book review

This Wound Is a World

Winner of the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize

This Wound Is a World

Billy-Ray Belcourt

University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London

Poems featured here have previously been published in Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, Decolonization, Red Rising
Magazine, mâmawi-äcimowak, SAD Mag, Yellow Medicine Review, The Malahat Review, PRISM International, and The New
Quarterly.

Originally published in 2017 by Frontenac House

First University of Minnesota Press edition, 2019

Copyright 2017, 2019 by Billy-Ray Belcourt

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401–2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Belcourt, Billy-Ray, author.
This wound is a world / Billy-Ray Belcourt.
First University of Minnesota Press edition. | Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical
references. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019009224 (ebook) | ISBN 9781452962245 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PR9199.4.B448 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006710

http://www.upress.umn.edu/

https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006710

When I go extemporaneously, I lose myself
—José Esteban Muñoz

Contents

Preface

This Wound Is a World

Love and Heartbreak Are Fuck Buddies

The Cree Word for a Body Like Mine Is Weesageechak

Gay Incantations

Notes from a Public Washroom

There Is a Dirt Road in Me

Wihtikowak Means “Men Who Can’t Survive Love”

The Rez Sisters II

Six Theses on Why Native People Die

Sacred

A History of the Present

We Were Never Meant to Break Like This

I Am Hoping to Help This City Heal from Its Trauma

Heartbreak Is a White Kid

If I Have a Body, Let It Be a Book of Sad Poems

Grief after Grief after Grief after Grief

The Creator Is Trans

The Back Alley of the World

Native Too

Colonialism: A Love Story

God’s River

Love and Other Experiments

OkCupid

Towards a Theory of Decolonization

An Elegy for Flesh

Everyone Is Lonely

There Is No Beautiful Left

Boyfriend Poems

God Must Be an Indian

Sexual History

Time contra Time

Something Like Love

Ode to Northern Alberta

The Oxford Journal

If Our Bodies Could Rust, We Would Be Falling Apart

The Rubble of Heartbreak

Wapekeka

Ode to Native Men

To Speak of the Dead, I Must Begin with the Photon

Hermeneutics of the Sometimes/Somewhere

Love Is a Moontime Teaching
Epilogue

Notes to the Poems
References
Acknowledgments

Preface

I think we have—and can have—a right to be free
—Michel Foucault

Poetry is creaturely. It resists categorical capture. It is a shape-shifting,
defiant force in the world. Indeed, it runs counter to the world. The
aphorism from Michel Foucault leads me to a description of the poem as an
entity that insists on “a right to be free.” It is an entity because our skin
becomes its and its skin becomes ours. In this way, it bears a theory of
nonsingularity—the lyric “I” opens up on itself as well as particularizes; the
poem brings us into our bodies and thus readies us for the touch and
affection of others. I read and write poetry because it is a time and place to
practice radical empathy. Poetry reminds us that there are worlds
everywhere, in a gradation of states of flux, many of which are hanging in
the balance. If a poem could speak, it might chant: if freedom has not yet
come, let us sing it home!

This is what I hope my poems have done as they have made their way
across Canada and outside it, across its at once rupturing and rupturable
border. This Wound Is a World marked my curiosity about the poem as a
unit of study, where study is construed by Fred Moten as a convergence of
suffering, dancing, and walking together.[1] At their most curious and
energetic, the poems in this book seek to marshal experience, felt
knowledge, and feeling in the service of a kind of anticolonial and/or queer
theorizing. Consciously and subconsciously, I endeavored to square up
against the long history of racism and homophobia in Canada to render
forms of indigeneity and queerness that were “recurrent, eddying,
troublant,”[2] that in their restlessness could agitate affectively arrested
ideas of what it is to live, to grieve, and to be desirous of freedom from the
position of queer indigeneity. That is, I experimented with the poem as a
time and place to breach the sound barriers of historical ignorance and
single-issue politics to posit a futurity for the queer Indigenous.

