Dream Research
by Sue Reynolds
the year my son perched on the cusp …
by Sue Reynolds
the year my son perched on the cusp
between grade eight and high school,
he graduated from sharing his thoughts
to single word responses
fine or sure
I worked in a sleep lab that summer
balancing his swimming lessons and day camp
with my own all-night endurance
one night he helped me stick electrodes
to the heads of the sleepers
then I bound him at the cerebral cortex,
hypothalamus and suprachiasmatic nerve
I tucked him into the unfamiliar bed
and plugged his wires into the sleep box
how are you? I asked
in the blue underwater light of the control room
I gazed into the computer screens
the way an aquarium visitor
peers at the unfettered flight
of aquatic creatures
he dove deep into slow theta
and I closed my eyes remembering
when he would roll over dreaming,
a seal pup in my belly,
the two of us umbilical connected
later he floated up into REM
the styli recording his dreams in frantic scribbles
like scribes in a marketplace
writing a language I could no longer translate
and when I opened my eyes
moments later I watched the dot
swimming across the graph
in search of open water
Susan Lynn Reynolds is a writer, teacher and psychotherapist. Her YA novel Strandia won the Canadian Library Association’s national Young Adult Novel of the Year award, and she is also a multiple winner of the Timothy Findley Creative Writing Prize for her short stories and poetry. She has been leading writing workshops for criminalized women at Central East Correctional Centre for 10 years and received the June Callwood Award for that program.
Meteor Shower
by Amali Rodrigo
The last fixed thing I saw, a fall of ash and moth-wing, …
by Amali Rodrigo
And now in age I bud again
George Herbert
The last fixed thing I saw, a fall of ash and moth-wing,
not ready for old hungers and
your whisper in the pure dark: like sperm racing
towards a cosmic egg.
Once plunderers, now lost, scratching runes on stone,
in this virtuosity of skin on skin
all shapes burn and break, fingertips in tiny voids
of dimples and folds, a palm over
the ribs’ insignia – the habit of knowing one thing
through another: and a day long ago
when night rain barely hung on spruce boughs,
constellations marooned, trembling
as every tenderness through which a man can vanish,
the body extinct, the who of it
as now, no longer seed silo, not yet an urn of ash
but a pure toll of an ancient singing
bowl from us, padded hammer on lip, endless circum
navigation,
a single note ransacking the furthest reaches. We are
younger than the river, older than the sky
Amali Rodrigo was born and grew up in Sri Lanka. She has lived in Mozambique, Kenya, India and is now in London. She’s widely published and has won several prizes in international poetry competitions. She is also the recipient of the Princess Alexandra medal from Lancaster University where she is currently a PhD candidate. Her first collection Lotus Gatherers is forthcoming from Bloodaxe in 2016.
Who Vanishes as He Approaches
by Linda Rogers
Today the last black rhino …
by Linda Rogers
“Who Vanishes As He Approaches,”
- Ted Hughes
Today the last black rhino
vanishes as he approaches,
his horn cocked, dying in spite
of his bodyguards, only human
like the poachers who hunt him
while shopping for essentials:
food, medicine, permanent erections.
We hope he expires on his
back, looking up - the rapture,
the stars within his reach.
We also assume what we call
the missionary position, human
animals, sunny side up, staring
at celestial maps from rooms
with skylights and NO EXIT signs
over the doors, no way out as in
rooms marked, kids, adolescents,
adults, or MIND THE GAP, the
shade where rhinos wallowed in
mud and albino children, allergic
to light, trembled in fear of holy
men with machetes.
This room has a neon sign that means
EXTINCT. It's rarely crowded, only in
times of cholera, ebola, war. Usually, the
lines move quickly, just like Disneyland
and the tourist attractions at Auschwitz.
Look up. Look way, way up.
