Poetry By Nancy Huggett

James Loesch CC



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But the Dark 
after Rilke

Every bird a burden breaking 
the branch in the darkness

that lays flat and heavy,
like your limb across 

my chest, pinning me--
the weight of it. All

of my own making: carefully 
crafted fractions of control

cracking into chaos, my fists 
ripping off the chords

of lists that wind their to-dos
around my days. Strangling

grace and now even love as
I shove your flesh from mine,

shatter stillness into shards
that sharpen all the edges

of our words. The world
we have been building shimmies

and are we willow or spruce?
or the bird that sings?

​



Missing My Mother

There is no one to call now.
No one to say I know, I know.
It’s all buck up and this too shall pass.
It’s all hold on, shake it off, tomorrow’s
a new day. It’s all frame and function
and lawn chairs gathered in a circle
for the Fourth of July and I’m that passel of fireworks
in a cardboard box at the end of the driveway waiting
for the random rogue spark to ignite the whole ke-bang.




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​Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes, lives, and caregives on the unceded, unsurrendered Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). Thanks to Firefly Creative, Merritt Writers, and not-the-rodeo poets, she has work published in EVENT, Gone Lawn, One Art, Pinhole, Rust & Moth, and The New Quarterly. 
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