“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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