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.

Every Halloween, bobbing on the ocean in Big Barnie, my parents read aloud our favourite ghost story at midnight: The Little Mermaid. “Even the ghosts of the sea were cold,” my dad, Jack, whispered, making use of the gap in his teeth. He frizzed up his blue-black hair so it looked spiked with hair gel. 

Wenzdae (she/her) is an Afro-Indigenous, multi-media artist hailing from the Georgian Bay Metis Community, of which she is a registered and claimed member.