The Shubenacadie by Emily Tristan Jones

I am down the spiral muddy of the river

This river calms us like a mother

It even spits us up like a death that we thought was long gone

It shoots us like a birth, sticking our baby fingers in the air

Each toe like a pipe tooting its own baby song

Emily Tristan Jones was born in the Northwest Territories. Her poems have appeared in The Puritan, Harvard Review, Denver Quarterly, Vallum, and several other journals. She holds a graduate degree in the visual arts from the University of Chicago (a winner of its emerging writers series). She lives in Montréal where she teaches poetry for the QWF and coordinates Columba, an online poetry quarterly.