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    Our Familiar Hunger
    Our Familiar Hunger
    Our Familiar Hunger
    Ebook91 pages31 minutes

    Our Familiar Hunger

    By Laisha Rosnau

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Our Familiar Hunger is a book about the strength, will, struggle and fortitude of generations of women and how those relationships and knowledges interact, inform, transform and burden. These poems are memories of reclaimed history and attempts at starting over in a new place. They are the fractured reality of trickle-down inheritance, studies of the epigenetic grief we carry and the myriad ways that interferes or interprets our best attempts.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNightwood Editions
    Release dateApr 28, 2018
    ISBN9780889711365
    Our Familiar Hunger

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      Book preview

      Our Familiar Hunger - Laisha Rosnau

      They Test the Bones

      The Last Best West: Three Promotional Posters

      1.

      Free 160 acres of farmland

      in western Canada! Homes

      for everyone, easy to reach.

      Nothing to fear. Protected

      by government.

      Wheat land, land for mixed

      farming, land for raising cattle.

      Rich virgin soil.

      Westward the star of the Empire

      makes its way.

      This is your opportunity.

      Why not embrace it?

      2.

      The country for agriculturalists!

      Free grants of land, good wages,

      cheap provisions, light taxes,

      free schools.

      Assisted passages are granted

      by the Government of Canada

      to farm labourers, domestic servants,

      and others.

      3.

      Why? Because no other country offers

      anything like it—a free farm,

      a fine climate, a fair charge

      for every man.

      Castle Mountain, Canada

      The posters promised farms, fields

      stencilled yellow against the stamp

      of sky burning blue. Red barn,

      woman in white, dress licked by wind,

      baby on one arm, the other raised in salute

      to a man imagined beyond the page.

      We’d not seen picture books, our own

      stories not illustrated but told, but we were

      lured by drawings like children. Tricked.

      We came and they took the men away

      from prairies surging with long grasses

      and into mountains of bald-faced rock—

      replaced unbroken horizons with wire,

      gave them shovels and demanded

      they tunnel into rock until roads appeared,

      which would lead to peaks so beautiful

      they would be renamed castles—national

      treasures—and our men would be released,

      brittle as split rock and sent, not home,

      but to the prairie where our own skin

      was cracked, soles of feet as thick as leather.

      We became hardy with absence and when

      they returned, we danced and sang,

      our throats raw with gratitude

      as curdled as the milk we’d make into cream,

      sucked off spoons, our lips closed around

      the taste, mouths silent against words.

      What we didn’t say: we were the women

      from the posters, waving goodbye with babies

      plump in our arms, chicken fat at our feet,

      men unseen beyond the edge of the picture.

      The wind always bracing, clean.

      Beast Against the Yoke

      We can’t remember if we made it up,

      the bit about our grandparents’ early years

      on the prairie, how they were so poor

      they couldn’t afford a horse to pull the plough

      so Baba filled the part, acted as beast

      against the yoke, furrowed the stony plain

      with her own heat and muscle.

      Imagine the will to keep going, clear the land

      of rock and tree then seed rows with boot soles

      worn of ridges, turning dirt like dull spades.

      To watch crops of baptismal certificates,

      high school diplomas, university degrees,

      marriage

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