Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “A Study in Missingness” by Colleen Charlette.

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A Study in Missingness

By Colleen Charlette

Missingness is:

an incomplete deck of cards

living an entire lifetime seeing the colour bar with a piece of the spectrum missing

beige brown blindness, anyone?

a language based on an alphabet that has almost all of the vowels present except “u” and “i”

a television’s remote control without batteries

official reports of enquiries without the damning facts of the matter

macular degenerative eyesight

cavities, a void of enamel and dentin

nativity dioramas with no baby or only two wise men

a “kibosh” move when it comes to the concept of tolerance

greed and deceit’s “safe word”

a smoking gun

an orchestra without a first violin

yoda’s proper grammar usage

a piano with 87 keys

boundaries and limits for the disenfranchised and dysfunctional

a musical scale with no key of C

a vitamin deficiency taken to an extreme resulting in malnutrition

family member relationships for sixties scoop survivors

a scientific table of elements with no noble gases

a solution to cool with Earth’s oceanic base temperature while keeping the planet humanly-inhabitable

my sense of humour in a dearth of compassion

4,000 First Nations women in Canada

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Copyright © Colleen Charlette

Previously published in i am what becomes of broken branch (League of Canadian Poets, 2020).

Colleen Charlette is a member of the Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation. She was born and raised in Flin Flon, Manitoba. Colleen has been on the board of the Saskatchewan (Anskohk) Aboriginal Writers Circle Inc. (sawci.ca) for 14 years. She resides in Saskatoon.

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