Mitchell Prize 2021

N 58° 10.684’  W 125° 45.021’ Muskwa Kechika, Homelands of the Kaska Dene, Treaty 8 and Tsay Keh Nations   First snow briefly on the backs of moving animals in the high altitudes. At the lake’s edge I’m waiting for the hour when the pain makes sense. The loon’s empty dance hall levitates. Several unproven…

i ———Where did it come from, this call ———to the interior— you will tree plant in BC forests, four hour by chopper from Prince George. The cork boots, belt and shovel bandanas and bungees, tin stove and tarp all packed, the many days drive in an ancient van sealed with shiny hope and duct tape.…

I remember the clouds yesterday— cow-belly low and heavy, pregnant with Irish rain— the way they hugged Quinn Abbey. clouds the colour of stones, shale grey and lichen-shadowed. ———Masses lighter than the ones on that first ———chemo morning, heavy rain sliding ———down the pane, as my son knelt ———beside the shocking yellow puke and bile.…

The lake has a provisional name. It has had other names. It’s possible those names were also in some way provisional, unless the lake has a name for itself. Facing it, it’s feasible to believe that the lake really does have a name, one it has given to itself and that it keeps. It keeps…

i. I was circling in a dry cistern pit, when I asked the Spirit to gamble on me. What were the chances, half-in and half-out, that I’d answer the ad in the paper? ———————Tossed in the box by the phone, it waited. Shame makes a hornets’ nest deep in the body. I’d lost twenty years…

I. – He must have hopped. How else could he have come —–out, as they tell us, with his hands and feet —–bound? and the loud voice ordering the winding-sheet —–to be dismantled, and the residuum —–of grief being wiped away? We live with this —–clown of a body, Brother Ass. We wipe —–the faeces…

                                in the Congo basin Children crack palm nuts milked of fats, stripped of orange. They smack nuts on rocks, split out the kernel of ndika, chew the smooth flesh and spit a festive spray of whitest white, ———like the…

and no sooner had the eaves of my eyelids drunk deep of that water than to me it seemed it had made its length into a circle. ––Paradiso XXX.88–90 I. In what now is Beaudry Park, West of the Forks, the Assiniboine is not so brown and muddy you can’t see upside-down elms, shifting in…

In the immediate vicinity of death, the mind enters on an unaccustomed order of sensations, a region untrodden before, from which few,very few travelers have returned…Here…the pilgrim pursues his course alone, and is lost to our eye. —————————–—Bishop George Burgess, 1850 I have watched the horse, the roan, turned loose, graze side by side with…

—————————–“The real aim is not to see God —————————–in all things, it is that God, through us, —————————–should see the things that we see.” —————————–– Simone Weil Daybreak the bones of dream break the light Breakfast spoons lifted from the drain board to spend time in the yogurt bowl beside the plate of steaming scones…