Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets' daily poetry dispatch. Read "the map" by brandy ryan.

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the map

By brandy ryan

i found, drew, printed, traced. it required thickness and thinness. it required my hand on it, twice.

i mapped between: borders, names, lines: capitals and coasts. provinces and parentheses. a pen limned

blue.

i gave, she took: wrong time and wrong place (whoever he is, opposite). but

then: her hands, the note: finding and framing and translation and this word not that and Sapphic and

sound and somewhere beyond

the map: transferred from island to inland

a question of cartographer: fixate and orient and inchoate the sense between shoulders the contour

below

the valley: her and body then and now hand and skin rises, reigns, remembers

a language: if other many others calculate distance on the map a finger’s pace a cave’s script a fluid

forest

invites rather than separates: tides excursions embraces whisper against a thousand grains a soft push

like wind a tongue’s stories

shipwreck: how it is with me and X is the mark surrenders indirection succumbs

to elements there was a map between

northless

unsouthed

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Copyright © brandy ryan

brandy ryan is a queer poet who likes to slip between genre and form. chapbooks include – full slip (Baseline Press, 2013), once/was (Empty Sink Publishing, 2014), After Pulse (with Kerry Manders, kfb, 2019), in the third person reluctant (Gap Riot Press, 2024). other pieces appear in lockbox, long con magazine, CV2, Windsor Review, and MediaTropes, among others. brandy has also published two collage series in Contemporary Collage Magazine 31 and Beautiful Trash Vol. 3.

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