February 2026 - Vol. 23, Issue 1

Editor's Note: Due to the nature of our platform, some poetry formatting does not display correctly on mobile. Readers are encouraged to enjoy this piece on desktop if possible.

All around me, snow shoulders crested with glittering crust ignite in the rising Arctic sun. The horizon is blanched of any discernible shapes and surrounds me like a blank page. Deep in the bush behind the beige trailer that is my temporary home, something is always watching me: giant ravens, tufted grouse, or starving mutts. I have not yet encountered a bear, but I have spent a lot of time deciding what I will do when I finally do run into one.

If a hungry bear charges, I have two options: Either I play dead, or I throw up my arms pretending to be a bigger animal. If I choose wrong, I die. I think about dead women often, particularly on my daily solo walks on the Eastern tip of Marten Lake in the Canadian North. Snow is a good listener. It doesn’t judge me or talk back. I can dictate anything I please onto its crystalline scrolls, and the words, like the dead women, simply disappear into obscurity.

This place where I have come to teach is so far North that I am 1500 miles from my mother. She texts me, concerned: You walk to work? What about the wolves?! My mother lives a life mediated by the sensationalism of true crime novels and shows. A woman always dies. The wolf is always red-eyed and snarling. So, I don’t tell her that orange ribbons are flowering the spruce, marking snares, or that the wildlife officer is folding in fresh fish guts to lure the wolf that has come up behind our homes. Eventually, our conversation slipped into a poem I titled “Fearless Animals” in which I try to find the grit to hunt down a poet’s instinct I had long lost.

“Yes, Mum,” I say.

“I’m safe. Wolves don’t really follow you. You’d have to find them first.”

***

Each season of my life has its own dead woman. Down South, in the city, some years ago before I left for the Arctic, was the season of Marrisa, a young girl murdered in a nearby urban park tented with summer caterpillar webs that I dodged crossing the park many times myself. I thought about her often. I saw her in the orbed wings of every Mourning Nymphalis. Many dead women marked each of the seasons of my life before Marrisa. But last season, out here in the Northwest Territories, was Atsumi, a middle-aged woman who flew to Yellowknife from Japan and waded into the Arctic forest’s deep snow drifts to die.

“Did you read about that Japanese woman?” My mom, always on the nose with macabre news.

“The nicest way to die, I’ve read. You just go to sleep as the wolves look on.”  Aha. Her detective novels; her pulp fiction. “I’m sure it’s not pretty. Death never is, c’mon.” I feel like being contrarian.

“There are degrees. Nice to know I have options!” She says with a snicker.

I shrug it off. But the words chime a shrill bell in my head long after the conversation. If you were prepared to die out there, the presence of feral creatures might offer comfort, instead of risk.

I would like to think Atsumi found a way to trick mortality through transmutation. Perhaps Atsumi saw beyond snow, beyond winter - beyond death. I suppose Atsumi’s last moments were not shattered by violence. Her death was planned out meticulously in such a way that made it insubordinate: defiant, even. It was Atsumi I recalled when I made the decision to accept a job in the lower Northwest Territories. I followed her ghost to Yellowknife before setting out on my own path to a small hamlet 200 kilometres further north.

The Arctic landscape splayed out flat beneath the bird body of the small Cessna plane that carried me over Yellowknife, then Marten Lake. The terrain appeared wrinkled. Sky-blue danced in the ripples of lake water that grayed over with light frost. I wanted to know if Atsumi and I shared first impressions of the Arctic. For me, the goal was not death, but rebirth; the thawing that happens after spring melt, and the promise of germination.

*

Several years earlier, I split from my husband and moved to an apartment in the dingy but artsy neighbourhood just outside Vancouver. There, the sunsets were tinged with the violence of splitting clouds over the steely grey Fraser River, while sufferers of the opioid crisis cocooned themselves in tattered sleeping bags in the streets. I bought an old typewriter to help me make sense of it all. In some of the photos of Marissa, she stood in front of a vase of yellow chrysanthemums, smiling. In China, the flowers signify good luck. I learned how to impress flower designs into Styrofoam plates, then press the floral stamps onto scrolls of paper. I typed words on my pages stamped with yellow Chrysanthemums and pink Magnolias. Jabbing at the heavy, sticky keys and sliding the bar until I heard the rhythmic clang were sensations I clung to. I wanted to write something about the beauty of urban parks, how the dense, lush greenery was also a site of violence and tragedy. The words grew into vines which became stanzas that took root to form life that then gradually took over the flickering screen of my laptop. In my typing fervour, I imagined beauty, and the agency of that beauty to flower. I thought about how flowers obscured bodies, in parks and in coffins. Marissa’s body was found where she lost her life amongst muscled salal leaves, delicate and fragrant Summersweet shrubs, and flashy, frilly hydrangea. That fall, my fingers to the keys, I spun tales of Marissa’s family, swirling within the orbit of Marrisa’s life and then death. I wrote about the slouchy socks of a made-up boy and a friend. I refused to let her go, feeling that if I could keep her life force flowing out of my pages, she could continue to flower, again and again.

