“1979, Main Street”
Moni Brar
Artist Statement: This poem straddles the political and the personal while illuminating transgenerational trauma resulting from an erased, marginalized history and existence. My work aims to take an oppositional stance and seeks to heal the rifts of colonization with language.
it hasn’t always been this way this gentrified street neatly lined
with shapely trees bakeries offering bespoke cupcakes
and yoga studios for the hip and fit was once the place
once a year we would tumble out two dozen brown bodies from the back
of a cube van legs cramped from sitting cross-legged knee-to-knee
for an hour on cold metal hands stained from a summer
of hard farm labour ready to rifle through silks and satins smooth softness
sold by the yard we were primed for a day of taking
- fabric, sweets, spices, rice - after a long season of giving momentarily oblivious
to the shifting air a rapid autumn approaching our wandering
constrained by the comfort of the familiar sights and smells
of those two blocks a whole city beyond our reach
Moni Brar has multiple nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She was the winner of the 2021 SAAG Writing Prize, runner-up in PRISM’s Grouse Grind Prize, and honourable mention in Room’s poetry contest. Her work appears in Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Fire, Hobart, and Passages North. She believes that poetry contains the possibility of healing.