I am so pleased and grateful that my poem “Sweetness | מתיקות” was shortlisted for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize. It’s a dissonant feeling to try to celebrate a good thing in this time of daily violence and genocide, but I’m glad it’s a poem which calls in various kinds of sweetness including the sweetness of solidarity, of standing together in the streets with thousands of people and shouting for the world we want to make together. And while it obviously wasn’t written for this moment, I’m glad it happens to be a poem which, even if only in passing, squished between queer sex and brisket for forty in the backyard, shouts out Free Palestine. May the small sweetnesses sustain us so that we can keep showing up in solidarity to build a world based in collective liberation.

I did do some interviews about the poem and the shortlist, but the one which ended up posted online wasn’t a great experience for me so I don’t want to share that one here. Instead, I’ll share what I wrote (in a daze in the middle of last October) as part of my answer to the shortlist questionnaire that was never used:

This year, for the two weeks around Rosh Hashanah, I had the beautiful and bewildering experience of feeling like I was living in this poem. Not just generally, but in some pointedly specific ways. New friends, a wild series of “pleased to inform” emails, an all-day honey harvest, marching in the streets yelling Protect Trans Kids (though I had hoped we would not need to do that again so soon). One of the moments was at a Rosh Hashanah gathering, in the new town I’d only just moved to, with a backyard full of queers and kids and beekeepers and singing and honey rituals and a blessing for gender autonomy and someone in a Free Palestine t-shirt blowing the shofar and too much food and people balancing plates on their laps and last-minute forks from the thrift store. At some point, as various lines from the poem played out around me, I looked over at my dearest friend (who had helped me edit the poem from several provinces away and who is now my neighbour again for the first time in a decade) and said, Does it kind of feel like…? and she laughed and said, Yes, obviously.

When I submitted this poem last Spring, I wanted to wish us all some sweetness for this coming year, during a time that hasn’t been particularly easy. As I write this, in the midst of the unfolding news in Gaza over the past few weeks, my heart is breaking in so many directions. I don’t know how to look away from the horror of the daily news. I don’t know how to grieve without fear that my grief will be weaponized against Palestinians. I don’t know how to make the violence stop, and I don’t know how to focus on anything else either. I remind myself that solidarity is a kind of sweetness, that we do not stand alone, that another world is possible. May we see a Free Palestine in our lifetimes.