From Outside, America. Published by Nightwood Editions in 2019. Sarah de Leeuw is a writer and researcher. Her work has won the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize, been a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction and been a finalist for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional BC Book Prize. Her essays have won two CBC literary awards and a Western Magazine Gold Award.

Scientists don’t necessarily name the places
but speak instead of mid-to-large centres,
are focused on
although I always think of Chicago,
where we met, evolving into us like cities
shaping wingspans of small songbirds,
shorter, blunter limbs for agile flight through
skyscrapers and traffic, the way you and I
balance on a fire escape, gingerly side stepping
my confession of upcoming marriage, watching
raccoons and spiders, each on average three
times larger than their rural counterparts,
our families thinking we’re here for business,
or coyotes and foxes adapted to anonymous
garbage foraging under streetlights, nights
far from forests, dens with pups and fish
scents, pavement an econiche, camouflage
to evolutionary biologists observing that while
the size of human thumbs has increased
within a decade of texting, empathy has decreased
with the use of cellphones that alter migration
routes of bees and monarch butterflies as we
Skype to arrange another metropolitan meeting.