Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “At the Table, Everyone Time-Travels” by Chanel Sutherland.

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At the Table, Everyone Time-Travels

By Chanel Sutherland

This is how the question enters.

Like a small weather,

someone says, if you could be born anywhere?

and meaning when,

as if time isn’t a country

with its own border guards.

The room is soft with lamplight.

Outside, winter keeps its mouth

pressed to the window.

Someone reaches for the sixties,

all soundtrack, all open throats,

they say everything felt possible,

and I watch that word.

Possible sits on the table

like an unwashed fruit.

Then the twenties—

they mean champagne fizz,

dresses that move like water,

a mouth red enough to be called freedom.

Someone says earlier.

I am quiet.

I think of timelines as rivers.

How some people step in and call it adventure.

How others are thrown in

and renamed current. They keep talking;

jobs they’d have,

loves they’d risk.

A pause arrives and finds me.

My name, spoken gently,

What about you?

I look down at the wood grain,

those thin brown lines

dragging themselves in one direction.

I say the era I love.

The one with the great novels,

rooms built for thought,

a life shaped by language.

I think far back,

No one contradicts me.

So, I say it,

plain as a winter fact.

I would have been owned.

The room does not fall apart.

The television keeps offering

faces filtered of consequences.

And my sentence sits there,

dark, small, undeniable,

like a bootprint in snow.

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Copyright © Chanel Sutherland

Chanel Sutherland is a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. She won the 2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize and the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize and was named one of CBC Books 30 Writers to Watch. Chanel is also the overall winner of the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her debut book, Layaway Child, is forthcoming from House of Anansi (May 2026).

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