“The Forts” by Dawn Macdonald

Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “The Forts” by Dawn Macdonald.


The Forts

By Dawn Macdonald

The personal is heretical.

The political is inedible.

A Host is a dead person.

A ghost is a dead person with gusto.

A ghost is an ideology.

An owl is proportional.

Starlight is fairly distributed.

A nightlight is political.

A house is a diplomatic pouch.

A mouse is immunology.

Fist, section, fur, fort.

Count to five,

turn out, live.


Copyright © Dawn Macdonald

Previously published in Northerny (University of Alberta Press, 2024).

Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up without electricity or running water. Her poetry appears in literary journals such as Grain and Nat. Brut, and in speculative publications like Asimov’s Science Fiction and Wizards in Space. She is the author of Northerny (University of Alberta Press, 2024).


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