“In the Wild” by Jennifer Bowering Delisle

Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “In the Wild” by Jennifer Bowering Delisle, part of the 2025 Poem in Your Pocket Day collection.


In the Wild

By Jennifer Bowering Delisle

My children like the sour fruit

early crabapples

chokecherries all pit and drought.

Spitting seeds like the big kids who hork

behind the Mac’s and staining teeth

the shade of blood. Sometimes I fool myself

I can protect them

from the packs that howl from just outside the light

luring prey, or troops

from the taunt that haunts for thirty years

its speaker. But regret is not a skill

that I can teach, but theirs to learn

like whistling, or grief.

The fruit is red and free and I think

that they believe it, when they call

try it, it’s so sweet.


Copyright © Jennifer Bowering Delisle

Published as part of the 2025 Poem in Your Pocket Day collection

Jennifer Bowering Delisle is the author of four books of poetry and creative nonfiction. Her lyric essay collection, Micrographia, won the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize and the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Memoir Award. Her new collection of poetry, Stock, is forthcoming with Coach House Press in fall 2025. She lives in Edmonton on Treaty 6 territory. 


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