Dr. Alex Wilson of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation teaches me and us that
queer and trans Indigenous and two-spirit youth are subject to some of the
most acute and world-shattering forms of violence in Indigenous
communities: “our bodies, genders, and sexualities have been regulated in a
continuum of violence.”[3] How might we strike a note of caution and
accusation about the failure of liberal governance and historical reckoning
to address the misery that tailgates the lives of the doubly and triply
marginalized? With which words do we spin a message about what’s
needed to fissure the structures of bad feeling that catastrophize our lives?

Keguro Macharia asks: “What kind of knowledge is freedom-building,
freedom-creating, freedom-pursuing, freedom-sustaining? What’s the
relationship between this knowledge and state-sanctioned knowledge? What
will ground this freedom-oriented knowledge?”[4] Having witnessed the
antifreedom stance of many in higher education, I have come to install
optimism and hope in the poem as a geopolitical coordinate to enact this
grounding of “freedom-oriented knowledge.” If political talk and social
theory haven’t managed to make life more livable for all on their own, then
perhaps poetry can shore up a decolonial knowledge that queers and
indigenizes freedom. This is the affective and aesthetic engine that makes
my writing possible. The goal is not just to advocate for our right to be free
but to insist on it, to demand it. The poem is the terrain for this unruly and
differently ruled insistence.

Notes
1. See https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/fred-motens-radical-critique-of-the-

present.
2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, quoted in Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press,

2015), 29.
3. Alex Wilson, “Our Coming In Stories: Cree Identity, Body Sovereignty, and Gender Self-

Determination,” Journal of Global Indigeneity 1, issue 1 (2015): 1–5.
4. See https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/toward-freedom/.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/fred-motens-radical-critique-of-the-present

Toward Freedom

This Wound Is a World

Love and Heartbreak Are Fuck Buddies

love and heartbreak are fuck buddies who sometimes text each
other at 10 in the morning. today, love asks: is this what the living
do? as he tries to shit but can’t because he doesn’t eat enough
fiber or exercise regularly. it’s the little things that’ll kill me, he
adds. heartbreak responds, ignoring the first message: you
emptied your body into the floorboards of me. they creak when i
Am lonely. if i am a haunted house, then let’s make up a theory of
negativity that notices the utopian pulse of sad stories like ours.
well fuck, love types out. he deletes it. he sends a selfie with the
caption: how’s this for a theory of negativity? heartbreak laughs.
true, he quips. love doesn’t respond right away. he thinks there is
something queer about leaving loose ends untied. love is a native
boy from northern alberta who decided almost everything he does
is an attempt to repair the brokenness-of-being that is indigeneity.
last month, love fucked a security guard in the basement of a
parkade at midnight. locking the door behind love, the security
guard joked, don’t worry, i’m not going to kill you or anything.
love wonders if it is the possibility of being killed that partly
animates his desires. that’s fucked up, heartbreak tells love when
love tells him this story. love hypothesizes that the parkade
basement might be a metonym for the world. heartbreak thinks
out loud: how do you know when the world is not that basement
anymore? love answers: my kookum and mooshum don’t use
pronouns or proper nouns to address one another. they made their
own language. that is how.

The Cree Word for a Body Like Mine Is
Weesageechak

the cree word for a body like mine is weesageechak. the old ones
know of this kind of shape-shifting: sometimes i sweat and sweat
until my bones puddle on the carpet in my living room and i am
like the water that comes before new life.

i was born during a falling leaves moon; which is to say that i
have always been good at sacrifice. it is believed that women are
most powerful during their moontime and because of this do not
take part in ceremonies in order to let the body cleanse itself.
there are weesageechak days when gender is a magic trick i forgot
how to perform and my groin floods and floods trying to cleanse
itself like the women and i too become toxic for men who have
built cages out of broken boys.

maybe if i surrendered myself to grandmother moon she would
know what to do with these pickaxe wounds. there is so much i
need to tell her about how my rivers and lakes are crowded and
narrowing. how i managed to piece together a sweat lodge out of
mud and fish and bacteria. she gives me the cree name
weesageechak and translates it to “sadness is a carcass his tears
leave behind.”

and the crows and flies who don’t care about gender will one day
make away with my jet-black finger nails and scraggly armpit
hairs. they will lay tobacco at my grave and tell their crow and fly
kin that i was once a broad-shouldered trickster who long ago fell
from the moon wearing make-up and skinny jeans.

