If you sit long enough
after Marcia Falk
If you sit long enough in the city
all the happenings become the same;
every rushed swish of suit or worn-out shoe
crisscrossing, circling
like the scent trails of ants
like water molecules in currents
that converge, diverge, bump into flotsam
and evaporate into the mouth of the wind.
And you begin, like a steel tower going up
to lean on your foundation.
Smog breath, river-park breeze, these
elicit neither panic nor joy;
you find your body on a hard bench, and beneath all
that asphalt and self – soil and worm, water and rock.
~ Juleta Severson-Baker
Juleta Severson-Baker
Juleta lives in her hometown of Calgary where she writes, teaches poetry and performance at the Mount Royal University Conservatory, works as a birth doula, and raises her two children. Her poetry has been previously published in All That Uneasy Spring(a Leaf Press chapbook, ed. Patrick Lane), the journals NoD and Freefall, and online at Verse Daily. In 2010 she won Freefall magazine’s 20th Anniversary Chapbook Contest with her collection A Hundred Pelts. Her first full-length manuscript, Incarnate, is being published by Frontenac House Press in Fall 2013.
To read more of Juleta Severson-Baker’s poems click here
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