Lisa Baird is a queer poet, essayist and community acupuncturist. Her chapbook Persephone’s Crickets was published by Baseline Press in fall 2024. Her second poetry collection, When Whales Went Back to the Water, came out with UAlberta Press in early 2025. www.lisabaird.ca

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Blue Angel

My dad, nearly 50 and over six feet tall, bends down to grasp the bar at the back of my Blue Angel banana seat bike—which I chose at Canadian Tire because it is blue and not pink—and holds me upright, running up and down the block in the summer heat. (Was it a string of sun-drunk afternoons? Or only an hour?) He runs till he doesn’t, and maybe he’s just chest-heaving tired, but I want to believe that he knows the moment my centre of gravity finds the sweet spot—when my arms, legs, spine, and cerebellum align—and this man who has never let anything go in his life lets go, and I remain upright, pedalling away from him while he beams with relief but maybe, I want to believe, also pride as the cicadas keen and I am perfect physics and perfect trust, flying.