Cut to Fortress

Poems

Tawahum Bige

• Publisher: Nightwood Editions
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780889714168
• eBook ISBN: 9780889714175

A stunning debut poetry collection confronting colonialism, relationships, grief and intergenerational wounds.

Tawahum Bige has written a stunning debut poetry collection confronting colonialism, relationships, grief and intergenerational wounds. Cut to Fortress considers the possibility of decolonization through a personal lens, urging for a resistance that is tied using cord and old-growth tree roots; a resistance that tethers us all together in this contemporary existence.

With an upbringing in Surrey, fraught familial conflicts, the passing of his older brother and its influence on his world view, Bige slices through the forts built overtop occupied Turtle Island to examine their origin and his own. His journey climbs into the mountains while he reconnects with his Dene and Cree cultures like a gripping hand on jagged rock. His path draws into the concrete urban streets that Wetako-medicine lurks through, especially for his people. The labour of these travels brings him to the springs where healing passed-down traumas becomes possible by drawing water through vulnerability.

Tawahum

I cannot contain myself, down my path where I wanna be in an instant

Set on the destination embracin’ myself and the universe tracin’ in and out of lines of solar flares gracin’ lights ultraviolet

sparkle the glimmer of light reflected in your luminous eyes What universes do you witness in us? In me?

Can you feel my fire? Can you smell the smoke rise? The sage burning? Can you feel my heart?

Sparking match on sage leaf cracking open abalone shell to flicker and dance with frenzy spinning one last time in the summer sun

I unhinge gates that once blocked me with liquid fire filling and growing from my decision to fucking continue

fucking continue

fucking continue

Incessant like game over space invaders high score

fucking continue

Another round in space arena

Again, through spirit’s vision and back

Expand, contract expand, contract with raised hands shatter, crack

it’s like my heart was buried not to rise again no resurrection

instead transformation feeding the foliage of tomorrow I now feel what our mother feels seeds sprout, vines tangle embracing me and I embrace her

become resurgence growing capacity branches blossom out grasp for the sky

Did you spot me? Dancing to illuminate despite space-borne darkness I still shine between galaxies

This is the flip side to the pit dug deep inside of me It holds massive volumes worth living for

And though I wish this was the end of it

the pain-stricken storms the nebulae and gas giants

raging and raging and raging

I embrace them, too

eyes glimmering for what’s next

and the storms continue

Flip side dualities drive my sight of the megaliths made from chaos and myth

I am volcano eruption I am asteroid collision

I am Turtle Island forming

I am black scoter slick duck showing off almost drowning below a flooded earth after the sun was stolen back from the bear I bring life and dirt back to beautiful lynx, mouse, pike and all other creatures

I am tectonic shift titan unearthed from frackin...

Table of contents

• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Origin
• Toy Soldiers
• Reasons to Decolonize
• Cartridge Discharges
• No Space
• Too Abstract
• Storm Call
• past
• Law and Order
• Inner City Owl
• U R
• old-growth genocide
• Transformer
• Geography Lesson
• how the elders educate
• Wetako’s Highway
• He Builds Himself a Computer
• Envy
• Videogames
• run away
• Radio Silence
• Umbrella
• Dragging Dusk
• Short Talk on Diaspora
• Capacity
• return me
• in time of war
• Tawahum
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author