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