Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “25 Craft Ideas to Make At Home” by Jennifer Bowering Delisle.

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25 Craft Ideas to Make At Home

By Jennifer Bowering Delisle

Symmetrical flames

stuck to the toilet paper roll.

Colour is primary.

Rules: lid the glue

show don’t run with scissors

don’t mix metaphors or you’ll get brown.

This is the kind of craft

that will fly us to the moon

that golden muse, tossing her botanicals.

My child’s version shows the bleeding

of the marker, skid of glue

revealing where her hands were.

Is it the work that makes her proud

or does she really see a cat mewing on the page?

And does my poem mew? Does it fly?

Do you like it?

I made it for you.

It’s not a bird, it’s hope.

Share what you know

of fuel and jettison

and I’ll show you where my hands were

my way of seeing

the night sky

my way of saying, look!

Look what I made!

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Copyright © Jennifer Bowering Delisle

Previously published in Stock (Coach House Books, 2025)..

Jennifer Bowering Delisle’s new poetry collection is Stock, a response to stock photography. Her book of lyric essays, Micrographia won the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize and the Writers Guild of Alberta Memoir Award. She is also the author of Deriving and The Bosun Chair. She is on the board of NeWest Press and lives in Edmonton on Treaty 6 territory.

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