Some of us lie on our backs and
sing from the hymn books we were
taught to trust - praise for treble-
voiced women, pre-fab, already
shaped like seraphim - and trumpet
our bangles in cumulous gratitude,
for Heaven at the end of the yellow
brick road and the grass savanna,
Hell for the ones we leave behind.
One of 100K Poets for Change, poet, lyricist, journalist and novelist Linda Rogers has been Victoria Poet Laureate and Canadian People’s Poet. Her recent publications include the novel Tempo Rubato with Ekstasis Editions and The Carter Vanderbilt Cooper anthologies from Exile Editions, which honoured her poetry with an inaugural Gwendolyn MacEwan Award.
Funeral Home
by Richard Sanger
Across the street from the hospital …
by Richard Sanger
Across the street from the hospital,
so obvious and faux-respectable
we paddle right by it, like a frog
on a lily-pad, biding its time,
waiting for flies, for us, the funeral home--
that’s right, just across from the hospital,
and the paramedics and the hardcore cases
dragging their drip-trolleys out
to sneak a sad, defiant puff.
Just going in for a spell, we thought,
a night or two to get our counts back up
before winter, and our energy,
but some of us, well, never step back
through those revolving doors again.
We end up down a different corridor
dealing with another order of business:
Imagine the owner going in to discuss
his start-up loan, the site picked,
glossy business plan in a binder,
the phrases he chose to pitch it
--steady earner, constant influx--
and the bank manager, nodding, nodding,
lunch coming up, some old friend
who’s been sick, say, she stands up,
ignoring the fat package, all that work
this guy did, the surplus apostrophes buzzing
around his laborious words,
ushering him out, yes, already decided, yes,
with a hand that might be shooing a fly away.
Then months later, it’s summer,
a cruel twist, sudden choices
to be made, and here she is, a new customer
Richard Sanger’s plays include Not Spain, Two Words for Snow, and Hannah’s Turn. He has also translated works by Calderon, Lope de Vega and Lorca, written for numerous journals, and taught and been writer-in-residence at various universities. His poems have appeared in many publications, including the TLS, LRB and Poetry Review. Sanger’s poetry collections are Shadow Cabinet and Calling Home. He lives in Toronto.
My Hand and Cold
by Natalie Shapero
Of surgeons putting their knives to erroneous …
by Natalie Shapero
Of surgeons putting their knives to erroneous
body parts, stories abound. So can you really blame
my neighbor for how, heading into the operation,
he wrote across his good knee NOT THIS KNEE?
The death of me: I’m never half so bold. You will
feel, the doctor said, my hand and cold—
and I thought of the pub quiz question: which three
countries are entirely inside of other countries?
I bought the bound ONE THOUSAND NAMES
FOR BABY, made two lists: one if she’s born breathing,
one if not. The second list was longer. So much
that I might call her, if she were never to bear
the name, never turn to it, suffer shaming, mull its
range and implications, blame it, change it, move
away to San Marino, Vatican City, Lesotho.
Natalie Shapero is the Professor of the Practice of Poetry at Tufts University and an Editor-at-Large of the Kenyon Review. Her poetry collection, No Object, was published by Saturnalia Books in 2013, and her writing has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Progressive and elsewhere.
Thomas, Not Saying
by Pete Smith
The finger must have seen something …
by Pete Smith
Jesus said to his disciples, “Compare me to something and Tell me what I am like.” …
Thomas said to him, “Teacher, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like.”
- Gospel of Thomas 13.
The finger must have seen something.
Say. The skeptical finger
sees more than the eye of faith.
Nothing invasive or military. The hole
invites the finger. So. A probationary
touch, tentative in intention then electric
in performance. Say. Only Caravaggio
not Thomas, sees, through Thomas’
finger, red corpuscles flushing the white
capillary walls. An angioblast
performed by Caravaggio by means
of the finger of Thomas. Not so.
There is incredulity to reckon with.
Six eyes and one finger focus intently
on the thoracic fault that rhymes
with the folds of the man’s robes
(robes once folded straight and flat
and put away).
