How Far You Live by Marlene Grand Maître

October 30, 2023
Poem title: How Far You Live Poet name: Marlene Grand Maître Poem: from your animal body. It sleeps in you, faint quiver of sinew. Your tamed mouth the architect of a word fortress the carnal can’t scale. Through a window, you watch a spotted fawn burst from behind the viburnum, rush its mother, and latch onto a teat, whole body a muscular suckling music. How to inhabit your animal body, awaken your howl: Climb out from under grief’s landslide. Roll in anger’s mud. Watch everything through wonder’s raptor eye. Mark your territory— brush against the big-leaf maple, red-osier dogwood, evergreen huckleberry. On your knees, all tongue and snout, pick up the scent of cougar scat, nibble miner’s lettuce, creeping blackberry; hunt violet webcaps, shaggy manes and fat jacks. Unfurl your ears to a gang of crows feasting on an anthill, to the swoosh of great blue heron wings lifting from a koi pond. Your heart drums, eager to be off-leash. Press your pelt against another’s for solace, for desire’s surge and ebb. Glutted, stumble into hibernation’s torpor. Wallow. End of poem. Credits and bio: Copyright © Marlene Grand Maître Previously published in Wild Kin (Raven Chapbooks, 2023) Marlene Grand Maître has had two chapbooks published: Wild Kin (Raven Chapbooks, 2023) and Cancer’s Rogue Season (Frog Hollow Press, 2020). Her poetry has also appeared in many literary journals and in ten anthologies. She has won Freefall Magazine’s poetry competition, been longlisted for Best Canadian Poetry In English, 2011, and nominated for a National Magazine Award. Her poem “Vanishing Point” was chosen by the LCP as a Poem In Your Pocket in 2022. She is on the Board of the Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series Society.