I wrote this poem/blessing trying to understand Passover in this time of genocide. After a recent online event where I read it, several people contacted me to ask for a copy to read at their family or Community Seder. I wanted to offer it to anyone who finds it meaningful for their Seder this year (as long as it’s not for commercial use).

See below for some liberatory Hagaddah resources. Poem below, or click here for PDF.

Free Palestine.

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Blessing for the Matzah        

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Liberation-oriented Haggadah resources

In “Hearkening to the Voice of Gaza: Seder Readings for Passover 5784” from Chicago Tzedek, we are reminded that “As we lift up the matzah this Passover, the words of Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha remind us that for Gazans experiencing forced starvation, lechem oni – the bread of affliction – is more than merely symbolic.”

“Three days later, on social media, (my brother) Hamza posted a photograph of what he was eating that day: a ragged brown morsel, seared black on one side and flecked with grainy bits. “This is the wondrous thing we call ‘bread’—a mixture of rabbit, donkey, and pigeon feed,” Hamza wrote in Arabic. “There is nothing good about it except that it fills our bellies. It is impossible to stuff it with other foods, or even break it except by biting down hard with one’s teeth…”“

There are many great liberation-oriented Haggadah resources, including many new ones this year like the one quoted above. The most expansive list I’ve found is here (8 pages of links!):

Justice-y Passover Seder Haggadot/Supplements ✊🌾🐸🧿

A few liberation Haggadah resources that are new this year:

[NEW] From the River to the Sea: A Passover Haggadah by Families for Ceasefire Philly 5784/2024 (great for children and families)

[NEW] Harkening to the Voices of Gaza from Chicago Tzedek (a Haggadah supplement with readings from Gazan writers that fit each section of the Seder)

[NEW] Pillar of Fire Haggadah: A collective queer anti-zionist haggadah

[NEW] JVP (Jewish Voice for Peach) Passover 5784/2024: Exodus from Zionism

[NEW] If Not Now Freedom for All Haggadah

Hightlights from recent years (these, plus some of the new ones above, are some of the sources I used when piecing together a Haggadah for my own use):

Legacies of Resistance: An Anti-Zionist Haggadah for a Liberation Seder by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN)

Jewish Voice For Peace Haggadah 5777

Passover Toolkit 5775 (2021): Set the stage for the telling The Great Narrative of Liberation by Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb for the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council

Kavod Jews of Color, Indigenous Jews, Mizrahim, & Sephardim Caucus Haggadah 2019

JUFJ Jews United for Justice Social Justice Seder 2020

Love and Justice in the Time of War Haggadah/Zine by Micah Bazant and Dara Silverman’s 

About the Spoon on the Seder Plate: 

• Disability during a pandemic: Why you should put a spoon on your seder plate this year By Rabbi Elliot Kukla
• Narrow Bridge Candles Haggadah insert about disability Justice

Pesach Resource Library collected by Cleveland Jewish Collective

Interesting historical Haggadot:

The Israeli Black Panthers Haggadah 50th Anniversary Edition

Hagode shel Peysekh (with a Socialist Twist): A partial translation of a 1919 Socialist Haggadah published by the Galician Bund

But seriously, there are so so SO many more. Check out the list above. And we’ll keep writing them every year until everyone is free.

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.

I am so grateful to Arcturus (published by the Chicago Review of Books) for giving a home to these two poems. The first has one of my favourite titles from the past few years.

CW: One poem makes reference to suicidal ideation and emotionally abusive relationship dynamics.

Read them here.

Did I write a series of manifestos in the voices of my mortal enemies? Why, yes I did. In this case: Insomnia. It was a weird exercise in attempting some kind of imaginative empathy for entities that have made my life miserable. (But also, did a single night of insomnia make me gay? Yes, yes it did.)

The weird little insomnia poem that came out of this has found a perfect home in Rogue Agent and I couldn’t be more pleased. If you are interested in where poetry and bodies meet, check this journal out. It’s always got engaging and visceral work, and this issue is no exception.

So delighted to see an anthology I have been a part of (Impact: Women Writing After Concussion, University of Alberta Press, 2021) on this list! It is impressive company indeed–so many great books on there.

https://www.cbc.ca/books/the-best-canadian-nonfiction-of-2021-1.6276723

The essay I wrote for the anthology is called “In Which Skinny Dipping Temporarily Fixes a Life.” It talks about how my concussion affected my life and my mental health and my writing, and how my writing process for the Garbage Poems project came out of that.

The editors worked with filmmaker Junyeong Kim to create a series of book trailers for the anthology, each focused on a different theme. My essay, not surprisingly, is in the “I Dream of Swimming” section. Here’s the trailer for the essays in that section:

Check out the whole reel of trailers here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCiHkBuv_jWYTc064OeLoAf08FnOSm1bJ

And more about the book here: https://www.uap.ualberta.ca/titles/1017-9781772125818-impact

It’s really quite a book – devastating, moving, and relatable even thought the experiences range so widely. I was honoured to see my essay keeping such amazing company in the pages of this book.

Illness and joy have had a strange and often fraught relationship in my life. My sickest years in my twenties, when I had to stop working and attending classes for several years, were also the time I came out and discovered writing. When I was on medical leave a couple of years ago, swimming outdoors was a balm when I could work myself up to leaving the house. But I lived in constant worry that someone would see me doing something fun and think I should be back at work already.

