Poet's Corner: “The Same City” by Terrance Hayes

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North

Senior Editor

“The Same City” by Terrance Hayes from Hip Logic. Copyright © by Terrance Hayes. Reprinted in Poetry with permission of Penguin Books, a division of The Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

A car in the rain at night

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it.

Terrance Hayes is one of my favourite poets, with a long list of collections, awards, and fellowships which you can explore here. He is known to invent formal constraints and often writes on themes of music, masculinity, popular culture, and race. His breathtaking poem, “The Same City,” is no different. 

The first thing you might notice about it is the shape of the poem, much like falling snow or a rain-streaked windshield—especially in the cold. The lineation could also mimic tassels or something woven, drawing attention to the layering of time and relationships in the poem. We feel the movement, which Hayes mentions in this quote, via Poetry, originally from a 2013 interview with Lauren Russell for Hot Metal Bridge:

“I’m chasing a kind of language that can be unburdened by people’s expectations. I think music is the primary model—how close can you get this language to be like music and communicate feeling at the base level in the same way a composition with no words communicates meaning? It might be impossible. Language is always burdened by thought. I’m just trying to get it so it can be like feeling.”

The movement of water, juice, breath, cables, mouths, electricity, radiowaves, bodies, traffic, and light are musical to begin with, but Hayes illuminates this by braiding time in: the present moment’s, Noah’s, Joseph’s, his when he met his girlfriend, his father’s as a younger man, and the infant’s biological father’s. And all of this life shares space to say that he—we—exist within all of these times. A stunning example is in the first half of the poem, where we almost feel like the speaker could be the infant’s brother—that he’s longing to be a father through this lens: “I’d get out now, / prove I can stand with him / in the cold, but he told me to stay / with the infant.” 

And then, we burrow further into the soil of time by visiting Noah and Joseph, setting up the multi-generational rescuing that happens in the second stanza—“But to rescue a soul is as close / as anyone comes to God”—by beginning again. This is especially resonant of Noah’s story, after the flood. In the case of this poem, the rain is still falling, and the rescue is ongoing with tendrils in every time portal Hayes has opened (and left open). In other words, he’s writing about love. 

The complexity of love is further enacted through the breathtaking enjambment Hayes uses. These lines stop me every time: “There is one thing I will remember / all my life. It is as small / & holy as the mouth / of an infant. It is speechless.” Read each line individually, without the others. Hayes doesn’t tell us what the ‘one thing’ is, either. I read it as ‘love’ while knowing how intentionally he leaves himself and us speechless. It’s so profound it’s unnamable. And all we can do is hold each other—our smallness, sacredness, and innocence—in the cold.

Thinking about the holiday season and the onset of winter, this poem is a tender though strong reminder to remember who we are because of who is or has been for us. “In 1974, this man met my mother / for the first time as I cried or slept / in the same city that holds us / tonight. If you ever tell my story, / say that’s the year I was born.” Look at the enjambment again, and how it’s shifted to capture a clear love, honouring, and admiration for a father, even though I’m positive it wasn’t a perfect relationship. The holidays remind us that perfect relationships don’t exist. We continue to love, give, and carry grief regardless. Whose name(s), in your life, could you substitute into this poem, perhaps changing a few details here and there? We are all born when someone else is, whether blood-related or not. And to tell them we feel this is one of the greatest gifts we can give during the loneliest time of the year. 

Before you go, I wanted to share a few other poems that are in conversation with this one: “Perhaps the World Ends Here” by Joy Harjo, “A New Law” by Greg Delanty, “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost. Please read them—I hope they offer you a hand or a hug this winter. 

Poet's Corner: “half-blood” by Justene Dion-Glowa

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North

Senior Editor

“half-blood” by Justene Dion-Glowa from The League of Canadian Poets’ Poetry Pause, June 5th, 2024

A bison in a wheat field under a cloudy sky

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it.

