Melisse Watson
Is this the year I give up my windows
Do I have one more year?
Trade in for a basement
A shame, what with the
Beautiful weather we are all all all having
Should I wait?
Mistake the winter for short dark dreadful days
And yet, the only time it rains anymore (remind, remind, remind them)
Trade the whole sky for a burrow
An intricate underground den of clay, soil soundproof
Embossed rivers as they tightly push their way between
A basement and
A hollowed space
One could pretend the day came and went
Maybe even plant something
What if I’ve waited too long
Prices as high as the condos they’re building up up up
Underground full of bodies
No more room, ground level(ed)
Nothing vacant, nothing left to own
Start gentrifying
Criminalizing
Classifying
Detain and deport
That’ll get the roaches
Pipelines run our machines cleaner than our water
Our children can’t live like this
Res’s ignored
Nations dismissed
Resources and rivers scarcely run
Rerouted to replace abundance, with “never enough”
Black folks still enslaved
Land still occupied
Womxn still raped
Still missing, still murdered
Still mental health and still mental illness
History still fictitious
How well we are able or unable to deny the truth
A system built without us is unjust through its frame
A foundation lain with disdain for change
Will never believe the youth
Tell us our best interests; use intimidation, fear
Same system
Shame system
An estranged system
Here
Surviving
Is predetermined
By legacies and legalities
Whether your predecessors were the bought or the patrons
Colonialism always begins with land
To know our future is to listen to where she has been
Her demise still catalyzed by our labour and compliance
Crawl back into her belly from whence we came
Until the sun sets for good
Until the moon pulls the plug, until the sea drains
Swallowing our plastic islands and blanched white reefs
A natural antibody is coming, an abolition of what is left
A liberation of the violence we’ve conceived, received
A freedom we can believe in
The trees are gone, clean water encased
We wanted cut diamonds in our rings
Instead of clean water in our kids
We won’t break out of a perpetual prison and
The pipelines won’t leak where the whites live
They’ll tamper with the rivers until they lay quiet
The fish no longer breed, lose themselves to the dams
Choose your stock for the waterways
The DOW is doing well these days
Linear notions of forward keep us in place
Reconciliation without reparations is a deception of peace
The oil will rise first from the rest
Our body mass submerged, our denial collapsed
And so I ask
Who here can breathe here and so who here can breathe here, and so who here can breathe here, and so who here can breathe here
And still
From here we said the names of the gods that we beloved in
And the ancestors we arose in
The children we gave birth to
Even in a dying world
We all have held elastics and had them fall apart in our hands
We don’t expect to lose freedom while preparing to defend
Sometimes we can’t imagine our futures
And yet we pull through into the darkness
Over and over again
Over and over again
We have a right to be lost and homesick
We were stolen and displaced
We have a responsibility to our treaties
We shall not walk away
From pregnant cliff nor thirsty oak
My windows remind me that we ache
One month, one day, one moment at a time
We search together for weakness in the concrete
It is together we will witness either
Great anew or a great fall
With some loved ones close and some loved ones far
Oh the distance we have walked
But what if choice is again made for me
A penalty, a purgatory
Floods at the coast, drought to the main
Land storm-torn apart—brick to clay, glass to sand
What once was so giving, simply will not any more
They will have us believe we have one more day
Until the moment that we won’t
We believe that we will win, but what if we don’t
Me
I’ll risk trading in my windows
For a place in the earth
And in the last of all moments
I will welcome the dark