Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. This June, Poetry Pause celebrates Indigenous and LGBTQI2S+ poets for Indigenous History Month and Pride Month! Read “Metlwater Basin” by Ellen Chang-Richardson.

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Meltwater Basin

By Ellen Chang-Richardson

Have you ever had those dreams

you know, those carbon-dark

sorts of dreams?

Where monsters and men made

of the same fabric move in

and out of each other, amorphic?

I’ve had; those sorts of dreams.

those lamp-black,

sorts of dreams,

in each one

there you are

on horseback, bareback

from the waist up,

in each one, there you are:

astride your shadow steed

like a legion of Kazakh Kings;

damn them,

these dreams.

These gut-wrenching

teeth-clenching

sweaty sorts of dreams, that

melt in, to each other

profuse and confused, soporific in nature.

It’s funny, these

sorts of dreams, these

burnt sienna, lamp flare, cotton-filled dreams.

They remind me of a time, long past

where my seas and your shores met like towers in rain,

they remind me.

Of leafy green, high golden mushroom haze;

where my lips and your limbs met

wrapped, in polyurethane.

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Copyright © Ellen Chang-Richardson

Originally published in Ricepaper Magazine and Lit Mag Love Anthology I: Blood & Water (2019). First appeared in Poetry Pause May 19, 2020

Ellen Chang-Richardson is an award-winning poet of Taiwanese and Chinese Cambodian descent living on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg. The author/co-author of six poetry chapbooks, their writing has appeared in journals and anthologies across Turtle Island including Augur, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Ex-Puritan, third coast magazine and Watch Your Head. They are an editorial member of Room magazine, a poetry editor for long con magazine, the co-founder of Riverbed Reading Series and a member of the poetry collective VII. Blood Belies (Wolsak & Wynn) is their debut collection.

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