Gay Incantations

i fall into the opening between subject and object
and call it a condition of possibility.
when i speak only the ceiling listens.
sometimes it moans.
if i have a name,
let it be the sound his lips make.
there is no word in my language for this.
my kookum begins to cry
and then there is a world before me.
grieve is the name i give to myself.
i carve it into the bed frame.
i am make-believe.
this is an archive.
it hurts to be a story.
i am the boundary between reality and fiction.
it is a ghost town.
you dreamt me out of existence.
you are at once a map to nowhere and everywhere.
yesterday was an optical illusion.
i kiss a stranger and give him a middle name.
i call this love.
it lasts for exactly twenty minutes.
i chase after that feeling.
which is to say:
i want to almost not exist.
almost is the closest i can get to the sky.
heaven is a wormhole.
i first found it in another man’s armpit.
last night i gave birth to a woman and named her becoming.
she is four cree girls between the ages of 10 and 14 from northern
saskatchewan.
we are a home movie
i threw out by accident.
all that is left is the signified.

people die that way.

Notes from a Public Washroom

i never dream about myself anymore.
i chose a favorite memory
and named it after every boy
i have broken up with.
grief is easier that way.
i need to cut a hole in the sky
to world inside.
is the earth round,
or is it in the shape of a broken heart?
i drove through a town called freedom
and it looked like an accident
pretending to be a better accident.
there is a city in colorado
called loveland
and it is where alone meets lonely.
i have been there exactly two times.
i saw a lot of indians
and cried for three days afterwards.
i bought a pin that says LOVE
and i wear it on my jean jacket as a cry for help.
i asked all 908 of my facebook friends
to tell me they loved me
and they did
and i believed them.
my cousin’s boyfriend punched
a hole in the wall
so i hid inside it
and for a few seconds i thought
maybe this is what heaven looks like.
i ran off the edge of the world
into another world
and there everyone
was at least a little gay.

There Is a Dirt Road in Me

there is a dirt road in me.
it takes you to a place like a reserve but not
because there are only cree girls
and no one is falling apart in a bad way.
we are a people
who proliferate
only as potentiality.
do not compare us to the rain
unless you fucking mean it.
why did my love scare you?
was it too dirt road?
what would you have done with a dirt road anyways?

Wihtikowak Means “Men Who Can’t Survive
Love”

1. setting: it is 2013 in a small-town made up of oil dreams and
soured masculinity and a thin white man reports a wihtikow
sighting.

2. legend has it that wihtikowak were once cree men whose sins
betrayed their bodies until they thickened and thickened and
turned into giants the size of spruce trees. these were men who
were never holy only selfish enough to want to drown in another
man’s thighs. in the old days, this kind of closeness was so
mystical and sinister it was called cannibalism.

3. if you must know more, know that the thin white man
blindfolded himself and fucked the wihtikow. that he put his
mouth to its ear and whispered, i will learn to love a monster.
wihtikowak means “men who can’t survive love,” so each time
the thin white man kissed his wihtikow it would ache and groan
and flinch but still ask for more until it stopped breathing and
melted into the mattress. i think it felt something like freedom.

The Rez Sisters II

after tomson highway

cast:

girl of surplus. girl who is made from fragments. she who can
only be spoken of by way of synecdoche. she whose name cannot
be enunciated only mouthed.

mother of that which cannot be mothered. mother who wants
nothing and everything at the same time. she who gave birth to
herself three times: 1. the miscarriage. 2. the shrunken world. 3.
the aftermath.

sister of forest fire. sister who dwells in the wreckage. she who
forages for the right things in the wrong places. nothing is utopia
and so she prays to a god for a back that can bend like a tree
splitting open to make room for the heat.

aunt of the sovereignty of dust. aunt of that which cannot be
negated entirely. she who is magic because she goes missing and
comes back. she who walks upside down on the ceiling of the
world and does not fall.

kookum of love in spite of it all. kookum who made a man out of
a memory. she who is a country unto herself.

father of ash. father of a past without a mouth. he who ate too
much of the sunset.

