by Manahil Bandukwala
A sturgeon, smiling, or swimming. River level rises in late summer. Waist-high. Once it might have engulfed me. Salt. I forgot to look over my shoulder two weeks ago and luck now eludes me.
*
Was I dreaming or is every sky pinker than the last. Snow catches fire five-hundred kilometres north-west of here. Here the sturgeon smiles, and swims. A full moon
morphed, elongated, swishing water and mud at the lake end.
Think hard about wishes
before blowing out
the candles,
careful not to waste any.
*
A wish is selfish. I wish for luck. To wish for time, or for more wishes.
Sturgeon.
Wolf.
Hungry.
Hungering.
*
Think back to last month, how every day felt thick. The month before, how the moon was beautiful and bloody. Get used to blood and red and copper. The reddest solstice of our lives so far, the pinkest the sky has been.
Lick the sturgeon eggs beneath the lake, a mingling of smoke and salt. Hints of cream cheese frosting between the wax.
*
Three birthday cakes and each candle on each cake is the same wish. As if the third time is when it sticks.
*
As if elongating the moment between the song and blowing out all the candles in a single breath will pause the smoke, sturgeons, surging water. Live
at the cusp of the full sturgeon moon. An abundance of fish in the lakes and rivers of this hemisphere.
The wind carries faint howls, and hunger.
*
Ask me of time. Birth time. Of the time the moon will be at its fullest but daylight floods the sky.
*
The sun is the sole witness to the moon this month
but if not the sun’s flood then smoke, then water
waist-high, then the opaque film
of blood.
*
Had I looked over my shoulder on the new moon I might have caught a moment of luck in my net. As though luck could, like a sturgeon, swim out of the haze. Now all I am left with are wishes. Effective as luck, as elusive.
The net is torn, a tangle of string.
*
So many names for the same thing, dependent on the latitude and the angle at which
the body is turned to the sky. So many signs point to the end ahead.
Fewer sturgeons swimming each lake.
Each summer day a new film of smoke.
Fire and fire and fire and fire and fire and—
*
Cicadas scream, each day louder than the last. Screaming to find a mate while there is still time. This might be the last cycle of mating they have
or they might emerge thirteen years later and find all the smoke cleared away and August’s sturgeons leaping against the silhouette of a full moon
(but sturgeons are not fish that leap up against full moons.
This is the imagined future where imagination runs).
*
River rising. Summer more than halfway through. Was I dreaming or did snow really catch fire outside my window. Snow falls in summer, somewhere. How else to explain all this smoke.
*
I made twenty-four wishes.
Each wish
the same.
In essence, to survive, to survive,
to survive.
Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist originally from Pakistan and now settled in Canada. She works as Coordinating Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine, and is Digital Content Editor for Canthius. She is a member of Ottawa-based collaborative writing group VII. Her debut poetry collection is MONUMENT (Brick Books).
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