“Saigner” by Lara Chamoun
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Saigner” by Lara Chamoun.
Saigner
By Lara Chamoun
I keep having this dream where I am being held
by a third grandmother from a book of verse,
who died before I was born, softly ruined on my lips.
And in Paris, once at seven and once at fourteen,
I met a drunken albatross. She was murdered
by a poet like me, they both dragged themselves
across the same tongue-scarred land,
born of mistranslation.
I wish for her wings to hold me,
and I want to be baptized with Seine River,
and if that were a verb, it would be saigner. To bleed.
Washing over my Lebanese uncleโs lifeless feet.
I am no Frenchwoman, Iโve never lit a cigarette
below the Pont des Arts, but I have thought of jumping
in front of the same Bateau-Mouche that delivered me
to Notre-Dรขme before it burned. I was with my dying teta
when it did, and I felt more for the collapsing spire,
like a bird shot midair, for that albatross, than for her
cooling hand. On Thanksgiving, the albatross rotting
on my plate, fleshed with slow fire and chestnuts,
is so tender I forget Iโm becoming my familyโs colonizer.
Copyright ยฉ Lara Chamoun
Lara Chamoun is a student from Toronto, Canada. She is the author of the poetry collection Bleeding Ghosts (Cathexis Northwest Press) and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Denver Quarterly, LIT Magazine, PRISM International, Queen’s Quarterly and elsewhere. She was a 2024 Adroit Summer Mentorship mentee in fiction and reads for Eucalyptus Lit.
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