It’s a dialogue
with my father, spirit world
and myself

Reaching back across distance
dislocation, despair
to recoup what’s been lost

>– as an arnaq >–

With memory, genetic memory
landscape, language, naming
::: time capsules :::
that both house and restore
the connections

An attempt to speak
in foreign language
english, writing, emotion...
to a residential school survivor
who mostly never speaks

Attempt to express
several things
we have never been able to say

This image washed up
like debris from a wreckage
long before my time 

I held it up like an old slide
saw the beautiful place I once knew as home 

Blood memory in aged hues
…something about my mother
…buried in my father 

She passed when I was young
He left when I was much younger 

Still, that ground is my birthright
I would have to cross the void

He met me there
Dug up enough words to tell me the meaning

Akia
“the other side”
/ that beautiful mountain seascape of our home

 The secret memory that kept him alive
when he was taken away 

His beautiful
   silent
      resistance

 …the name he gave my mother

 The other side of our void

Sealskin

In lieu
of Inuktitut

In lieu of drowning
in all we cannot breach

In hope ancestors at least
receive my felt encryption
from the distance in which I’ve been cast

(like that planet they found, in outer orbit
named for our goddess transformer, bottom of the sea)

Especially for her

Sealskin

to wrap our feeble, terrified hope
heartache, desire

in soft warm protection we ourselves
never had

Link to original publication at The Capilano Review