mmiwg
By Amritha York
for now the red maple in the cloth flag remains the stain of a history attempting to come undone,
but
the other day i said bye to my friend and wasn’t sure if i’d ever see her again.
the other day, a waste management person told me they were scared of what they’d find at work.
red
isn’t just a dress.
mmiwg isn’t just a hashtag.
it’s a mother’s spirit spilling out her mouth every time she’s questioned,
and flowing out when they stop asking.
watching the red in the flag flapping in the wind,
the red flapping in the empty dress that replaces her daughter.
red in the rcmp uniform,
red in the strawberry jello cake i made for canada day off the box.
never knowing who those red-dressed women were.
$122, 728,283 spent over 54 years can’t replace 4000+ women.
go back and find my girls,
my women,
that were born of this earth,
that we hold in our hearts.
every july, we road trip past unmarked graves and lost mothers’ souls.
red planted over with orange lilies and lady slippers stepping through our way.
keeping them company
until they find their way home.
Learn more about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls at MMIWG.
Amritha York (she/her/they/them) is a Torontonian queer, Indian, RN, new mother and gender-fluid woman. Amritha writes from her own life experiences of traumas, loss, poverty, and race and the resiliency in overcoming these. She hopes to push how we use storytelling out of stuffy exclusivity into generationally healing words of comfort. She has previously written for the Legion at a provincial and regional level and more recently participated in social action projects with Gardiner Ceramic Museum, for International Day of Violence Against Women, and part of a social action project for vulnerable and un-housed persons in Toronto, distributed by the YWCA.
Amritha hopes to make poetry and writing more accessible and digestible for BIPOC persons, and individuals who are in vulnerable spaces of mental health, addictions, trauma work and recovery. She has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Libre Lit, and Fruitslice, and you can find snippets of her work on Instagram @first.breath.release.
Photograph by yooperann via a creative commons license.
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