Mary Pinkoski is a Spoken Word poet from Edmonton and the winner of the 2008 National CBC Poetry Faceoff. Her writing has been called dynamic and visceral. Mary has presented her unique style of Spoken Word throughout Alberta, British Columbia, and Washington. In addition to her live performances, Mary's work has been played on CBC Radio One's Radio Active and the Key of A, CKUA's The Road Home, as well as Philadelphia's Spotlight on Jazz and Poetry. Mary's first chapbook, Set List: poems for lonely microphones, (Red Nettle press). She has also published a second chapbook: My Heart & Other Small Gifts and a very limited broadside, Instructions on How to Hold a Paper Bird. She can be found at marypinkoskipoetry.com

Event 7: Wild Woman – Morning Magic

Words

Tuesdays and Thursdays I tutor down
at the local community centre;
local for them, not local for me.
The place is like a ghetto,
once I leaned my head in too close
to a kid and got a case of
head lice.

The thing about that kid was that
she hummed while she did her math problems.
It was this barely audible hum
like she had been told by some teacher
one too many times to “shut up” and
even though she didn’t speak English,
she knew that “shut up” wasn’t something she wanted
to hear every day. So she developed this
almost inaudible hum
that I leaned in closer to hear and
got a case of head lice.


These kids are like origami paper.
They squeeze themselves into
folds and folds and tears
and then POOF,
all of the sudden you’ve got this
staggering swan.

They have a beauty, but you have to search for it.
Which is why I am not surprised when
she comes to me with this huge smile
and a mouth full of
rotting teeth.

Tuesdays we burn through vocabulary lists
faster than their older siblings burn through
crack rocks, but for 3 weeks all she says is
“read to me.”

And so I do. I become the Mother Teresa of words:
I dole out vowels like charity, setting up hospices of
constants for her mind.
We read this mildewed copy of A.A. Milne poems
and it is all blah, blah, blah to her until
we get to the poem about the raindrops racing each other
down a windowpane, and she says,
“oh I never had a windowpane until I came here.”

After that we are ready for vocabulary lists. We move through:
I and can and would and could and should.
We trip over:
ice cream and house and between and stand.

Then we hit the word “bicycle.”
And it takes her a full five minutes
before she can even get her mind around the word,
let alone spit it out in syllables.
It’s the “c-y-c” part that keeps messing her up,
but finally she gets it and says,
“but what is a bicycle?”

And that is when it hits me,
she is 7 years old and spent
her whole life in a refugee camp and
arrived in Canada to 5 months of winter.
The first time she rode in a car was from
the airport to her new home.

This girl has walked her whole life.

She’s got shoes for a soul
and calluses as thick as freedom.

And so I am sitting here, explaining to her
that a bicycle is
a thing with two wheels and a set of handlebars and you pedal it to get around
and she asks if it is faster than a car,
and I say, “no.” And she says, “but why then?”
And before I can answer, she says:

“Imagine feeling the wind in your hair, while
riding a bike down a hill?” And then she
touches her hijab, like it is her hair,
and smiles a vision big enough to swallow up
her whole face.

Two weeks later, I see her downtown. She
has made learning about bicycles her business.
So she points to the front of this bus and she says,
“look! a bike rack. Imagine having a bike and
not wanting to ride it.”

And I realize, I can’t give this girl anything
more than she already has. So I pass on some words
with no meaning to her and she stores
them away for a time when they
might be useful.


That year, I suffered the best case of head lice ever,
as a little girl with a huge smile
and mouth full of rotting teeth dreamt of
owning a bicycle while translating
menus and bus maps for her mother.