Angeline Schellenberg is the author of Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016), a collection about raising children on the autism spectrum, which received three Manitoba Book Awards and was a finalist for a ReLit Award. Her second full-length collection, Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press), will launch in March 2020. Angeline’s poetry has been selected in two Prairie Fire contests and shortlisted for Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2015 and 2019 Poem of the Year. In addition to Irises, her chapbooks include Roads of Stone (Alfred Gustav Press), Dented Tubas (Kalamalka Press), and the forthcoming Blue Moon, Red Herring (JackPine Press). Angeline lives in Winnipeg, Canada, with her husband, their two children, and a German shepherd-corgi.
Irises
After “Through the Looking Glass,” a photograph by Melody Carr
Look what survived the winter and the men with shovels.
Yesterday you told me to clean up the bones in the basement
and it may have been the morphine,
but I believe you. I have them too.
Sometimes I think of you and it’s hard to breathe:
all that green. All the lights in my house are burning out,
you know. One by one, except the television.
Sorry, they tell me I talk to touch.
It sounded like the guy on the radio said
Poetry is iodine. You’re growing wilder
with each wingbeat. Sometimes we pray
and God glazes a window.
Don’t say the knitting’s on the wall.
Today, you squeezed my hand four times,
the number of days that London burned.
Now that I think of it, he may have meant melon vine.
I read that care comes from the root to cry out.
As I left your room, the crosswalk did its best
chickadee impression. De do de do—
counting down the seconds that remain.