It has been hard for me to hold the simultaneity of illness and joy without making it an either/or, and even harder to trust that other people will do the same. It has been hard for me to remember that I deserve rest and pleasure outside of the frame of ‘earning’ them—either by being so sick I have to be in bed, or by being productive enough that I can see them as rewards.

I’m so happy two poems from the Garbage Poems have found a home in the Canthius Pleasures Project, especially Blessing for the swim selfie which is the most directly I’ve written about illness and joy. This eclectic online project explores pleasure from a feminist and intersectional perspective, and I am LOVING it so far – I adore reading about the why and how of artists’ processes when writing and creating about pleasure. I can’t wait to make my way through the rest of it.

With thanks to April White for their illustration work for the ongoing project, and for the underwater swimming selfie research (which I used to call “research” with scare quotes because how could research be fun?) which profoundly altered my ability to look at images of my own body with pleasure or interest instead of fear.

[Image ID: Photograph of a laptop and keyboard on a wooden desk, surrounded by carefully arranged rows of garbage including cans, bottles, chip bags, cigarette boxes, cups, and bottle caps.]

This year’s Sparks Literary Festival was cancelled once during our Snowmageddon State of Emergency this January, and rescheduled for late March. We all know how that turned out. The festival is wonderful, and it’s one of many recent cultural losses. I’d entirely forgotten about the associated poetry contest until I got the email saying I’d won first place. I was more moved than I probably should have been. I think I’d forgotten that unadulterated good news existed. Congratulations also to Grant Loveys and Maggie Burton. Sparks asked for a video of the poem to post, so my artist friend/collaborator April White and I worked together to create this video. Which is to say, I had an idea, and then she jumped in and actually made this beautiful thing. Thank you April. The poem was written during an entirely different time, but it feel eerily relevant right now. ❤

Or view video on Vimeo here. Text in the video is the poem below.

I am writing a spell for your nervous system

and hiding it in a poem.
I know you’re trying to stitch

the world back together
while it breathes and keeps

breaking. Like you. Another
heatwave, hurricane. Grief

gurgles like a sump pump.
The arctic on fire. Thirsty birds

of industry, mouthing
dry wells. Bulldozers

in the olive grove. Prehensile
suits in a sealed building,

deciding who deserves
to be a person. Baby monitors

tuned to the evening news.
Geologic time is breathing

hard. Your nerves: clenched
shut like barnacles and still

flinching. I am casting a road
out of the city. Stop waiting

for CNN to self-soothe.
Stop memorizing formulas

for herbal abortion, just
in case, even though

some futures are no longer
unimaginable. Here

is a highway that vanishes
behind you like wet footprints.

Gravel pullout, the rule
of three boulders across

an unmarked road. The car door
closing with a reverse bang,

retracting into itself
the existence of cars.

Because you are in a poem,
rusted mile-markers appear

only for as long as you walk
the dirt road towards them.

Now a marshy spot, now
lily pads, now wooden pallets

thrown down for you to cross.
Labrador tea and pitcher plants

flanking a narrow trail, and
wasn’t it ever only this?

An opening in the trees.
Worn stones sloping down

to the flickering mirror of a pond.
Step out of the idea of clothes,

into a shallow dive.
Fingertip-to-fingertip

with your reflection—and
gone. A beat later, slick

and blinking, as if from a dark
room: somersault, scissor kick,

glide. Your body diamond-tipped,
a stylus polishing a groove.

Practice this skin. A dark map
back here, sparking, neural.

When it is time, walk up out
of the pond, dripping with

what made you. The world
leans down over cupped palms

to blow you dry. When you are
ready for clothes to exist,

clothes. The path winks
into existence before you.

Eventually you think,
I had a car. Onward,

the messy heartbeat
of the world. And whatever

work you have to do,
you begin again.

I don’t nap easily, but I am of the mind that a good nap is an almost spiritual experience. I recently ran across this poem that was published earlier in Maisonneuve. It’s one of the few poems I’ve ever written about happiness, and I can tell you I had recurring doubts about whether a basically contented poem was a viable thing. Thanks to Maisonneuve for publishing it back in 2018, and making it available online for National Poetry Month the year after (and for Facebook’s terrible search engine that served me a post about poetry instead of the super very important feel-good swing dance dance video I was looking for).

Check out the poem here, and check out the general awesomeness of Maisonneuve while you’re at it.

I’m pretty thrilled to be reading at this Riddle Fence launch on August 15th in Woody Point. Why? So. Many. Reasons.

First of all, I’ve always secretly wanted to read at Writers at Woody Point even though it seemed highly unlikely (I am not a famous novelist or Jeremy freaking Dutcher). This is as close as I’m going to get, and it’s pretty swell. Also, what a festival. Seriously.

Also, Lorna Crozier was one of my first poetry profs—a big influence and support when I was first writing poetry over 20 years ago. She was a phenomenal teacher. I was lucky to learn from her, and am thrilled to be reading with her (and see her again).

I’ve been trying to get poems in Riddle Fence for a while now, and it’s one of those small things that makes me feel like this place finally wants to claim me a little bit as a writer. This province can be a complicated place to make your home when you’re not from here, and it means a lot to be recognized by rad local institutions like Riddle Fence.

And, not only do I have poems in this issue (from the Garbage Poems project), but they’re being published alongside three of April White‘s colour illustrations. They’ve been painting the pieces of garbage I used to create the poems, and I cannot wait to see these in print for the first time.