal (Write Bloody North, 2020) is his debut book of poetry.
Watch Brandon Wint interviewed by Lauren Peat.
Watch Brandon Wint interviewed by Lauren Peat.
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