Marie-Andrée Gill

Trans. by Kristen Renee Miller

MICROPOEM SEQUENCE

You’re the clump of blackened spruce
that lights my gasoline-soaked heart

It’s just impossible you won’t be back
to quench yourself in my creme-soda
ancestral spirit

Still, I wish we’d poached again, that you’d laced up my fur in
your fingerless gloves, that you’d wrung out my heart like
mounting a pelt to a frame. I’d have shown you I can smile at
myself as a carcass of the word dread.

I’m still hoping
for a door cracking open
for a daybreak
between the lines of our story

But I admit
I would trade my heart simply
for a good bowl of macaroni
and sausages

Landscapes all look like you when you light them up—
polluted woods and streams, uishkatshan
and hawks that appear when you wish for them,
maples along the coulees, shady folds
of the mountains, a sunset that pricks a line
of conifers and the tshiuetin that slaps the houses,
plates of good food, joyrides,
weather that no longer holds any meaning
except in the arrangement of our bodies. 

I’d like to say all that
and quit biting
the skin from my lips

In the village, we watch each other live; we turn to all the cars
that pass; we mark, with orange flags on the edges of dirt roads,
all the places we left our beliefs.

I imagine you’ll hear me
if I think loud enough
and you’ll appear on my threshold

still on the goddamn threshold
there but with a coat on your back

there but not there

I eat it hot whenever I go to the co-op or the pharmacy. There’s
always a memory loitering down an aisle or a corny love song
playing, and it perks me up.

It’s like that saying I hate: eat your hand but keep the other for
tomorrow.

Fear, I save it for the shining eyes of night animals. I save it for
stories of dead children, for black ice and beetles in my hair.

Fear, it’s running into each other at the minimart and not
knowing what to do with our bodies.

Sometimes I close my eyes and pretend I'm there:
you hold the trout; I pull out the hook. With my thumb in the
gill, I crack the bone and kill it. I'm proud to know how to do
that—I think I'm good.

Christ it sucks to have been so happy.

I tempt myself to the edge of a fjord, to a secret place with no
paths. A seal appears beside me, dancing in the water. I shout
HELLO BABY, and he startles and swims off.

In the night, no wind. I wake to the quiet breath of belugas, a
new lullaby, a medley of hugeness and grace. And this is what it
feels like, exactly: a sparkling gratitude, the words thank you
flashing neon above my hair.

I awake to mist, thick mist filled with sunlight—the blurred
radiant expanse, the fluid sweetness, the subtle voice of the air.
Though I want to take the mist for what it is, I can't help but see
a moving, surreal, pointillist painting—a gift.

I touch myself, I read, a squirrel scrambles over me—I'm a
Disney fucking princess. I tramp through the dense forest; I
scratch myself everywhere and I like it. This body, haunted by
backcountry, bears marks of pride and autonomy, endurance
and strength. In these moments I'm all here, unkillable—
nothing much and everything all at once.

And this pulls me out of my head. The closer I get to nature, the
more I feel worthy of its voice, of mine.

Outside is the only answer I found inside.

I, too, can run after elk and listen to the uncomplicated poetry
of aspen.

Under the snow-drunk sun I replace you, in each new trail I
open and enter like a woman in heat, in the sharp, bright paths
of snowflakes, being born.

You know when you dig a tunnel in pairs in the snow, each
taking a side, the moment the shovels touch and the center
falls open and the walls expand outward: that’s us; that, I know.

I want to feel that freedom
of driving after dark
in some unknown town
so late the red lights are flashing

It’s in the sacré of a sunrise
in the music of our surviving animals
in the sorrow of all that shines

in all the slowness
my shaky breath allows

I let time
tune its instrument
accordingly

Kristen Renee Miller is the managing editor for Sarabande Books. A poet and translator, she is the 2020 winner of the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation and the translator of two books of poetry from the French by Ilnu Nation poet Marie-Andrée Gill. Her work can be found in POETRY, the Kenyon Review, DIAGRAM, jubilat, and Best New Poets. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the American Literary Translators Association. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

Pekuakamishkueu poet Marie-Andrée Gill is a doctoral student in literature at the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi and the recipient of two Indigenous Voices Awards in Poetry and two Poetry Prizes from Poetry Prize from the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean Book Festival. Her writing is rooted in territory and interiority, combining her Quebec and Ilnu identities. She is the author of three books from La Peuplade: Béante, Frayer, and Chauffer le dehors.