Or else, her heart a wingless hummingbird—little one, that is why
The ribs are called a cage.

At last year’s prestigious Ho-Lit awards
I won the coveted Layton Medallion
(rhymes with ‘Canadian stallion’), now nestled
in my chest hair as I winter in Crete.

Back to a beginning, these walls and I.
Not the first beginning for me,
and surely not for these walls, but we go back.
We know each other’s secrets.
Having seen each other scraped down,
And my father, how he worked,

In the white world
lives are depressions in a surface crust
scents pressed into the river’s pelt.

May patrollers season the spring leaf
by finding a Public 31
illegal