Caesura

by Erin Rodini

I remember hearing about them, the babies my Grandma never had,
and though I’d never held such a seed in my body, I felt the want
of them. Five children with ghost-spaces between. She believed
unbaptized souls went to Limbo, which to me meant low,
so I saw them spread like mica in the soil beneath her roses,
and in the gauze of grasshoppers that rose with every step
through summer grass. On my Grandma’s ranch, I watched
a barn cat lick her living kittens clean, leaving some still
sacked. Little grapes, their mother’s warmth unreplaced by their own.
When I bled, I locked the bathroom door. Later, I pressed a still-
frame of my only ultrasound inside my Grandma’s copy
of The Secret Garden. Little unblossom, little mausoleum.
I’m not religious anymore, but I grew up with God,
the grandfatherly one who knew I was bad sometimes,
but loved me anyway, and I could always talk to. It’s a hard habit
to break in the cathedral of my sleeping daughters, that consecrated dark
gauzed in white-noise, a halo of nightlight. My prayers are always
some variation of Don’t you dare, and Please. Somehow, I know he was a boy.
The middle brother. So little now, so nothing. My daughters don’t know
the word God. They know earth and death and rain. They’ve watched
that silent sleight of hand replace a caterpillar with an iridescent bud
of wings. They’ve seen me clutch a spider between paper and a plastic cup,
only to crush a mosquito against their bedroom wall, its body smeared
with our family’s mingled blood. They are learning to be merciful
doesn’t mean to be good, only powerful enough to choose.
After our cat died my oldest kept asking Where is she? I know she’s dead
but where is she? First, I spun a heaven-place, then I changed my mind,
stood her barefoot in the garden and said Here, look down.
The dirt is full of root and bone. Oh, my darlings we are so small.
Lie down, back to summer grass. Feel how we are always falling
into that star-spread black expanse. And feel too
the way the earth holds us and we are held.

View the PDF version of “Caesura.”

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Erin Rodoni is the author of Body, in Good Light (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2017) and A Landscape for Loss (NFSPS Press, 2017), which won the 2016 Stevens Award sponsored by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. Her poems have been included in Best New Poets 2014, nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and honored with awards from AWP and Ninth Letter. She lives in the San Rafael, CA, with her husband and two young daughters.

38 Michigans

by Eva H.D.

You are thirty-eight Michigans away from me,
thirty-eight wolverine states into your cups
in the sky, because being dead is like being
profoundly tanked, profound as an empty silo,
with your thoughts and your arms and your
credit cards ignoring you, just eyes, eyes, and behind
those eyes nothing, or the sky, or the smell of manure,
or thirty-eight Michigans of black, bloated ice.

One Michigan is bigger by far than a football field,
and two or ten is one of those I'm a man who needs
no woman type of motorcycle trips and fifteen is all the
old routes of tea or silk or spice or Trans-Siberian
misery rolled; but thirty-eight is the size of the space where Oh,
I need to call you, though laying hands upon
the phone I am repelled by a forcefield of practicality,
grasping at the incongruities of the calendar year and my
desire and your non-existence. Thirty-eight Michigans away
you are no doubt somewhere or other, balking at being,
polishing off a sandwich made of rare, impossible air.
You are as likely as the apocalypse. I can almost hear
you on my radio, the cracks in your voice of clay.

I summon up photos of our planet as seen from
invented places like e.g.the moon and it looks
like a Rubik's cube. Peel off the stickers and
solve the black plastic beneath. Solve this blank
sheet of aluminium. Solve this anteater.

Yes, I recommend walking in the rain,
sluicing in the lake, howling at the shadow
of the moon behind the moon. Say Go long
before you throw long. Say Heads. Give the
dead more than their due. Yes, I recommend
cutting and running. Can you hear me, thirty-eight
Michigans down the line? Go long.

View the PDF version of “38 Michigans.”

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Eva H.D. lives in Toronto, where she works at your favourite bar. Her first book of poetry, Rotten Perfect Mouth, was published by Mansfield Press in the spring of 2015.

The Antenna

by Mia Anderson

For Mike Endicott

The antenna is a growth not always
functional in all people.

Some can hoist their antenna with
remarkable ease—like greased lightning.

