My daughter calls: Mommy!
Two magpies and a crow are fighting over a puddle!
This girl attends our backyard world
blessing each nook of nature with fascination.
Blessing ladybug, late-blooming daisy, blessing
apples rotten on the tree, bark and fallen leaf, blessing
ant and strawberry and saskatoon, creating
religion of science, methodical rigour of ritual
testing the bonds within a blade of grass
her limitless porosity, pulling
petals for collages: destruction
blessing paper with re-creation
beside the fence, this child goddess
constructs an altar to teach herself to pray.
I savour my coffee. The magpies
take their bath in the alley.
Jessica Coles (she/her) is a poet from Edmonton (Treaty 6 territory), where she lives with her family, a tuxedo cat named Miss Bennet, and a tarantula named Miss Dashwood.Her work has appeared in Prairie Fire, Moist Poetry Journal, Full Mood Mag, atmospheric quarterly, Stone Circle Review, CV2, The Fiddlehead, Ghost City Review, and elsewhere. Her two self-published chapbooks are available through Prairie Vixen Press (https://prairievixenpress.ca). Find her on Bluesky: @prairievixen.bsky.social