Katie, forest fires melt the air

half an hour

from where you live

the sky is a black sheep

bleating and I can’t even

see the wolf in the photo

you texted me

but I feel his snarl

in your voice over speaker phone

heat is an apex predator

in a desert valley

I keep promising to visit

and pick up flats of peaches to can

but Greyhound cancelled

its bus service in Western Canada

you biked to the north end of

Galiano Island

and a month later I followed

there were two coves to swim in

and an island to fuck on

our illegal fire by the water

lasted only minutes before

a woman walking her German Shepherd

yelled we all want marshmallows!

we slept on a peninsula

and I whimpered all night

because the voice that whispers

you’re safe needed to let go

and when it did

I felt my boundaries dissolve

into waves and wind



Artwork by Sheila Norgate.

Adèle Barclay’s writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Heavy Feather Review, The Pinch, Fog Machine, The Puritan, PRISM international, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 Lit POP Award for Poetry and the 2016 Walrus Readers’ Choice Award for Poetry and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, (Nightwood, 2016) was nominated for the 2015 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and won the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.

Her second collection of poetry, Renaissance Normcore, is forthcoming from Nightwood Editions in fall 2019. She lives on unceded Coast Salish territory/Vancouver, BC. 

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Sheila Norgate is a dog-crazy artist, writer, performer, and pre-post feminist. She makes her home on Gabriola Island, BC where she practises kissing her dog on the lips and letting herself go.

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