Six Theses on Why Native People Die

1. indigeneity exceeds and is exceeded by gender.

2. he couldn’t make language out of the gravel-like noise stuck in
his throat.

3. once freed from the bottom of his stomach, desire went on a
killing spree.

4. she made a casket out of his guilt.

5. we were a sad story and i fell in love with the idea of it.

6. she watched a western and thought the world looked better in
black and white.

Sacred

a native man looks me in the eyes as he refuses to hold my hand
during a round dance. his pupils are like bullets and i wonder
what kind of pain he’s been through to not want me in this world
with him any longer. i wince a little because the earth hasn’t held
all of me for quite some time now and i am lonely in a way that
doesn’t hurt anymore.

you see, a round dance is a ceremony for both grief and love and
each body joined by the flesh is encircled by the spirits of
ancestors who’ve already left this world. i ask myself: how many
of them gave up on desire because they loved their kookums more
than they loved themselves?

i dance with my arm hanging by my side like an appendage my
body doesn’t want anymore. the gap between him and me keeps
getting bigger so i fill it with the memories of native boys who
couldn’t be warriors because their bodies were too fragile to carry
all of that anger. the ones who loved in that reckless kind of way.
you know, when you surrender your body to him.

and i think about the time an elder told me to be a man and to
decolonize in the same breath. there are days when i want to wear
nail polish more than i want to protest. but then i remember that i
wasn’t meant to live life here and i paint my nails because 1) it
looks cute and 2) it is a protest. and even though i know i am too
queer to be sacred anymore, i dance that broken circle dance
because i am still waiting for hands that want to hold mine too.

A History of the Present

in the 1990s,
a man raped a little girl
and the reserve caught fire.
it never stopped burning.
i mouthed the word justice
and then forgot how to speak.
if these walls could talk
they would sing country songs
about an entire generation of men who learned how to love on
grindr.

what did you expect, my love?
alternate ending:
i give my body to men
i don’t find attractive
and it doesn’t fuck me up.
12:03 am: why is it that love makes you feel lonely?
if the earth
could end it all right now
i think it would.
what i know:

colten boushie
a ceremonial fire keeper
was shot while sitting in the backseat of a car with a flat tire;
and
it took an ocean to break us.

We Were Never Meant to Break Like This

1. follow me out the backdoor of the world.

2. how do you tell someone that they are helping you stay tuned
into life?

3. what does it mean that her first breath was also her last?

4. i am so sad that i burrow into the absence of every boy who has
held me.

5. i kiss him knowing that when i wake up i will be in a body
differently.

6. the future is already over, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have
anywhere else to go.

I Am Hoping to Help This City Heal from Its
Trauma

“i am hoping to help this city heal from its trauma.”

i sleep with a man who looks like he is dying. his eyes are caves,
darkened skin disappears them. with each movement, his body
wrings and protests. i think sex is the only thing that can stop the
hurt for a little while. perhaps this is what being medicine feels
like.

“i am hoping to help this city heal from its trauma.”

he messages me at 3 am and i respond because my phone vibrates
and wakes me up. he tells me he is horny, that his roommate is
working night shift, and that he wants someone to piss into his
mouth tonight. he sends me a picture of his dick and confesses
that he’s had a bit of ecstasy but that it doesn’t affect him much
anyways. i want to know what it’s like for my body to end in
someone else so i travel twenty minutes to his apartment and stay
for three hours. when i leave he admits that he’s closeted, but that
he would like to see me soon to open himself up to desire again.

“i am hoping to help this city heal from its trauma.”

when we fuck, we meet in his RV in the dark. i never see his
entire face, but i think there’s something romantic about the way
we disappear into each other. he’s twenty years older than i am
and softly calls me a bitch over and over again when he cums. i
don’t ask why he’s whispering and i think someone is waiting
inside the house for him and maybe they always do. maybe he
learnt love like disappearing into things that aren’t good for him.

