In the gap between two pine trees at night

a wild animal skirts out — in — out

like the mind in the thick of the lyric.

She lets down her hair in the boreal forest,

catching in its slick propulsion of memory.

Between the two pine trees there is queer

desire and interiority, a bristling attitude.

A way of life that is all margin, all edge.

Here, there are no mountains to conquer.

There is tangled and forgotten life somehow

surviving in the conditions of reserve.

But look, this is not a confessional poem

written by a brown woman who contemplates

her own relationship to being unseen. No.

No, this forest has an acceptable story.

It lacks strange bodies and strange faces.

It is filled with pine and smells like pine

and the pine is not racialised.

In the gap between two pine trees at night

a dark figure presses up against the lyric

border of a forest that demonstrates

the right kind of belonging. The wild animal

may or may not have been there at all.