Menu
Subscribe
Search
Poem of the Month
Untitled (“I will present a huge fire”)

By Natasha Kanapé Fontaine

Published on November 2, 2016

I will present a huge fire
I will burn the residential schools
the paper acts

And with a single gust of wind
brush away every pipeline
the caribou will come
running with the buffalo
the horses the deer
there will be a great trembling

The caribou
the buffalo the horses
the deer will come
with the land
drown the pipelines

We will burn
the residential schools
the paper acts

We will embody
a huge fire.

(Translated from French by Howard Scott)

More Poetry

The Genus Nabokovia

March 2015
Taste of tangerine.
Blue as Tuesday.
Wings, the texture of powdered sugar

Novelists are serious about taxonomy–
the blur of color and text on labels
of blue butterfly genera.

a love-hate song to a hometown

June 2012
In Fredericton, we climbed buildings we ate Chinese in the valleys of elementary school roofs, me spitting out the oil

Rua da Felicidade

June 2014
Walking down Rua da Caldeira, on my way to the Street of Happiness. Rua da Felicidade. These narrow two blocks were the hub of the infamous Macau red-light district back in the twenties and thirties, and after.