How we exist in the world
depends on how we describe it.
Have I always been in the world?
No, I’ve been autumn in the middle of August.
I’ve been the wind as well as the tamarack tree
seconds after its final needles drop.
Don’t tell anyone, but I’m happiest
when my life feels like autofiction.
In Alberta, the twentieth century never ended.
We are all subjects of the twentieth century,
I say to a man I just met on the internet.
It sounds like a riddle for which the answer is the body.
Every winter, I take pictures of the snow
because the snow reminds me
of my impermanence. Mostly, I want to be undone
without being ruined. An NDN truth?
The present is as beautiful as it is brutal.
Billy-Ray Belcourt is a poet, author, and scholar from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, This Wound Is a World.