Justene Dion-Glowa is a queer Métis poet living in Secwepemcúl’ecw. An alum of the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, they now work in the non-profit sector and recently released their first full-length poetry collection, Trailer Park Shakes, available now via Brick Books.

The brilliance of Justene Dion-Glowa’s poem shines through their use of white space on the page, which is one of my favourite craft tools in poetry. In “half-blood”, space—including caesuras, stanza breaks, line breaks, and indents, for example—works as hard as words, enacting the feeling of being ‘halved’ alongside a sort of sinister whiteness. But there is also space for thought, pause, breath, love, and reverence, for “the strength of our people / and Creator / reflecting in my eye shine”. The title of the poem, “half-blood”, isn’t extrapolated directly, but this is why it works so well: it layers the poem’s language. And although it likely speaks to Dion-Glowa’s Métis heritage, it also says: for so much to coexist is to be devastated—to be in a perpetual state of halving oneself and being halved by society. It’s both a brand of erasure and a necessary state of reflection.

Dion-Glowa, with tender care, also weaves in reflections on longing for the “sleek, hot, and slender-framed conventionally attractive”, “not made for a life of hardship”. A longing, now, to be halved. But I also think about the etymology of the word ‘hardship’, which conjures the rigidity of the British and French ships seemingly pouring into harbours, everything aboard inflicted like a trap. Dion-Glowa’s lines, here, gently shift blame and fault from them and their people. Followed by white space, I see these lines afloat, reclaiming the sea dominated by whiteness. 

There are also several short lines, intentionally placed to help us mirror feeling. For example, “spoons tapping along to the rhythm / I consider / how lucky I am / to have a weight I must carry physically” offers space to mirror how we consider gratitude, particularly with the inclusion of extra space beneath “how lucky I am”. Similarly, Dion-Glowa leaves extra space for generations to hurt—the past is not obsolete or ‘back in time’, it’s ongoing and always with us. The hurt didn’t happen behind us, it’s beneath our every step.

I’m also drawn to the musicality in “half-blood”, specifically in “girthy thighs”, “bison & bear”, and “food / fur / fibre / so / I starve no longer.” When rhyme and alliteration are used here, they ask us to chew. The language is delicious, so an excellent craft choice for the content of these lines (which become memorable for these reasons).

In the same vein as musicality, word choice profoundly shapes a poem. The word ‘meager’ stands out, starkly, because it’s the only word italicized. It also drives the last line, and is uncapitalized when we’d expect a capital ‘M’. We so often repeat “meager means” when we’re speaking about intentionally marginalized and “underprivileged” folks. By using lower case and italics, Dion-Glowa is tapping on the shoulder of the inflection—fear, discomfort, disgust—that’s used when we say ‘meager’, which our lexicon bolsters: “deficient in quantity, fullness, or extent; scanty, deficient in richness, fertility, or vigor; feeble, having little flesh; lean (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition).” Anti-fatness and ableism are apparent here without these exact words, reflective of the covert ways they outline our world. This is the power of poetry—‘meager’ is one word, and placed well, it does the work of evoking everything “half-blood” is alive on the page to say: in body, mind, spirit, and relationship, Dion-Glowa and their people are not, never have been, and never will be meager.

Poet's Corner: "The Albatross’s Sonnet to Western Civilization as the Madleen Sets Sail for Gaza" by Tishani Doshi

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North

Senior Editor

“The Albatross’s Sonnet to Western Civilization as the Madleen Sets Sail for Gaza” from Rattle’s Poets Respond June 17th, 2025. 

A bird’s-eye-view of a cargo boat

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it, alongside Tishani’s audio reading & notes about the poem. Further, here are helpful texts referenced in the poem: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1834)” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and “Compare the courage of Greta Thunberg’s Gaza aid mission with the inaction and complicity of western governments” by Owen Jones for The Guardian. 

