Make Good
Patrick Grace is a writer living on Coast Salish lands. His work has been featured in recent issues of The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, and EVENT. His poem “The Big Dark,” originally published in Prairie Fire, will appear in Best Canadian Poetry 2022. Anstruther Press published his first chapbook, Dastardly, late last year.
How do you intend
It to end the road its roar
To nowhere the habitual
Leaving we revisit once
A long age thaws
Solid in our forgetting
Did you return
To make good
On your boyhood instinct
Playing animal, uncanny
The southern blur
At the train’s terminal gate
How does it begin
I know not
To listen to the city
Braided in light
The second step
A heavy familiar
How much time
Before I guess
Myself back
Into that world
Saying
I am not
Afraid—
You first
Patrick Grace is a writer living on Coast Salish lands. His work has been featured in recent issues of The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, and EVENT. His poem “The Big Dark,” originally published in Prairie Fire, will appear in Best Canadian Poetry 2022. Anstruther Press published his first chapbook, Dastardly, late last year.