Then, another woman. Mabel Patterson:  a gun-toting matriarch who settled her family in North Burnaby’s Central Park district. Mabel died of natural causes but spent a chunk of her early pioneer life in an Edwardian house with a wide veranda overlooking the park. I studied digitised turn-of-the-century black and white photographs late into the night, fascinated by her life, and death. Picnics in the park in early Fall on gingham blankets, long skirts swept to the side. Words filled my pages:

She grips the handlebars

whips her head back

look—

a jagged Hemlock overstory, razor's edge

and milk pale sky.

I want to return here and taste the darkness.

Bury me here.

Is my obsession with dead girls morbid? I don't wholly agree. I invite you to see it as disquieting, yes, but also, much more. Maybe in this way, I am similar to my mother: dark stories call to me. I'm at peace with my recognition that death is always snapping at our heels: it gifted me the impetus to try and outrun it. To keep walking, creating, reviving, growing.

Scientists have recently revived a fossilized Campion flower. Its ancient fruit was found dozing deep in the Arctic ice for over thirty thousand years, its soul split away from its body, and yet it was revived in the rotor of a centrifuge, planted, and bloomed. The process was surprisingly basic: cells were carefully broken open and extracted with a pipette, before being bonded again in salt and water. That is all it took. This flower is now the oldest living fossil belonging to the genus Silene, meaning, “I shall not forget you.” The idea of reviving, of making the dead come alive, fascinates me.

A poet is a scientist of words. The idea that I could revive these dead women on the page obsessed me. The fact that it would resuscitate my own writing practice was a bonus. But the thing I could not resurrect, no matter how hard I tried, was my mother, because while she was not living, she was not dead either. And I did try, but to no avail. My mother stayed in bed staring at the ceiling, her chest pumping air gently and slowly under the blanket, and she called it life. For months on end, she failed to lift her cheeks into a smile. Even during better times, my mother sat and passively consumed other people’s lives on television instead of living her own. I wanted to speak life into her, or else declare her dead so I could revive her with my words, but she existed in a purgatory that I simply could not affect. I struggled to write about my mother for years. My first serious attempt to write about her was when I moved away to the Arctic. The blank canvas of the landscape, and the nearly 3,000 kilometers between us, seemed to help. The solitude helped.

Thirty years ago, my mother was prescribed Prozac, which turned into an increasing bevy of medications that shelled her body of anything resembling vitality or emotion. Punctuating the last thirty years have been phases of intense anger and sometimes paranoia, usually about men with glowering eyes following her through parks or tunnels. I have always wondered what sparked these deep-buried intense emotions. I doubt that I will ever know.

Long ago, when I was in grade 11 or 12 and I still lived with my parents in a high rise apartment near loops of inter-city highways, I returned home after school and found a hard-boiled egg left blackening in a pot sizzling dry. She was usually home at this time and it must have been a while since she left that egg in the water that has since evaporated. I felt something lodge in my throat. I waited on the couch. Soon, I heard the grating sound of her house key in the lock. “I was afraid to be here alone- I went over to Zosia’s upstairs….I heard a man’s steps speed up to keep up with mine. I turned around and saw hatred in his eyes” she said by way of explanation.

*

          The story of my life                    is a silent film.

          My gasp                                        is my mother’s gasp.

          My mother’s mother:                her mouth is full of melodrama.

          Every time I write my life         I end up cycling back to my mother.

          Eyebrows pull up                                  the fabric of her face

          a scenery that hangs                         a familiar cyclorama.

          Through the mechanics of familial effort all stories become my mother

          Through the mechanics of familial effort all women become my mother

          My mother becomes her stories, all women become my mother

          My mother becomes my story

          My mother becomes my mother

These lines spilled out from my pen recently, after a bout of what I call interviews, and what my mother calls chats, for an article about migration and motherhood I was preparing to write. The split stanzas when read in a sort-and-match order helped me parse out my more circular thoughts. “The story of my life is a silent film/The story of my life is my mother’s gasp/My gasp is a silent film/My gasp is my mother’s gasp.” The repetition mirrored the lineage of mothers and daughters: the interlocking parts of stories that unite us not just as relatives, but as women. I am reminded of how the women in my family performed their troubles in silence.

