None of This Belongs to Me

By Ellie Sawatzky

In this vibrant debut, Ellie Sawatzky rustles the underbrush of identity, seeking clarity on the nature of ownership and belonging. Haunted and inspired by old boyfriends, girls named Emily, ancestral ghosts, polar bears and mythic horses, None of This Belongs to Me plots a young woman’s coming of age in a time of environmental and socio-economic peril. From rural Ontario to Kitsilano to Burning Man, Sawatzky inquires into childhood learning, girlhood learning, what is inherited, what is acquired, what begins to take form in the iridescent space between innocence and experience (“The body’s crystal arithmetic”). Superimposing dreamscapes on realities, history on pop culture and everyday sorrows, this collection is a hymn for the broken-hearted, a plea for connection in the information age, and a call to question the ways in which we both nurture and harm one another and our environment.

None of This Belongs to Me is pertinent now more than ever, as Sawatzky’s generation comes of age in a tumultuous time, forced to consider all of that which does not—and may never—belong to them. These poems invite readers to explore our inner and outer worlds, to question the ways we inhabit them, to infuse our modern lives with our potent histories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nightwood Editions
• Release date: Oct 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9780889714090

Ellie Sawatzky

Ellie Sawatzky is a writer from Kenora, ON. She was a finalist for the 2019 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and the recipient of CV2’s 2018 Young Buck Poetry Prize. Her work has been published widely in literary journals and anthologies such as The Fiddlehead, PRISM International, Best Canadian Poetry, The Matador Review, Prairie Fire, The Puritan and Room. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and lives in Vancouver, BC. None of This Belongs to Me is her debut poetry collection.

Book preview

none of this belongs to me

Nightwood Editions 2021

Shape of an open hand, raching from the top left to the bottom right, made out of a pattern of flat colors. Text: None of This Belongs to Me. Poems.

Ellie Sawatzky

Copyright © Ellie Sawatzky, 2021

1 2 3 4 5 — 25 24 23 22 21

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, [e-mail].

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Cover art: WKNDRS Rachel Rivera + Claire Ouchi

Cover Design: Carleton Wilson

Typography: Carleton Wilson

Government of Canada Canada COuncil for the Arts Funded by the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council

Nightwood Editions acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.

This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled, ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free and printed with vegetable-based dyes.

Printed and bound in Canada.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: None of this belongs to me / Ellie Sawatzky.

Names: Sawatzky, Ellie, 1990- author.

Description: Poems.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210245352 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210245360 | ISBN 9780889714083 (softcover) | ISBN 9780889714090 (HTML)

Classification: LCC PS8637.A9265 N66 2021 | DDC C811/.6—dc23

For Darlene, Vern, Bram and Rachel

Contents

I Repeat Offenders

Overnights at the Hospital

Repeat Offenders

Garage Sestina

Minaki Lodge

Circles, Strokes

What Blue

Look at Your Life You’ll See Emilys

Finlandia

The Boy Next Door

Recalculating

I Press an Ear to Ontario

Chihuly’s Mille Fiori

II Poetry Wants My Imaginary Boyfriends

Tom Petty Said Love Is a Long Road but I Think Love Is a Circle

Poetry Wants My Imaginary Boyfriends

If You’re Writing This Down

Rhinocerotic

Forgive Us Our Trespasses

Summer Work

Camels in the Cariboo

Three Days and the Next However Long

Sun Valley Lodge

Hippocrene

Albatross

Pueo

A Synonym for Oracle

III None of This Belongs to Me

The Missed Connections Ad Writes Itself

Ouroboros

NouNou

Cowhide, Plastic

Shibari

This Little Girl Goes to Burning Man

Crystals

Swan Song

Matrilineal

IV Unorganized Territory

Goodbye

New Moon, Gemini Season

Blessings Upon U and Ur Bullshit

Ways to Write a Poem

Untitled

Knife Thrower

Grey Area

I Can’t Find the Heartbreak Emoji

Natural History

Spotify My Body

Kenora, Unorganized

Crossroad

Self-Portrait as Ostrich

The Falling Man

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

I

Repeat Offenders

and it is all right to make a distance

of a nearness, to say, ‘Boat, I have left you

behind. Boat,

I am with you.’

—Tess Gallagher

Overnights at the Hospital

I have slept in the snow.

In a greenhouse. On other people’s

couches. In a hammock.

I’ve slept in the seats of cars, trucks, buses,

on the Trans-Canada highway, on goat paths,

gravel roads. In a safari van, in

a sleeping bag on the floor of a lemonade stand,

in the staff room at the Safeway. In

a tent. A few times in a taxi. On boats, trains, an airplane over the

North Atlantic, the Sahara. During Cyrano de Bergerac

in a Paris theatre. During

sex. I’ve slept

under the table at a wedding, in the dirt

at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, in libraries, in shitty motels. Once,

in a lighthouse, a few times in a castle.

On a bench. In a church.

I’ve slept through storms, loud music, sirens, through

meteor showers, blood moons. I’ve slept

through nightmares, forgotten

by morning.

I’ve slept in the sun. In

a bathtub. On someone’s

balcony, overlooking the lake.

In an orchard, a screen porch, an army barracks, and once

on a fold-out