Moon
Sarah de Leeuw
I could confuse you
with a single vertebrate
washed ashore years after
the chum salmon rotted away
with the rain-bleached
squirrel rotted to my bottom
with the orb of milky white
guts from a freshwater mollusk
black shell shattered
opened by an eagle’s beak
with arêtes full
of dimpled glaciers
with an agate, opaque
a snow flake
a strip of marrow-hued
bear claw, ripped off
during a fight of fur and screams
or the downy belly
of a trumpeter swan
amongst blocks of ice
floating above
when I face the night.
~~~~~
Sarah de Leeuw, a two-time recipient of a CBC Literary Prize in Creative Non-Fiction (2008, 2009), is a writer and human geographer. She grew up in northern British Columbia, mostly within the boundaries of the Skeena River watershed, and is currently an assistant professor in the Northern Medical Program at the University of Northern British Columbia, the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of two books of essays (Unmarked: Landscapes Along Highway 16, NeWest Press 2004, and Front Lines: Portraits of Caregivers in Northern British Columbia, Creekstone Press 2011) and the book of poetry (also in the long poem tradition) Geographies of a Lover (NeWest 2012). Her creative and academic writings appear in numerous literary and research journals.