Dotted Line Dotted Line

Poetry Summer 2019    fiction    all issues

whitespacefiller

Cover Antoine Petitteville

Laura Apol
Easter Morning
& other poems

Taylor Dibble
A Masterpiece in Progress
& other poems

Julia Roth
Lessons From My Menstrual Cup
& other poems

Jamie Ross
Ceaseless Wind. The Drying Sheaves
& other poems

Nicole Yackley
Mea Culpa
& other poems

George Longenecker
I’m sentimental for the Paleolithic
& other poems

Taylor Gardner
Short Observations by Angels
& other poems

Greg Tuleja
No Thomas Hardy
& other poems

Joanne Monte
War Casualties
& other poems

Nathaniel Cairney
Potato Harvest
& other poems

Steven Dale Davison
Wordsmouth Harbor Founder
& other poems

Heather 'Byrd' Roberts
How I Named Her
& other poems

Greenheart
sunny ex
& other poems

Ashton Vaughn
Through the Valley of Mount Chimaera
& other poems

Linda Speckhals
Borderlands
& other poems

Lucy Griffith
Breathing Room
& other poems

Steven Valentine
Written
& other poems

Emily Varvel
B is for Boys and G is for Guys
& other poems

Jhazalyn Prince
Priceless Body
& other poems

Marte Stuart
Generation Snowflake
& other poems

S.J. Enloe
Kale Soup
& other poems

Meghan Dunsmuir
Our Path
& other poems


Meghan Dunsmuir

Where Do I Begin

tell me

where do i begin

was that normal? was

that the right way t0 grow

up into the spaces before i even

knew what shapes would be emerging?

you supported me with an infrastructure we

called love but you would still encourage

me to smile sorries every time i cried

because really everything was fine

because belly worms are really

stagnant butterflies hiding

within the spiralling

infinite expanse

of my mind

glowing



Ancestor

when i was born

the pathway

lined the sky with light

splitting once again


soon the centre

of my circle shifted

and the faces beyond my mirror

were hauntingly familiar


perhaps i am the ghost

of your ancient home

decade after decade

not the other way around


a cobweb history

unborn and reborn anew

expands in form

into the sphere


so much bigger

than us



Dreamtime

last night i went to bed

praying i would wake up

somewhere deeper

than today


i closed my eyes

and i saw roots soggy

with millennia of ancestral currents

still the same level of damp


the rainforest greeted me

from my cotton coated vessel

my head touching ground

holy, undiscovered


the creatures gathered ‘round me

and i asked, politely

how the time is treating them

in infinity


they said

the midnights are darker than oblivion

and the summers brighter than newborn eyes

but i mustn’t stay too long


so

despite the hypnotic

coloured mist

beckoning


i woke up

in morning

to start another

present day



Our Path

we’ve been walking

down this path a lot these days


mostly because we have realized

it’s the only place left to go


i spent the majority of last night yelling

about something


someone did

(very far away)


to someone i do not know

(will never know)


you simply stared

back down the now-empty path


thinking about the last fir tree

cut down a while ago


since then we’ve just been walking

and finding peace when i’m not yelling


at all those stubborn ghosts

here and nowhere



17 Years

i lived within

a tiny pale pink universe

where I have cut my hair to fly

beyond the walls that kept me near

this everything space, this nothing space,

a curvature of plaster swirling the same air

over and over, my own foggy reflection

was slowly appearing; cracks revealed

we’ve been floating side by side

together we would learn,

hope, grieve til



the circle breaks

Meghan Dunsmuir is a white, queer identified woman of settler descent currently writing from her current location of Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people, known today as Halifax, Canada. Born in Tkaronto (Toronto), she crossed the country to attend the NSCAD University, where she is in her final year of study. Her interdisciplinary degree has had a focus on textiles, specifically weaving on the loom. Through both art and writing, Meghan aims to return herself and others to the creative spirit within us all, traversing otherwise divisive and limiting borders.

Dotted Line