Poetry By Nancy Huggett

         Tim Vrtiska CC





Maybe It’s the Cicadas

So, she’s up and hit you again. 
Her fractured brain sparked 
by some random directive, or maybe
it’s the cicadas.             She throws her 

phone, the one in the protective case
that can’t protect you from its blow.
You turn, tired now. You know tears 
only incite more rage, so you stare up 

at the trees. Ancient maples gathering 
the breeze, cooling the clouds. You raise
your face, pray for something to unravel this
heat. This sorrow that boils beneath, engulfs

a whole day. Not sorrow. Anger. Dig 
deeper. Fear. Deeper. This molten 
sense of failure that consumes 
your ribcaged heart when all you want 

to do is love her back into 
herself and let her go. 





We Long to Name

your muscled misery, 
your panicked pain. Ghosts 
edging the stone walls we’ve built 
to keep you safe and healing. We dim 
the world for your shattered brain.
Fractaled sunlight, bright colours, sharp 
sounds. Our ambiguous grief. We hold 

it all in. Leave the rest out. Crack
an opening to test the elements.
Reckless derecho drowns 
your dreams. My salty tears 
number the losses, unnamed,
we have been holding for you. Still 

you rise. Tumbled, stumbling,
dendrites misfiring.
Looking for those open 
arms that say: It’s alright.
You’re here. You belong. 





My Jessie

she’s a full-blown tragedy but lives 
her life like a dream while I plump 
the clouds around her as she floats.
I am mother. Full of hope, wind. Blowing, 

blowing so her sails are full. Each stone 
thrown, picked up and mined for a vein 
of gold or a prism. Others hidden away. 
The stones will come, I say. The boulders too. 

But this is how you sail. Look 
here are the sirens. Here the earplugs. Let me 
tie you to the mast. This will pass. The seas 
are full of mythic creatures—scaled, exhaling 

fire. But it’s her own breath that burns 
the bindings, those that tie her 
to the world. She floats        
                                                                 away                 away.



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Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes, lives, and caregives in Ottawa, Canada on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people. Thanks to Firefly Creative, Merritt Writers, and not-the-rodeo poets, she has work out/forthcoming in Citron Review, Literary Mama, The Forge, Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly, and Waterwheel Review. ​
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