“Forget your Life Vest” by Rose Haberer
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Forget your Life Vest” by Rose Haberer, third place winner of the 2026 Jessamy Stursberg Poetry Prize for Canadian Youth, senior category.
Forget your Life Vest
By Rose Haberer
The plane wing dips into a folded white sea, and though it is bodyless,
we are swimming in the hurt. I wish that flesh could inherit no more than sky, birds,
this large piece of metal invented so wingless skin could fly.
From here, the world has never felt more like a planet as
the atmosphere stretches its belly,
puts its hand on its back to ease the pain of a pregnancy near its end.
Yes, the clouds are pregnant with human-sized cells.
They fold, dip. Fold, dip.
I say it somewhere beneath breath, and I dip and fold my hands.
From up here, I am the invisible hand,
letting the free market run wild and naked on the street.
I want to know how the clouds feel on
Mercury, Venus. What do they know about raising a child?
I want my atoms to turn into a breath of water. I want to breathe
without ever having to open my face.
Exist without the knowledge that everything that was
is hanging like a shirt on the hook of all that ever will be, inside a borderless closet.
Endless flight. Digest the planets. Pick them, so pretty, for my floral arrangements.
Yes, God.
No, God.
God might just be sitting somewhere between tongue and throat.
God breasts. Lactating gravity.
I will raise a child in the clouds. As we drift as shadows,
my daughter will catch birds mid-flight and throw them back down to the ground.
Down, birdy! she screams to the bowl of the earth. Only we can fold, dip.
Only we know how to hurt,
can tell you in what place wound on wound evaporates.
Sometimes people in the plane watch us, forever mammals.
They quickly turn their attention to the crinkle of airplane snacks
being handed out by the stewardess.
They are the ones who search for the life vest under the seat.
They are the ones who forgot to look at who was outside the window,
forgot to break open the glass
and let the clouds suck them up into perfect oblivion.
Copyright ยฉ Rose Haberer
Third place winner of the 2026 Jessamy Stursberg Poetry Prize for Canadian Youth, senior category.
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