“Like a river flowing”
“Christine Smart’s poems perform acts of clear-eyed unsentimental recollection and fierce longing, and move with an earthy music that is all their own. The reader is left with a sense of the sharp, bittersweet tang of the authentic.”
Don McKay
Published in Sublime, Poems for Vanishing Ice, ed. Yvonne Blomer, Caitlin Press, 2026.
DARE
Dare to lick an ice cube with a wet tongue,
don’t do it
never ever
and yet my brother says, it can’t be true,
my tongue stuck
to a wire fence in January
or glued to the mailbox,
his lip fixed
on a metal ice cube tray
the dangers of
the stupidity of
this
heat melts glaciers
mammoth ice bergs the size of tankers
crash into the sea.
The great thaw—permafrost—no longer eternal.
Tourism goes viral in the Arctic,
ships pass like pedestrians on a crosswalk.
Not long ago, the northwest passage swallowed
sailors, created ice sculptures, preserved
creatures to revive like robots in a video game.
Icicles dangle from the lip
of the roof, glistening and bending light
the daggers thaw, drip and freeze.
I snap off arrows, suck the melting like a popsicle,
hold the wand in my mitted fist
point and draw letters in snow –
pleas for help and my name
we exist, we’re here
and then we melt.