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Whose Mouth Do I Speak With? / Wintering

Whose Mouth Do I Speak With?

I can remember my father bringing home spruce gum.
He worked in the woods and filled his pockets
with golden chunks of pitch.
For his children
he provided this special sacrament
and we’d gather at his feet, around his legs,
bumping his lunchbox, and his empty thermos rattled inside.
Our skin would stick to Daddy’s gluey clothing
and we’d smell like Mumma’s Pine Sol.
We had no money for store bought gum
but that’s all right.
The spruce gum
was so close to chewing amber
as though in our mouths we held the eyes of Coyote
and how many other children had fathers
that placed on their innocent, anxious tongues
the blood of trees?


Wintering

a coyote’s yap
sounds nothing like a wolf ’s ceaseless mourn

it is the first snow and i’m late with wood

the stove pipe hisses into heat
expands into long days of hibernation

white boulders frozen
wolves wandering
have come to close in on daily living.

i’m late
with tasks of wintering the kayaks
snaking sluggish hoses into coils

will this be the last one?
i ask myself
i don’t want it to be with unfinished tasks
but who’s to say?

i feed the cast iron englander
praise ogun with an anvil of gratitude


Suzanne S. Rancourt is an award-winning poet and multi-modal expressive arts therapist. Rancourt’s writing draws upon her Abenaki/Huron descent, military experience, and rural, woodland upbringing in the western mountains of Maine. Her second book of poetry, murmurs at the gate, Unsolicited Press, was released in May 2019. “Whose Mouth Do I Speak With” was previously published in Billboard in the Clouds, winner of the Native Writer’s Circle of the America’s First Book Award, with a second printing by Northwestern University Press in 2019.

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