It Begins in Salt (Downloadable PDF)
It Begins in Salt, a book of poems, wanders the halls of an ocean blue-collar life while rummaging the heart spaces of growing up, and evolves into mothering, labours, and loves. The poems explore the ways the heart grows, and the tentacles of complexity grow and evolve “to infinity”. This book of poems is a love letter to those that share the tides of life. It urges us to love harder and give homage to those loved.
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Natalie Meisner
Natalie Meisner is a poet and playwright from the Mi’kma’ki /South Shore of Nova Scotia and Calgary/ Mohkinstsis 5th Poet Laureate. She combines survivor comedy with hopepunk in the service of social change. Baddie One Shoe (2019) is her book of odes to renegade women. Legislating Love: The Everett Klippert Story is a stage play based on the true story of the beloved Calgary bus driver whose plight spurred the decriminalization of homosexuality. Speed Dating for Sperm Donors is a comedy for the stage based on her family’s story, and was a hit at Neptune and Lunchbox Theatre. Double Pregnant: Two Lesbians Make a Family topped non-fiction lists and My Mommy, My Mama My Brother & Me is her children’s book about a two-mom biracial family finding community. She is a wife, mom to two great boys and a Full Professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta.
Undertow
At what age could you
feel the difference in the suck
of a riptide & an undertow?
& how old were you
when you learned to parse,
in cups & teaspoons
the salty ocean of other people’s
needs & let a wave: sine & cosine
bottle green liquid fist
roll you over the sea floor
buoy you up,
deposit you alive onshore?
Do you suspect your bones
are only yours on loan?
& can you see the the tiny infants
sleeping in the curve
of the sweet dark pupils of the old?
Have you yet answered
the fitful needful question
they never tire of asking
in the conch of your ear:
whoseboygirlboy are you?