The man with the finger looks
away – to enhance, say, the finger’s encounter.
He seems intent on listening, though,
for a word the others have no need of.
Two of the three fix a clinical gaze
on the folly of flesh, so, as if
professing faith yet awaiting the full report.
The pierced one keeps gentle hold
of the wrist of the guided finger,
letting it draw, say, its own conclusions
(the Now of the whole matter);
and it is this touch, not the Braille wound
his finger cannot read, but the hand
on his wrist that tells, that knits breath back
to bone and says it is so and so and not so.
Pete Smith, born and raised in Coventry, immigrated to Canada in 1974. After a long detour, he returned to poetry in the late 1990s. He’s published poetry with Wild Honey Press, Poetical Histories, Great Works and Oystercatcher among others. His reviews and essays have appeared in Agenda, The Gig, The Paper, The Capilano Review, Crayon and elsewhere. Bindings with Discords, was published by Shearsman Books (UK) in February 2015.
Passage Grave
by Rosamund Taylor
I’m in the dry centre of the passage grave, …
by Rosamund Taylor
I’m in the dry centre of the passage grave,
looking at interlocking circles
carved by stone-age hands,
when the guide tells us life expectancy was twenty-five.
I'm dead, then. The guide adjusts the electric light
to create a gold glow
and asks us to imagine sunshine,
December sunshine striking silent stone.
I imagine I'm Neolithic
and pregnant, standing here,
knowing I may die soon from wounds
or childbirth. I'm taller
than the other women. When we celebrate I
chew berries and paint my face purple with their juice.
The women say
I'm a wicked goddess. We laugh
together in the dark, and a woman
kisses my stretched abdomen
where the baby's head
distorts the skin. She kisses my foot, too, all its firm callouses.
We laugh together in the dark
among dry stones and I'm
standing in Newgrange and I imagine I'm
already dead like all those who
didn't—who stepped into the sea and went under,
who never disgorged the pills. I have a year left, I have fifty, I watch
the electric light glow gold, imagine
stone-age sunshine striking stone,
and a December goddess laughing in the dark.
Rosamund Taylor was chosen for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series in 2015 and gave a reading as part of the Dublin International Literature Festival. This is her third time appearing on the Montreal International Poetry Prize website. She has been published in a number of magazines in the UK and Ireland, and is forthcoming in Agenda. She is currently working on a first poetry collection called Notes from an Alien.
Africa Today
by Joseph Ushie
She is the blind bowl-bearing beggar …
by Joseph Ushie
She is the blind bowl-bearing beggar
Sitting on a roadside mound of gold
Yawning all day, yawning all night
America arrives, cleaves a chunk of the gold,
Drops a coin and some affronts, and passes;
Asia arrives, cleaves a chunk of the gold,
Drops a coin and some contempt, and passes;
Australia arrives, cleaves a chunk of the gold,
Drops a coin and some chuckle, and passes;
Europe passes, cleaves a chunk of the gold,
Drops a coin and some insult, and retires;
Then hail her own one-eyed leader:
He clears the bowl of the dropped coins,
Blames her plight on her slothfulness, and passes,
Belching all the way as his beggar-land yawns.
Joseph Ushie teaches at the University of Uyo, Nigeria. He is a Fellow of the 2002 Fulbright Program and recipient of many honours and awards including his state government’s for his outstanding contributions to the growth of African Literature and Culture. He’s been a judge in national literary competitions and was Africa’s representative at the 2010 Philippine PEN 50th anniversary celebrations. His poetry has appeared in world-class literary anthologies and has earned global attention.
Slant of the Girl
by Jessica Van de Kemp
I cut my feet that autumn …
by Jessica Van de Kemp
I cut my feet that autumn
on all the bay-rocks.
The hill without end.
My tent was a net in the air.
I ran down the hill so my legs would give out.
