Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Motorcycle, motorcycle” by Dr. Micheline Maylor, part of the 2025 Poem in Your Pocket Day collection and winner of the 2025 National Broadsheet Contest.

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Motorcycle, motorcycle

By Dr. Micheline Maylor

For Richard Osler

The wasp men of the granite valley

buzz-buzz down the highway at dawn,

leather crusted, dangerously tilting

at blind corners. Belligerent riders

wind in their cuffs. My friend is dying,

one province over. I wish one of these

flying boys would pick me up and take me

to the sumptuous mound of heaven

at the centre of a brown-eyed Susan,

so plump in the autumn sunlight, that I might

grasp the petals on the face of death,

yellow as my belly in the last days of life.

Ephemeral as one yellow insect, yellow as the last

sparked colour on the last summer sunset ride.

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Copyright © Dr. Micheline Maylor

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

Dr. Micheline Maylor is a Poet Laureate emerita of Calgary (2016-18). She was awarded the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Award for literary contributions to Alberta in 2022. She is a Walrus talker, a TEDX talker, and she a past Calgary Public Library Author in Residence (2016). Her most recent book, The Bad Wife (U of A Press 2021), won the BPAA Robert Kroetsch Award for best book of Alberta poetry and has been translated into Italian La Cattiva Moglie (iQdB). She was short-listed for the Exile Robert Kroetsch award for experimental poetry. She won the Lois Hole Award for Editorial excellence for poetry in Alberta (2019). Her poems have recently been translated into Italian, Farsi, and Chinese.

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