Billy-Ray Belcourt: Two Poems
LOVE AND OTHER EXPERIMENTS
- he told me he was into natives, but he couldn’t love the traumas
hidden in my breathing.
- how do you tell a ghost that It’s already dead, that it’s a body is a
fairy tale you stopped reading a long time ago?
- what happens when sounds start to work like bandages?
- sometimes love feels like vanishing, like taking apart pieces of
yourself and giving them to someone who can’t use them.
- what happens when decolonial love becomes a story you tell
yourself after he falls asleep?
- i tell him: you breathe us. we are in you. look at the blood on your
hands.
- queer definition: knowing your body is both too much and not
enough for this world.
- i asked the earth to hold all of me and it said i can’t, that it was
too tired to keep all of us in the world anymore.
- sometimes not loving is the most radical thing you can do.
TOWARDS A THEORY OF DECOLONIZATION
- forget everything you’ve learned about love.
love. - investment is the social practice whereby one risks losing it all
to be part of something that feels like release. lose everything
with me.
- indian time is a form of time travel. a poetics of lateness.
- i never liked goodbyes, but some of us aren’t here to stay.
- superstition is a mode of being in the world that keeps ghosts like
me in the living room.
- the afterlife is the after party: a choreography of mangled bodies.
- i made a poem out of dirt and ate it.
Billy-Ray Belcourt, from This Wound is a World, Frontenac House Poetry, 2017. Used with permission from the press.
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