"In six, the seasons" by Selina Boan

Summer

between the warmth of language

and a four-walled room, a girl clicks Beginner

Cree on the internet, a divided circle,

a laptop, a desk and a full screen

of a flat skyline hung below

the Cree word

Nīpin (knee-pin)

summer in northern Saskatchewan

thick with mosquitoes

July hatching

heat

learning the seasons into six

a girl listens to her father's first language

alone, never having been that far north

she hears sounds like a knee-pin

a forced fracture, fixed

with pins and wire

Fall

a girl grows up only to trip again

falls into her not knowing like a knife,

every season, a birth

father's blood balanced between

a want for words where no words are known

she'll imagine

takwākin (tak-wwa-a-kin)

how leaves commit themselves

to change

how grass rolls gold

moose velvet lost to the land

take away a kin is not the right way

to hear it, how her tongue tries and falls

from the outside of a window screen

and the inside of a room

Freeze-up

site to site her fingers touch glass

lake sheen zoom, a picture,

a frozen rain warning for the prairies

white letters against a red screen

on google, she searches

her grandfather's seasons into sound

mikiskāw (micki-scow)

for when language braids

the ground still again

and the ice moves in

cracks closing

a girl can search the space between

a season and a scow, a boat unbound

where words float rivers

swim the surface, here

and here and here

Winter

a girl in a room in the wrong month

can repeat one season two hundred and ninety-six times or more,

an elder's voice stretched

from the laptop screen, power speaks

Pipon (pip-oon)

water solid

and a thumb of trees

exposed

her lung sound

a vowel pulled into a room

a sound it out write it down

try try again,

long reasons to keep repeating

Spring

a bulb of light, a breath,

door open like a square of sun

the girl taps into a woman's voice

she's never heard before, a wish

the web an elder's word

Sīkwan (seea-gwen)

sound combed into lake water

goose necks

settled into the shape of questions

how to say when a word is more than a word

she hears a sequin of mother's English

disk-shaped bead

balanced

and weighed on the tongue

Break up

a girl between two dialects

still a screen and still a searching, learns

break-up can come before or after spring
depending on where you are

online, back and forth between

knowledge and knowing

a difference of space

a word in the mouth

Miyoskamin (meeyous-ska-min)

birch sapped June

season snow spotted

river melt

running

her want for memory

where no memory exists

child again

all slim wrists and creek bone

a river-girl

slick with mud

frost and word melt

Miyoskamin me and you are s-kin

Miyoskamin me and you are s-kin

Miyoskamin

in grandmother's language

where the body never stands alone

a girl's tongue curls Cree into the nerves

and walks from a room

to where miyoskamin returns

and ice

opens