I dream a basement
in a boarding house
and I must go
down into its splintered
silver light searching
for cargo and machinery
crouched in corners
everything flashing
black and white—
hours pass, scraping
grate and lift of metal
in my heels and bones,
I drag the pieces up the stairs
and through the door,
into a daylit world
the colour of tea
where people sit in twos
and threes eating laughing
drinking then a voice
decides that I must go
down the flight again
to find a flashlight I’d
forgotten, blinking silver
strobe, and three young men
appear to help me
scour the concrete floor
we see it lolling in the corner
of the space I’d cleared
with heavy lifting climb
the stairs to learn
that no one cared or knew
my hours of labour
in the craven light—
and then the basement’s
gape becomes an opening,
fills my ribs with knowing:
no longer will I scale the dark
to carry burdens not my own.
Kelly Norah Drukker is a Montreal-based writer and doctoral candidate. Her collection Small Fires (MQUP, 2016) won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and the Concordia University First Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. Petits feux (trans. Lori Saint-Martin; Paul Gagné) appeared with Le lézard amoureux in 2018. Most recently, Kelly’s work was a finalist for the Accenti Poetry Contest and the Montreal International Poetry Prize (2022).
