Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Pine Needles” by Raymond Sewell.

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Pine Needles

By Raymond Sewell

When I was young, I played in orange needle beds

Pine branches are slinky and scaly

The pine needles rise like hair on your arm excited to play

I loved sewing myself between trees

Amid rusting chair legs and bikes old clay things from powerlines

Everything is salvaged and turned into toys

I feel like school has been a living autopsy

And the settler find my insides are pine needles playful and picky

And I hope a trout that is my gut nips at the examiner’s fingers

A gay little rainbow trout

I am a rainbow trout with a mud brain

Dropped into a beaver pond alone

Eating surface bugs

And watching beaver undercarriages wiggle gayly

Long gone – Kentucky – this is a new world deary

I say I like a nervous tick

When I am wigging, I repeat things

nippingly

My living room yawned me in

America the living autopsy

The cryptid in the living room

Recovering from a night of scaring people

Stoney Boy with his rez mullet

Rocky Boy with his fringe

Drug boy clothing

I’ll cover them with pine needles

Those rez bastards

I’ll pick them up like little snakes and I will staple their necks to scrap boards

And they will look like a circus game

With their snake faces gasping for air

A bb in a snake’s stomach – the things guts writhe out – as though they always wanted to get away

And my rust shovel snake guillotine

Their bodies writhing away from their heads

I’ll do them like that – drug boys in drug clothing

Drug leather – pedophile sneakers with cracks and white sneaker paint

Snakes like shoelaces pulled straight by their weight of their asses

Lined up on a board outside my aunt’s house

By the front step

This place needs an exorcist

I wrestle with ghosts when I drink

In the morning, they are chunks of pulp

Felix the cat clocks

The night of my living autopsy

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Copyright © Raymond Sewell

PRaymond Sewell is an l’nu poet, singer-songwriter, and English professor from Pabineau, First Nation, New-Brunswick. Since a young age Raymond has been writing and producing creative works.

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