Frontenac Street Sign

she is reading her blanket with her hands

by Sharron Proulx-Turner

I am humbled by the women and girls in my world, and I thank the great spirit for their presence. my métis grandmother, germaine proulx-boyce, taught me to embroider, to work with ribbon. I’m told I have hers and exilda dufort-lafrance, my great-great grandmother. I’ve passed these hands to my daughter, barb, and to my granddaughters, jessinia and mazie. these hands of mine love to write, and I’m told my great grandmother, rosina lafrance-proulx, was a poet, that she talked to the trees, to the plants and animals. and now she talks to me. more than fifteen years ago, rosina’s voice in mine, I woke up to the words “she is reading her blanket with her hands,” the birthing of the poems in this book.

Reviews

Sharron Proulx-Turner’s book she is reading her blanket with her hands encompasses love and death, journeys and discoveries. It is a powerful work dedicated to family and friends and reads like a mother’s song to her children, the way in which a mother will say listen, the way a mother will hope and dream. The book is also a dedication to women: the victimized, the paralyzed and the empowered.” ~ Mary Barnes, Prairie Fire

Sharron Proulx-Turner mixes an amiable prose with a verse so free it gets downright trickstery to unfold the small talk impulses behind the familial and the familiar into songs and meditations, prayers and autobiography. In the process, her notes dedicated to family and friends also reveal and revel in large chunks of the Canadian landscape and re-inscribe in those natural places figures that history erased, the figure of the particular contemporary Metis girl, woman, mother and grandmother she herself was and is, sitting centred on the blanket and “inviting anyone awake/ to take the chance/a lifetime of dreaming our selves/one small bird at a time.” ~Daniel David Moses

Samples

one crow sorrow two crows joy

for joy hendrickson-turner

green in the hills
like lines in a long & sensuous poem
each one a careful reflection of the next

sisters walking & something about crows & sand & clams & black bear beach, about rapid rivers & rivers wide as lakes. these were the beauties for us, the peace. the sand from the beach, coarse & hot & cleans the feet in seconds. acorns from a grandmother oak, leaves bigger than men’s hands. those great trees, the oaks & the maples & the white pines, growing in our backyard, our schoolyard & us playing marbles in the sand, making necklaces from pine needles, elegant & long. climbing trees. hiding in the bushes. kick the can all the way through to the big kids’ school.

we’ve walked together in all weather
in blizzards, laughing in the cold
in hail, running for shelter
in the company of birds
crows & hawks & ravens
magpies & whiskeyjacks & geese
osprey in the hot, hot sun
& chickadees in the bitter cold

we’ve walked through the chill of our childhoods
& into a prairie meadow
filled with the healing power of sage
of sweetgrass all around
& there your beauty
is intensified by your smile
your most excellent sense of humour

I remember when you were born
your smell after coming home from hospital
the smell of new life
of what joy can mean
in an embodied way

if I were to express my love for you, I would walk with you on the side of a mountain, the snow deep & us pumping our way from camera to tree, camera to tree, trying to take a photo, our footprints deep & slow & our laughter all around. the air there, in those mountains, has a quality that’s hard to describe – an intelligence & a voice, a story. & the two mountains with us in the photo, like sisters reflected in each other’s home.

high on a mountain
laughing
where a single moment
is worth more
in that instant
than years of not knowing

blood rushes to my fingers and the frozen blanket’s off the line

remembering joan marguerite boyce-turner, 1932-1986

they say it's hard to talk about death 
sometimes it's hard to talk about life 
death's a new beginning 

my mother isn't good to me when she's alive 
she doesn't like me 

right from the start she doesn't like me 
she says I try to kill her from in her womb 
tells anyone who'll listen 

I'm the biggest born 
a fat baby 
goat's milk bread and sugar's how I stay that way 
too slow for cow's milk is what they say 
soft in the head 

I'm the slowest to walk 
the slowest to talk 
I'm toilet trained very young 
and then begin to dirty my drawers again 
so I'm put back on the diapers 

I wear a diaper and suck a soother till I'm in school 
I'm beaten a lot and raped by many men and women 
and that's not just the half of it 

my mother says she destroys my childhood pictures 
as they come along 
some say I make that up and rip them up myself 

it's not true though 
so I never see a picture of that fat baby 
or the crosseyed girl with crooked teeth  

they are close my family 
thing is the closeness is unhealthy 

keeps the cocoon brilliant with its own poison 
my family touches wrong
there's no telling who'll blackout and go hogwild 

there's one thing about my family though 
never a dull moment 

sharp knives maybe 
but never a dull moment 

because I see my family that way 
as a mass of bone and fibre and light 
for my kids and their kids' kids 

I stop the drinking 
the violence 
the incest 

not that I stop going there every sunday like a sun dial 
when my mother is alive 

I cook 
I clean 
take care of the kids 

and make sure the breakables are out of the way of the adults 
thing is I'm not no saint you understand 

no angel either 
but by golly gee holy smokes I'm workin’ on stuff 
and that there's one weird family I come from

my mother phones me twice in my adult life 
the second time she calls she can't stop choking 

she quits smoking about six years or so before  
that's about the same time she switches 
from beer to rum and coke 

drinks to blackout 
she's at work when she calls 

she's crying and sounds scared and scary at the same time 
I go and pick her up and take her to her doctor 
this is a friday 

sunday she has emergency surgery 
they're going to remove her left lung 

they close her up after they open her 
and there's nothing there but cancer 

she's very ill from then on 
dies eight months later 

two days before my mother calls me up and choking 
I call her up to tell her today I'm leaving my husband 
so while my mother's dying I'm feeling 

pretty good 
and I feel guilty and ashamed 
and happier than I ever felt in my life 

not that I wish death on my mother 
but the knowing is so delicious
so liberating 

I can see her dying every day 
after a few months 

she wants me to go to her house 
and clean every second day 
which I do 

she wants me with her when she goes to chemo 
she wants me to help her pick out scarves to cover her baldness 

she wants me to get her tea 
she wants me to feed her 
she wants me to soothe and swab the open sores inside her mouth 

she wants me to sing to her 
she wants me to massage her when she 

smells of cancer and morphine and death 
and her bones are her only curves 

and then her bones get the cancer too 
too painful to the touch 
and then her brain 

and then her brain forgets to tell her body what to do 
forgets to tell her body how to take her into death 

any day now
the hospital folks say 
any day now

day after day after day after day
I love my mother 

for a long time after her death I'm sick with hurt 
and glee and anger and grief 
not any more though 

then this summer my mother comes to me in a dream 
she tells me she is different 

she can help me now she says 
she can come to me like my grandmothers 
I am not too comfortable with this 

so I frame a photo of my mom when she is just a girl 
a picture at her first foster home 

behind her left lung there's laundry on the line 
abuse and fear and danger that's just hangin out to dry
image

she is reading her blanket with her hands
ISBN: 978-1-897181-18-8
Price: $15.95

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