“i am hoping to help this city heal from its trauma.”

he asks me how many men i’ve slept with and i lie and say seven.
he thinks that’s too many because he’s thirty and has only been

with three men and one woman, his ex-wife. he asks me to spend
the night and i do because sometimes i just need to be next to a
body like his. later, he breaks up with me because i reminded him
of everything he’s ever had stolen from him. being with me, he
says, was like living inside a cemetery.

Heartbreak Is a White Kid

heartbreak is a white kid from south edmonton
who lives inside the what-had-been.
the what-had-been is an atmosphere,
a sensation against which all others are calculated.
it is a performance of embodiment,
or should i say disembodiment?
heartbreak is a body that is not bodied.
he is everything that will have happened to him:
he is his mother first
and then his sister, both dead.
heartbreak is an alias.
it is not a name but an enactment of grief
whereby one ropes strangers by the tongue into a collective
wounding.
heartbreak lives in the underbelly of a system
meant to world around his body.
heartbreak is sonic:
it is the sound one makes when one becomes
those who refuse to be put to rest.
heartbreak is the first man with whom i fell in love.
heartbreak is the sound
we made when we bodied one another with things like cum and
tears and saliva.
that our eyes stopped
believing in what was in front of us
was the closest we got to killing ourselves.

If I Have a Body, Let It Be a Book of Sad Poems

i keep listening to a song by tom odell called grow old with me. i
am hung up on the enormity of that kind of project, of asking
someone to architect a livable world with you. what a blessing
and a curse!

i hooked up with a man who insisted he was 42, but i suspect he
was older given the soft and reckless way he met my body with
his. it was 9 pm and we were making small talk and he told me a
story about how a relationship of his had started and ended at the
same ski resort in france. recently, he returned to that resort, and
was caught unawares by a wave of memories about his ex-
boyfriend. today, he lives alone in a houseboat, unwilling to be
beside himself with desire. how could he have expected anything
but what christina sharpe calls “the past that is not past” to haunt
him? maybe that is why he wanted to sleep with me last night.
maybe that is why i invited him over in the first place. i should
have said: i don’t have it in me to transform you.

if i have a body, let it be a book of sad poems. i mean it.
indigeneity troubles the idea of “having” a body, so if i am
somehow, miraculously, bodied then my skin is a collage of
meditations on love and shattered selves.

ok yes, i have been reading a bit of psychoanalysis lately. forgive
me. i am desperate. desperate to figure out how someone like me
is still here.

if i know anything, it is that “here” is a trick of the light, that it is
a way of schematizing time and space that is not the only one
available to some of us. maybe i am not here in the objectivist
sense. maybe i am here in the way that a memory is here. now,
ain’t that fucking sad and beautiful?

Grief after Grief after Grief after Grief

1. my body is a stray bullet. i was made from crossfire. love was
her last resort. his mouth, a revolver. i come from four hundred no
man’s lands.

2. “smell my armpit again / i miss it when you do that.”

3. his moaning is an honor song i want to world to.

4. one of the conditions of native life today is survivor’s guilt.

5. it is july 2016 and the creator opens up the sky to attend a
#blacklivesmatter protest. there, she bumps into weesageechak
and warns him that if policemen don’t stop killing black men she
will flood america and it will become a lost country only grieving
mothers will know how to find. this, she says, is how the world
will end and be rebuilt this time.

6. haunting is a gender. gender is another word for horror story.

7. “i can hear him screaming for me, and i can hear him saying,
‘stop, honey help me.’”

8. i am trying to figure out how to be in the world without
wanting it. this, perhaps, is what it means to be native.

The Creator Is Trans

the creator is trans
and the earth is a psychology experiment
to determine how quickly
we mistake a body for anything
but a crime scene
the product of older crime scenes.
there is a heaven
and it is a place called gay.
gay as in let’s hold up a world together.
gay as in happy to make something out of nothing
and call it love or anything
that resembles a time
in which you don’t have to be those shitty versions of yourself
to become who you are now.
one day i will open up my body
to free all of the people i’ve caged inside me.
i want to visit every tim hortons in northern alberta
so that homophobes can tell me sad things like
i love you
your hair looks nice
you have nice cheekbones
until someone kills me
and then the creator will write my eulogy
with phrases like
freedom is the length of a good rim job
and the most relatable thing about him
was how often he cried watching wedding videos on youtube.
homonationalism, amirite?
my grandma thought there was a portal
to the other side in her basement
but it was all of the women she had ever met
praying in a circle
that she would give birth to a world
without men

only women
made
from other women’s heartbreak.

