Author Statement

I wrote the poem “Breathing the Night Out” in less than 10 minutes, just days after spending time in the park with my brother. Both of us child sexual violence trauma survivors, my brother had been homeless for decades. I hadn’t seen him in several years. It was only the second poem I’d ever written—the first was when I was 11, a simple piece about Remembrance Day.
That day, I was riding my bike around downtown Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, searching for him. Along the way, I woke a young woman and her boyfriend who were curled up on the sidewalk at a busy intersection. She promised to keep an eye out for my brother. I thanked her and gave her $20—not because she’d asked, but because she reminded me of myself from a thousand lives ago.
I rode away hoping they’d chosen that spot to earn more, not merely to sleep in plain sight for safety.
A few months later, my brother overdosed. He was in a coma and on life support for three days. I sat counting the seconds between his breaths. I read him this poem, and even though he couldn’t tell me what he felt, I knew he’d wake up and get to work turning it into a song. My brother was the gifted one.