Elana Wolff

Juney, It’s You

Greening like a luster colour. Red and blue
birds flying to the heavens
all done up. The cumulus so nimble it collects to cauliflower—

cotton-masses just like batting—presto
as I write a tiny spider walks my wrist. In someone’s culture
spiders crossing bodies must mean luck. Rain, a sudden

windfall, the cherry tree is fruiting. Hard green baubles
still the squirrels, vying with the starlings, come to feast.
Juney, it has to be you—I couldn’t do this.

Or ring like Canterbury bells, or smell as deeply
sweet as spring syringa, or hang my head like Lily
of the valley crooning the garden nymphs, the dulcet parasol

mushrooms. Again, I’ve planted digitalis—hopefully she takes.
The light is low beneath the trees. The ants come marching nonetheless—
onward to the colony—led along the path by the pheromone trail—

over the subterranean stream. Sometimes we can feel its flow—
a silent reminder that most of what we feel cannot be seen.
Teeming in the etheric—all this given project.

Peony, my everlasting pink, you’re so short-lived.

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Elana Wolff writes from the ancestral land of the Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat First Nations in Ontario, Canada. Her poems have most recently appeared in The Antigonish Review, Asemana Review, Best Canadian Poetry 2024, Blood+Honey, The Nelligan Review, Montréal Serai, Pinhole Poetry, Poem Alone, Nashwaak Review, The /tEmz/ Review, and Women Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution. Her cross-genre Kafka-quest work, Faithfully Seeking Franz, received the 2024 Canadian Jewish Literary Award in the category of Jewish Thought and Culture. Her poetry collection, Everybody Knows a Ghost, is forthcoming with Guernica Editions.