Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Running As Your Name Implies” by Kevin Spenst.

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Running As Your Name Implies

By Kevin Spenst

to a grandnephew

Playing into the corners

coats us dust-bunny brothers.

Racing lengths of a home,

we get a feel for the airstrip

which will someday be take

off into an over-storied steepness,

as if the future were nothing but

a grove of trees soaring up and away.

Hollering under the bed,

we ask if anyone’s up there.

Come out, come out wherever

the stars may be directing traffic

and you and I have much in

common: who wants to say hi

under compulsion? I greet your mom

with the wrong holiday: obvs,

my inner child wants to play

some other season where spring buds

from the signal-coloured leaves.

We call out to this exponential habitat

hopping, snaking, mottling and

flying under your grandparents’ bed.

Here’s where everyone moves forever

with creature comforts’ twitching noses

at all the smells of promise and a Forested-

Everywhere your name babbles you through.

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Copyright © Kevin Spenst

Forthcoming in Windowful (Anstruther Press, Spring 2025).

Kevin Spenst has authored sixteen chapbooks plus an upcoming one with Anstruther Press, and four full-length books of poetry including the latest, A Bouquet Brought Back from Space (Anvil Press). He’s an organizer for the Dead Poets Reading Series, writes for subTerrain magazine, occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and teaches poetry at SFU’s The Writer’s Studio in Vancouver on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory.

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