The Back Alley of the World

make my mouth into a jar
spit inside me
throw me into the air
leave me there
pretend that this is love.
whisper: tonight, we will be children
tomorrow, the feeling of being in two bodies at once.
pray, if it gives you a tongue
a book for words that fall flat
a book that does not like to be written in.
where do you come from?
i am from the back alley of the world.

Native Too

he was native too
so i slept with him.
i wanted to taste
a history of violence
caught in the roof of his mouth.
i wanted our saliva to mix
and create new bacterial ecologies:
contagions that could infect
the trauma away.
i wanted to smell his ancestors
in his armpits:
the aroma of their decaying flesh,
how they refuse to wilt into nothingness.
i wanted to touch his brown skin
to create a new kind of friction
capacious enough
for other worlds to emerge
in our colliding.
i wanted our tongues
to sketch a different tomorrow:
one in which we might know how to love better,
again.
i wanted him to fuck me,
so i could finally begin
to heal.

Colonialism: A Love Story

1. colonialism broke us, and we’re still figuring out how to love
and be broken at the same time.

2. the first time he told me i was beautiful, i thought he was lying.
i thought beauty was a plot in a story i had been written out of a
long time ago.

3. what happens when “i love you, too” becomes a substitute for
“i can’t,” when his hand finds your body and it feels like he’s
taking pieces of it? perhaps this is what they meant by “love
requires sacrifice.”

4. sometimes bodies don’t always feel like bodies but like
wounds.

5. he told me he’d take a needle and stitch our bodies together
with the thickest thread.

6. colonialism. definition: turning bodies into cages that no one
has the keys for.

7. when i invite him into the abandoned house of me, he tiptoes
inside. he notices the way the walls ache to be touched again even
though they know time won’t let them survive it.

8. we need not pretend that love was to be found in wastelands
like these.

God’s River

it is september 2009 and health canada sends body bags to god’s
river first nation – a community hit hard by swine flu

a body bag
is a gun
is a smallpox blanket
is a treaty
– call it a medicine chest

wait for
an autopsy
they call it H1N1
you call it
the pass system:
bodies like
these can
only leave if
they’re on
stretchers
– call it “moving”

someone says:
“it’s like sending
body bags
to soldiers in
afghanistan”

remind them
that canada is
four hundred
afghanistans
– call it colonialism

to live in
trenches like these

is to be
civilian casualty
and soldier all at once
– call it a “suicide epidemic”

wonder
how many deaths
it takes for a
country to
call itself
god

think maybe
reserve is
another word
for morgue
is another word
for body bags
– call it home anyways

Love and Other Experiments

1. he told me he was into natives, but he couldn’t love the traumas
hidden in my breathing.

2. how do you tell a ghost that it’s already dead?

3. what happens when wounds start to work like bandages?

4. sometimes love feels like vanishing, like taking apart pieces of
yourself and giving them to someone who can’t use them.

5. what happens when decolonial love becomes a story you tell
yourself after he falls asleep?

6. i tell him: you breathe us. we are in you. look at the blood on
your hands.

7. queer. definition: knowing your body is both too much and not
enough for this world.

8. i asked the earth to hold all of me and it said i can’t. i can’t keep
making room for everyone much longer.

9. sometimes not loving is the most radical thing you can do.

OkCupid

my okcupid username was nakinisowin
which in cree means: resistance
means: not white
means: love don’t live here
means: ask me what my “ethnicity” is
and say that’s interesting
when i tell you i’m native

that i am the monster in the closet
your bedtime stories prepared you for
you want a man
whose body doesn’t whisper
horror stories
each time you touch him
a man whose nightmares are about dying
because he doesn’t already know what that feels like

but then i messaged mrB0B
because his skin was brown
like the water that drags itself through my reserve
pleading:
drink me
i need you
i promise
and his profile was a eulogy of …