Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Northern Exposure” by Adèle Barclay.

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Northern Exposure

By Adèle Barclay

how to move days out of sight-

lines of mountains I traced

with unsteady eyes

when eating yoghurt

on the north-facing patio

was both luxury

and survival

my daily goal

to let the grisly spring light

grace the beaten chamber

of my brain so I could

rebuild trampled cells amidst fear

when the sun set in the evenings

a primordial shudder pricked

and dragged me to the bottom of a pit

lake muck and debris and mud

I saw my path entwined with my sister’s

the hotel sheets must come for me too

late at night as my vision swam

and my skull burned

my wife told me I had never met any of their needs

how my pain always took centre stage

and I bleated like my mother had bleated

and her mother before her

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Copyright © Adèle Barclay

Forthcoming in Shame Engine from Nightwood (Spring 2027).

Adèle Barclay is the winner of the 2016 Lit POP Poetry Award, The Walrus’ 2016 Readers’ Choice Award for Poetry, The Fiddlehead’s 2022 Fiction Prize, The New Quarterly’s 2025 Creative Nonfiction Contest, and a 2025 National Magazine Award Gold. She is the author of the poetry collections, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, which won the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Renaissance Normcore, and the forthcoming Shame Engine.

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