migratory patterns by Moni Brar

August 22, 2022
Poet name: Moni Brar Poem name: migratory patterns Poem: our stories entwine, then diverge. we wait for this landscape to become ruin to become memory. we oscillate between the need to surrender or survive, wait for the anonymity of history. she remembers palm fronds scratching the back of her neck, hands fanning long after sleep, body filling with tamarind dreams, awakening in the damp hours to watch a mourning dove swallow the moon whole. I marvel at how a prairie wind can blow and blow on a mirrored surface and soothe a raven’s head. I’ve learned how to watch the skies on a sliver of lake, how a chinook arch can bend the universe or follow a corridor of veins on every plot of skin. End of poem. Credits and bio: Copyright © Moni Brar Previously published in The Literary Review of Canada, vol. 29, no. 8, October 2021, p. 33. Moni Brar (she/her) was born in rural India, raised in northern British Columbia, and now lives as a settler on Mohkínsstsisi, the unceded territories of the Treaty 7 signatories and Metis Nation Region 3 (Calgary). She has multiple nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, was the winner of the 2022 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award and has received writing honours from SAAG, PRISM international, Subnivean and Room Magazine. Her creative work explores the immigrant experience, diasporic guilt, and religious violence and can be found in Best Canadian Poetry, The New Quarterly, Passages North, Prairie Fire, CV2, and Hobart, among others. She believes art contains the possibility of healing.