Outside my window,
in the parking lot of the Arabic grocery store,
a hundred seagulls assemble
to avoid the sharpshooting wind off the highway.
The clouds are low down and on the offensive.
Hup two, three, four. Hup two, three, four.
The cockiest male struts
like a colonel among troops
Carolyn Marie Souaid is the Montreal-based author of six books of poetry and editor of over a dozen. She has toured her work across Canada, Europe and the United States, and has been shortlisted for a number of literary awards including the A.M. Klein Poetry Prize and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. In 2012, her videopoem, Blood Is Blood, won a prize at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin. In 2013, she was awarded a seven-week writer’s residency at The Banff Centre to work on a novel. Her newest poetry book, This World We Invented, will appear from Brick Books in 2015.