Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Forks” by Carol L. MacKay.

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Forks

By Carol L. MacKay

We are five-tined: a grass rake brought indoors.

We plant ourselves barefoot, against the swallowing wall

beneath Blue Boy and Pinkie —

frames too small for a twelve-foot sky and a stubble rug.

Pole light in the corner casts portraits in profile.

We are immigrants still suffering too much space.

These Alberta years have been cut down, grown again and again,

and now the corners are bursting with more mass than light.

Our shoes sink into deep pile, carpet over carpet.

There are seafood forks at our dinner plates.

Our progeny grows taller

assured of a more proportionate sky.

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Copyright © Carol L. MacKay

Previously published in Prairie Journal.

Carol’s poems have appeared in literary journals and anthologies in Canada, the US, and Great Britain, including in Prairie Journal, The New Quarterly, Crannóg, and The Fiddlehead. Last year, Carol independently published her first full-length collection of poems, Bird, Making No Sound, which was a finalist in the 2024 Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society (SCWES) Book Awards.

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