Poison ivy everywhere.
The others reddened and boiled
into spider nests, any rough cloud
that could hang them
above the green.
I lived happily on the outcrop,
walking on mountaintops,
scarring my soles.
For once, I was blood and bone,
my feet like rhythm-bowls.
I thought I had what you had,
a strange mind. I thought I was
born to grow upward.
That autumn, the hill ran
down into darkness, and I slanted
with the trees toward the bottom.
I walked on ground forgotten
by humans. That’s how I learned
of the moon’s jaw, opening for virgins,
as if a temple could be made
from moss and foliage.
My mind is stranger every day,
it works by rock and moon-cut.
I sleep in tents of air.
The others have gone
to find help for their bodies.
They’ll find none.
I learned how to die as I lived,
like a photon, and weigh
the salt of my years
against the exoskeletons.
Jessica Van de Kemp (BA, B.Ed, MA) is a 2014 Best of the Net nominee and the author of the poetry chapbook, Spirit Light (The Steel Chisel, 2015). The recipient of a BlackBerry Scholarship in English Language and Literature and the winner of a TA Award for Excellence in Teaching, Jessica is currently pursuing a PhD in Rhetoric at the University of Waterloo.
Twitter: @jess_vdk.
Hunger
by Gilliam Wallace
These are …
by Gillian Wallace
These are
the empty lines of a home, these are
the black windows looking
for lamps. The cupboards are
the life raft you cling
to. You've fed
them cans and boxes for so
long, hoping to sate
them with twists
of dried pasta. You know the panic
of cutlery when a plate
is empty. You remember
it from your childhood, the years
of bologna carved
into fried sculptures. When you check
your pools of forgiveness have
dried up, only
faint rings of salt are left
in withered grass. It's a desert
where you step, the bones
of trees holding
a box labelled
rage that you can't
reach. This
is what Eden looked like after
hunger chose
the soft curve, sucked
flesh until juices
ran down its face.
Gillian Wallace’s poems have been published in various journals including Descant, The Antigonish Review, Room, and This Magazine. In 2009 she won Arc Poetry Magazine’s Diana Brebner Prize, and in 2010, she was named a “Hot Ottawa Voice” by Ottawa’s Tree Reading Series. Gillian has her PhD in the psychology of religion. Her thesis was on the origins of evil. She occasionally edits her poems online at http://gillianwallace.ca.
Shapes & Sizes
by Stephanie Warner
When couched in one of Man Ray’s glycerine tear drops …
by Stephanie Warner
When couched in one of Man Ray’s glycerine tear drops
at 30 clicks an hour, immediate danger is understood
abstractly. Like your tax return, or The Cloud—
& Rain has made an executive decision.
Your laowai tongue will make such a cockup
of the tones, you'll end up in a 2nd or 3rd tier Chinese city
in a very bad way. The word for foreigner being ghost—
& home, Jia 家: a roof, under which, a pig. Animal husbandry!
Shang Dynasty! says Rain. & so your insubstantiality bundled
in the back of the bubble car. Capacity: two humans, one cat, an amp.
Siouxsie & the Banshees, Big in Japan. Yes, fight & flight
have taken a staycation, & your hangover coiled in your buzz
like a scorpion in formaldehyde. It just seems wrong, a city
the size of Belgium: endless ring roads, bypasses, & tunnels
where taxis are sleeping it off, the lighting cranked
to Ibiza. Ribbons & ribbons of highway
playing cat’s cradle with each other. Not moving
so much as moved. A God, quite bored, tipping
a silver ball through a wooden box maze. & nothing
to yoke the eye, save fractals of neon. Or the promise
in chubby letters: Home Inn (the full English, black-out curtains),
crescent moon with a night cap spooning the wastes
of his dark twin. Rain is telling you about a club in Berlin
where people freeze their shits into dildos
and fuck each other to dream pop. You sort of get it.
