scorpio moon

after Black Belt Eagle Scout’s ‘Scorpio Moon’

January 9, 2025

jaye simpson (she/they) is an Oji-Cree Saulteaux Indigiqueer from the Sapotaweyak Cree Nation. simpson is a writer, advocate and activist sharing...

i have dreamt of you

            a thousand times         &         still

                        it is never enough that

i can’t run backwards into the hazy before–

            the paradox of raising oneself

begged for another chance

            &         here i find you:

child-like wonder, unhindered by the obscenity

            of premature grief.

 

i have embraced your slight frame

            every chance i get

&         you smell of L’Oreal Kids

strawberry smoothie shampoo

comforted by the familiarity

of stolen girlhood.

 

            i have carried you just as long

as you carried us, a family unforgiving

            &         far too young

to be changing baby diapers;

            although you find yourself

mother             &         child  entangled.

 

oh child,

            i dream of us together

&                     no reality could

            bear the responsibility of the both of us

together.  instead i find myself

            chasing this shifting star light miracle:

                        we exist still    &         you survive

it all in the end.

jaye simpson (she/they) is an Oji-Cree Saulteaux Indigiqueer from the Sapotaweyak Cree Nation. simpson is a writer, advocate and activist sharing their knowledge and lived experiences in hope of creating utopia. 

she is published in several magazines including Poetry Is Dead, This Magazine, PRISM international,  SAD Magazine: Green, GUTS Magazine, SubTerrain, Grain and Room. They are in four anthologies: Hustling Verse (2019), Love After the End (2020), The Care We Dream Of (2021), and Queer Little Nightmares (2022). Their first poetry collection, it was never going to be okay (Nightwood Ed.) was shortlisted for the 2021 ReLit Award and a 2021 Dayne Ogilvie Prize Finalist while also winning the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Poetry in English. a body more tolerable, is her second book of published poetry.

she is a displaced Indigenous person resisting, ruminating and residing on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-waututh), and sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) First Nations territories, colonially known as Vancouver.