In some it is broken, stuck there in its old winged
fin socket way down under the shiny surface

never to issue forth.
Others make do with a little mobility,

a little reception, a sudden spurt of music
and joy, an aberrant hope.

And some—the crazies,
the fools of God—drive around

or sit or even sleep
with this great thin-as-a-thread

home-cobbled monkey-wrenched filament
teetering above their heads

and picking up the great I AM like
some hacker getting Patmos on his toaster.

And some, with WD40 or jig-a-loo
or repeated attempts to pry the thing up

or chisel at the socket
do not give up on this antenna

because they have heard of how it works
sometimes, how when the nights are clear

and the stars just so and the new moon has all but set,
the distant music of the spheres is transformative

and they believe in the transformation.
It is the antenna they have difficulty believing in.

View the PDF version of “The Antenna.”

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Mia Anderson is a writer, an Anglican priest, a gardener, an erstwhile shepherd and a long-time actress. Her one-woman show 10 Women, 2 Men and a Moose showcased then-contemporary Canadian writers. She has published four books of poetry: Appetite (Brick, 1988), Château Puits ’81 (Oolichan, 1992), Practising Death (St Thomas’ Poetry, 1997), and most recently The Sunrise Liturgy (Wipf & Stock, 2012). Her Long Poems “The Saugeen Sonata” and “from The Shambles” have won awards. 

Walking Underwater

by Mark Tredinnick

For Kim Stafford

There is this quietness that hangs over North America.
As if all the days were double-glazed against themselves.
It’s uncanny. Tectonic. A kind of grief, a kind of pain
In waiting. Some sort of business unfinished. I feel it here
In the northwest, especially, though it stalked me in Toronto:
A slender quality of northern light, I guess, my southern
Self’s unused to, transposed into a season of suppressed sound,
A penumbra of silence cast by too much history, too much
Ecstatic landscape, too many plot points resolved at gunpoint,
And it feels like my life’s been lost here from the start.

I’m sorry: I’m talking out of my mood, which is jet-lagged
And dreaming heavily of what it used to think I loved.
There are plates subducting other plates on the mantle
Of my mind; there is disquiet and illness of ease. But look,
Out your windows the prayer flags have stopped
Praying, and moss deckles the edges of the oaks and firs,
Which hold out stoically inside the sweetest excuse for day-
Light I’ve ever seen. Come out with me, you say; let’s wander
Up the river. Let’s see what N’chi wana has to say about
The light… Which turns out to be a lot, and most of it profane—

The cock and the cunt, for instance, Neruda’s entanglement
Of genitals, right there, gargantuan in basalt, and wrapped in Douglas
Fir on the south bank—and glorious. The robins along the Eagle
Creek drainage seemed convinced it was spring, but the cloud
That streamed downriver on the back of the teal-blue water
And the rising wind and the narrow road coming unstuck beneath
Our feet, were all busy putting winter back in place. And for two
Hours you schooled me in the art of walking underwater; for two
Hours we carried a bright conversation all the way to the falls
And back again in rain that fell like disappointment on my head.

If you’re going to call a mountain range The Cascades, this is
What you’re going to get—their very name on the map
A long walk in the rain. But it was worth it; it nearly always is:
The afternoon crying out the grief the continent had spent
All morning—all last century, so far as I can tell—trying not to
Confess. The watershed was a Japanese watercolour at risk
Of running off the canvas, the big water carrying its muted palette
Down to the sea and taking a good part of me with it. The gorge,
It turns out, is a green sermon left largely unsaid, and as we drove
Out of it, evening lay on the river like half the psalms I never knew.

Note: The Columbia River is known by many names to the people who live along it. To the Chinook of its lower reaches, it is known as “Wimahi”; the Kwak’wala-speaking peoples of the river’s middle reaches call the river “Nch’i-Wana”. Both “Wimahi” and “Nch’i-Wana” mean “the big water” or “the big river”.

View the PDF version of “Walking Underwater.”

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Photo credit: Vicki Frerer

Mark Tredinnick is an award-winning Australian poet, is the author of Fire Diary, The Blue Plateau, The Little Red Writing Book, and eight other works of poetry and prose. Mark lives, writes and teaches along the Wingecarribee River, southwest of Sydney. The Lyrebird (2011) is his most recent book of poems, and a new collection (Body Copy) will appear in 2012.