Slicing Lemons in April byMichelle Porter

Michelle Porter has made the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize for Slicing Lemons in April.

• 33 writers make longlist for the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize

About Michelle

Michelle Porteris a Mtis writer who has called Newfoundland and Labrador home for almost 10 years now. She is currently studying creative writing, teaching journalismand is involved in a research. She holds a BA in journalism and communications, an MA in folkloreand a PhD in geography. She was selected for the longlist for the 2016 CBC Poetry Prizeand has beenpublished in The Malahat Review. She was a winner of the 2017 Arts and Letters Award, Senior Poetry category. This year, she won funding from ArtsNL to create a poetry manuscript about the mobile, overlapping, historical and contemporary meanings of Mtis home.

Entry in five-ish words

Moving toward home

The poem's source of inspiration

"Home is a complicated place. Really, even trying to settle on a definition of home is almost impossible because each person's home is radically different from anyone else's.I studied the critical geographies of home as they are narrated in rural Newfoundland and Labrador during my PhD studies. This new series of poems is a creative expression of that academic research. This poetry project is a way to explore my own personal geographies of home. I am focusing on the different ways that being Mtis and being globally connected are implicated in my home(s)."

First lines

Tucked in
the bed of a truck lurching down the
highwaymy sister and I, limbs
knotted

with the
sky we called our Grandmother. She watched over us,
her starred eyes fierce as she told us half-moon
stories.