Birthplace: Victoria
Occupation: Student
My favourite author: Among many favourites, I love the work of Wayson Choy, Alan Bradley, Jane Austen, Jodi Piccoult and W.O. Mitchell.
My writing background: My family raised me to love reading, and I’ve been writing ever since I could pick up a pen.
How often I write: When possible I like to write first thing every morning, but I always carry a notebook to jot down ideas throughout the day.
Where I write: At home, at school, on the bus, when out on a walk … anywhere and everywhere.
My preferred style of writing: Any type of fiction, but particularly poetry.
The inspiration for the piece I submitted: Five Seasons came in the wake of many poems written after my grandmother’s death; I hope this version manages to capture an authentic experience of grief.
Five Seasons
Fall curls on your tongue.
This is the sort of love you wish
you could leave behind:
like the pebbles your mom made you
turn free from your pockets,
those wishstones filched from the bay
on that road trip towards
an adulthood without maps.
You know now that the weight of loss stays
forever heavy: that rock face that grief
carved in your own image.
**
What would you be now if not
for the ocean:
for the neap tide of late November,
for seaweed draped like cut power lines that time
we coiled ourselves in corners,
painting shadows on walls in a dark house
we should have recognized;
we wept while consuming food
about to unfreeze
spitting out pain
disguised as plum seeds.
**
Spring.
Girl falls in love.
Girl gets struck by car.
Car remembers its impact,
grafts her skin to make a ghost.
**
At the end of your life you return
to childhood,
to those mornings cut like prisms
by light through blinded windows.
The beach house.
Those timeless days you,
as if in dream, watched
your grandmother butterfly stroke,
cresting waves made silicate.
She who vowed the lake remained
the one thing she could clasp -
found disaster as inevitable
as clichéd. You who lay
flat on the dock, watched her drown.
Later they commended you
for being brave.