SIX A.M.

BY JENNIFER HOSEIN

Art by Jennifer Hosein.

Windows masked
with the night’s 
thick frost waning 
men sleep-
buried in the garage 
between slick-
shiny cars and their own 
frigid feces
in the cold-blackened 
pandemic, silence 
wraps the lake and
I throw limbs across a decade 
into the apartment 
on Treewood Street
amid crumpled newspaper-
nests, curdling plates, boots 
spread all over like berry jam 
where my mother settles 
on the green velvet sofa
before her last slumbers 
in bleached rooms 
where she speaks in wisps 
that don’t convert 
to any mother 
tongue but my own 
mother’s tongue 
thick with the nights 
we breathe
into her waning breaths

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JENNIFER HOSEIN is a Toronto writer, visual artist and educator. Her debut collection of poetry, A Map of Rain Days (Guernica Editions, 2020), was longlisted for the League of Canadian Poets 2021 Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her poems, short fiction, creative non-fiction, and a play have been published in Canadian literary magazines as well as translated into Hungarian for the anthology Crystal Garden/Kristálykert.