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GAY INCANTATIONS

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

i fall into the opening between subject and object 
and call it a condition of possibility. 
when i speak only the ceiling listens. 
sometimes it moans. 
if i am a body let it be the sound his lips make. 
there is no word in my language for this. 
sometimes my kookum begins to cry 
and a world falls out. 
grieve is the name i give to myself. 
i carve it into the bed frame. 
i am make-believe. 
this is an archive. 
it hurts to be a story. 
i am the boundary between reality and fiction. 
it is a ghost town. 
you dreamt me out of existence. 
you are at once a map to nowhere and everywhere. 
yesterday was an optical illusion. 
i kiss a stranger and give him a middle name. 
i call this love. 
it lasts for exactly twenty minutes. 
i chase after that feeling. 
which is to say: 
i want to almost not exist. 
almost is the closest i can get to the sky. 
heaven is a wormhole. 
i first found it in another man’s armpit.
last night i gave birth to a woman and named her becoming. 
she is four cree girls between the ages of 10 and 14 from northern saskatchewan. 
we are a home movie i threw out by accident. 
all that is left is the signified.
people die that way.

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