Tishani Doshi writes poetry, fiction, and essays that explore the meeting of the lyrical and political. The body recurs in her writing, stemming from fifteen years working as the lead dancer of the Chandralekha company in Madras, India. In her work, the body is “a vehicle to explore gender, violence, sexuality and power, but also as an agent of renewal and transformation.” Doshi’s writing has won and been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Forward Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, the Hindu Fiction Prize, Tata Fiction Award, and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. She is an Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (paraphrased from her website).

Truthfully, the last time I read Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was in high school. Still a difficult read, enacting archaic English spelling, it’s fascinating to revisit now. You don’t need to have read it to experience Doshi’s poem, so in brief summary, it’s a long poem about the mental, spiritual, and physical consequences of violating nature (the mariner senselessly kills an albatross while he and his crew are at sea, and faces an onslaught of suffering). 

I was captivated by the question inherent in Doshi’s poem: if the albatross were to speak—in sonnet, one of the most well-used and unique of Western poetic forms, typically used in praise or love of a beloved—what might it say, now, flying above a humanitarian aid ship bound for Gaza, by which we mean and know: bound to not reach Gaza? For me, more haunting than the question was that I already knew its answer. I’d wager most of us do. And yet, “Remember, when all of this was going on, / there were some who were homesick for the world / and what it could have been, and others who were silent.”

Typically, a ‘traditional’ sonnet has fourteen lines, set in iambic pentameter, and utilizes a particular rhyme scheme: Petrarchan sonnets are ABBA ABBA CDECDE or ABBA ABBA CDCDCD, and Shakespearean sonnets are ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. In Petrarchan sonnets, there is one octave (eight-line stanza) followed by a sestet (six-line stanza). In a Shakespearean sonnet, there are three quatrains (four-line stanzas) followed by a couplet (two-line stanza). There is always a volta before the final stanza—the poem’s transition or turning point. 

Right away, we notice that the poem bends many of these “rules”. It doesn’t follow traditional form, which to me indicates a need: to first understand/acknowledge a “rule” and then to break it. I wonder if this is why there are echoes of traditional form, particularly with rhyme in the middle of lines (end & friends, malfunctioning & unveiling, coat & told & globe, seen & besieged, and do & two, for example). Similarly, the volta appears with an em dash and a question: “what we’ve seen what we’ve seen what we’ve seen— / will you still ask, What can one boat do for the besieged?” It’s as if the albatross is saying, “I know your tools well, and I will try to use them to make you listen.” The rhyming words scattered throughout the poem amplify this, giving a sense of crumbling. The empire of Western civilization is falling apart and “coming to an end.”

Further, rhyme slants and tapers off as the poem moves. The last few lines don’t rhyme as much and feel matter-of-fact. But exceptionally poignant is the fact that the obvious rhyme with “been” in the very last line is “Madleen.” Instead, the final word is “silent.”

Stepping into imagery, we have the “friends” of Western civilization on a beach. I had to pause and think about who these friends might be, especially in conjunction with the “sheepskin coat.” All point to the uncompromising and unquestioning rule-following—“I only did what I was told”—bedrock among this family of civilizations, all of which followed one another, led like sheep, right off of a cliff. 

Last but certainly not least, the repetition Doshi uses with “what we’ve seen” three times alongside the preceding “when we’ve seen” leads into the volta. To me, this feels resonant of social media: we’re (necessarily) bearing witness to violence that so overwhelms our hearts we can’t describe it—all we can do is repeat, re-share, and repost phrases and clips. Interestingly, a version of this happens in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” After the mariner shoots the albatross down, the ship becomes trapped at sea, stuck without a breeze. The crew becomes so thirsty that they lose the ability to speak. This parallel is powerful, particularly after the Madleen was captured. Of everyone who wasn’t on board, who continued to speak when the Madleen’s passengers couldn’t? Poetry has an irreplaceable way of resourcing us with these types of questions and conversations. What a brilliant, needed poem. I hope we can all spend more time with it (and all of Tishani Doshi’s work).