“You Were Not One Time in Your Life” by T. Liem
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “You Were Not One Time in Your Life” from T. Liem’s collection Slows: Twice, shortlisted for the League’s Raymond Souster Award.
You Were Not One Time in Your Life
By T. Liem
When will you arrive? Do you want to be a large gross fruit? Were you trained to think of the choices you did not make? But do you think under everything like a rot? Were you a sun engorged by green? And how did time reason inside? Was it something particular in the world, a number or a vast gift that gave you vertigo? Was it very shiny, very told? Were there a hundred years doing you in? In between that shining sound that rings when you think and now, when did the chance arrive? When will you try less for longer to be a large gross fruit? If you liven your sight, maybe there is a chorus of lows attending to all this longness all the time. Could you see it from the window? What is the question you want to pose for your mirror? In the future will you chance the cold water of a body? What will you see waving from the other side of automatic? Of time of time when the lows diffuse days, will you rest your legs? If you were a large gross fruit would it hurt less to think? Does some time sleep? Are your dreams always memories? You were not only you once in your life were you? Was it once or twice you fell for night? Who let you forget the gross fruit? Tell me, were you ever a currant? Well you, like many, have been the gross fruit. Does that make you plural? What else can you stand? How does anyone stand being gross like that? What seems obvious is hoping, full volume, to be waved forward, to be waves.
T. Liem is the author of Slows: Twice (Coach House 2023), and Obits. (Coach House, 2018). Their writing has been published in Apogee, Plenitude, The Boston Review, Grain, Maisonneuve, Catapult, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. They live in Montreal / Tio’Tia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territories.
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