Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Ars Fami” by Angela Xiao, first place winner of the 2025 Jessamy Stursberg Poetry Prize for Canadian Youth, junior category.

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Ars Fami

By Angela Xiao

The aluminum suturing your mother

is a blackening peel. Should you not split it,

let the gore-light of her heart

throb against the air, let her ribs

sing rust where we press our fingerprints?

The heat gnawing your mother’s eyes

is a maw of good fire, hungry fire.

Should you not drown it in your mouth,

so she can watch our shadows lick the wall,

two wolves chewing the same last coal—

Your mother’s stomach is a gutted bell.

Should you not tongue its clapper,

let the hollow teach you how hunger

outgrows the body? Listen:

even the flies refuse to choir

this silence. Should you not

kneel here and starve with me,

until our throats are the same

rusted flute?

We could stay here, yes? Two bodies

sewn to the wall by our own sweating hands.

Should you not plant me like your mother,

but let me root in your arms, a bloom

fattened on spoiled light, until our skeletons

are one crooked ladder?

and when our daughter cracks us open

like a geode, she’ll find the honey

still crawling as the rot sings in our throats.

When she lifts the veil of rust between

our lives and hers,

should you not whisper through my

wax-stiffened lips and aluminum skin:

leave us be,

the living make poor relics,

and we were never holy,

just hungry?

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Copyright © Angela Xiao

First place winner of the 2025 Jessamy Stursberg Poetry Prize for Canadian Youth, junior category.

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