Death is largely about absence. What we grieve are possibilities. But how to mourn a parent who is alive, but whose possibilities remain absent? How to mourn the loss of a parent when a tattered version of them seems to exist here on this plane, but the version you miss is gone? Writing is sorcery: turning rage and grief into poetry. Words are how we can mourn.

There is one version of my mother, the version I do not write about: the one who makes small talk about chores. And another: holed up in bed with her hands crossed on top of a true crime novel resting on her chest, eyes closed as if she has finally found a resting place.  Nowadays, she seems most animated when she sends me out to buy her Du Mauriers, which she smokes out the garage door.

               your four packs of smokes cost 120$???

i know that.

               a therapist would be way less per month.

               …

The text indicator dots pulsate, then disappear.

*

I stopped writing for a decade in my twenties. It was inexplicable. It was only through writing about these dead women that I was able to revive my creative self, my alive self, which had been suffocated by my dissolving marriage, mother and the grind of graduate school. In my last semester, instead of writing my thesis, full of dry visual analysis of art works I failed to care about as much as I should, I sat in my carrel and watched the library’s mechanical arm that reached into the archives, pulling out research requests for students all day through a window into the guts of the building, typing and retyping apologies to my husband about staying out all night, if I spoke to him at all. My mother’s figurative absence ballooned into all my relationships. The air in the library was a thick soup of dust, cloth book covers, ink from the nearby printer reheated by the warming late Spring sun. Life seemed unalive.

At that time, as summer approached, my university issued an alert about a predator following women to their dorm rooms. We were invited to call security assistance to walk us to our campus housing if it helped us feel safer. I became hyperaware of my own steps, even of my own shadow on the pavement. The urban landscape around me became threatening to the point of being dizzying. I recall writing low-effort poems about drowning inside my days, but nothing substantial. Despite leaving both my husband and grad school, my ability to write again didn’t revive until much later, when Marissa died and I hauled that old typewriter back to my apartment like a heavy cliche.

Marrisa’s passing had breathed life into my writing, briefly, but her story was so shocking and sad that it had pulled me down, and my writing with it. It exhausted me imagining her parents kneeling at the grassy knoll amongst yellow asters, where her body was found. I was haunted by her lanky jean-shorted silhouette captured by the security camera at the Tim Horton’s where she and her killer were both last seen. Writing instead about feisty Mabel offered me a respite, although any writing I did about her wasn’t really about her so much as about myself and Marissa and that bold brand of youthful ignorance that makes girls take the same risks their parents warn them against.

I didn’t write poems about Atsumi. Instead, my thoughts about her provided a portal into a book, the writing of which has happily consumed me for the past four years. While romanticising suicide is something I want to be cautious of, a writer is also a witness, and a witness tells the truth: Atsumi’s suicide was an alchemy that churned souls into stories and inhospitable tundra into words that heal and reveal me. While the Arctic landscape sharpened my senses and forced me to pay closer attention, it was Atsumi’s death that changed how I live. And how I live changes how I write. My writing has bloomed from occasional short poems to a whole greenhouse alive with stories that have helped me to reconcile my relationships with other women, with my mother, and with myself.

A poet told me recently how in Chinese creation mythology, trauma is intertwined with transformation that leads to divinity. When goddess Chang'e stole an immortality elixir, she was punished by loneliness in perpetuity. But her deification made her a symbol of nostalgia for entire generations of Chinese artists. So, she did gain immortality- just not the way she first set out to. You cannot cheat death like Chang'e attempted. And if you manage it, it might be awfully lonely out there for you. Perhaps the one way I know to hack mortality is to write, create: leave traces of yourself.

Ghosts don’t ask questions, but I do: Why plan to kill yourself among the beauty of snow? Why murder a young girl among the beauty of flowers, and why let yourself wither inside to preserve the illusion of beauty around you? I don’t have all the answers, but their stories populate and inspire the blank pages on my laptop. Through their stories I have found the will to escape stagnation, move on, and keep creating, because dead girls don’t write.

*

Walking briskly through trails of winter bush, I see the dark orange curlicues of wolf urine adorning the higher plane of my path. This is marked territory. The urine reeks, feral and sharp, like adrenaline and everything else I’ve ever known that’s fierce and alive. My hand hovers over the bulky can of bear spray in my pocket, searching for the trigger with my gloved fingers, just in case I need to make myself bigger. Are my days of playing dead over? I scribble over the wolf piss with neon orange bear spray. My graffiti marks a scent signal:

beware of a bigger animal here.

***