by Cooper Skjeie
six bundles of sage
lie dormant
at the bottom
of six barrels
twenty-eight moons pass
and rain finally falls
the same night
she left us
to fend
for ourselves
the sky cry and cry and cry
while medicine buoys
towards brim
and fastens tight
to internal thread
our breath holds in the bush
chests tight with trauma
before the leaves sway
a reminder to exhale
momentum gains
and the winds beget
the barrels
to fall
like dominoes
we shadow them
into the horizon
swallowed by distance
crashing
swooshing
filling
tubs of boiling medicine
colonize the canadian shield
as minks and martens
build rafts
from the remnants
of broken barrels
and drift through weighted eye contact
towards a people subdued
in medicinal sadness
with a smaller tub draining
through the palms of their hands
as if to say drink
so we drank
COOPER SKJEIE (/shay/) is an educator and poet from Treaty 6 and Métis Territory. An alumnus of the 2019 Banff Centre’s Emerging Writers Intensive, he won third prize in the 2020 Short Grain Contest for Poetry and was shortlisted for the 2020 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize. His work appears in PRISM international and Grain Magazine, among others. He lives
in Saskatoon.
barrels full of boiling medicine can be found in Augur Magazine Issue 4.1.