Right now. The combined gigantism and lack
of detail: simulation of a city and graphics
on a shoe-string, where the video game limit drops
its particulate soft-focus somewhere between
a stone’s throw & middle distance. The pollution’s worse
at night, but you take off your mask & breath
the invisible PM 2.5’s. Embracing the intimacy
of carcinogens small enough to take a hair-pin turn
into your bloodstream, the one-off alleys of capillaries,
to darken the doorsteps of your cells.
Tower block after tower block, (some still being poured),
Home Inn after Home Inn—
& that trick of a lone lit window
glowing more human life through synecdoche
than anything wrought of hair & blood.
Stephanie Warner completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her poetry has appeared in Event, Arc, Descant, This Magazine and Prairie Fire. Her first collection of poetry is forthcoming with Fitzhenry & Whiteside, and she has been accepted to undertake a creative-critical PhD in poetry at UEA. She has taught English in Prague and Literature in Beijing. She now resides in Barcelona with an Englishman and a demanding cat.
Firebird
by Jessica Wilkinson
You cannot find it in a book— …
by Jessica Wilkinson
“Our body has to free itself
from the drug of earthly gravity”
- George Balanchine
“Take some more—let’s be drunk.”
- Igor Stravinsky
You cannot find it in a book—
the heat of a taut, lean muscle—glowing;
the piccolo flutter of a wing;
blinding vibrations at take off.
The bird must be free to be understood,
a burst of tulle, skittering on and off
the stage; ember-quick, with the burning
grace of a vodka wavelet down the throat.
Allegro rapace: woodwind and strings refracted
through movement, the body rhythm
rampant—wild bourrées, sissone, sissone
arabesque unfurling. This creation is
substantially sincere, a blessing
and a bringer of doom: you see, a rose
is a rose is a rose is not true—
each body becomes its own distinct poetry
in a logical plastic sequence.
The message is: intense pleasure—
and then it is gone.
Jessica L. Wilkinson’s first book Marionette: a biography of Miss Marion Davies was published by Vagabond in 2012 and shortlisted for the 2014 Kenneth Slessor Award. Her second, Suite for Percy Grainger: a biography was published in 2014. She is currently working on her third poetic biography, Music Made Visible: a biography of George Balanchine. Jessica is the founding editor of Rabbit: a journal for non-fiction poetry.
Siege
by Shoshanna Wingate
The light flashed red. The stretcher sprouted metal feet, criss cross legs. …
by Shoshanna Wingate
The light flashed red. The stretcher sprouted metal feet, criss cross legs.
On cue, men filed out of bars, shops, restaurants, a ritual
of grief like dreamtime, a remembering of life lived here.
They swarmed our door until I could see the black bag no more.
The leather boys in chaps and vests, aging queens with kohl-ringed eyes
and silver rings, the shop keeps, bartenders in steel-toed boots,
and boys pausing mid-step, flash of red their doppelganger.
Out the gate, on Castro Street, a sore thumb of a girl,
an impostor in a man’s man world, smelling of sleep and stale beer.
Here men married their lovers through adoption papers,
while other fathers, late at night, opened their wallets
to show photos of portrait smiles and freckled faces, pigtails.
War changes you. It changes how you see the world, how bright
the subway cars and grocery aisles, vertigo at the clinic;
the white chaulk lines of separation like a hopscotch grid.
You have this little box. Move freely here here nowhere else.
Oh, and words become weaponized. We’re onto other wars,
but I remember. T cell count. KS. Thrush. Cocktail drugs.
AZT. Gay plague. Nature’s retribution. God’s revenge.
Wars of neglect are hard on families. Who were quarantined,
whose friends closed their doors, who knew help was insular.
When the police did show up, they declared everyone
illegally assembled, including in their own homes.
My father’s body gone, I left my place, encircled by bloated aunties
who ushered me into the bar. Have this. Another.
They cradled my shoulders. My drunken mothers. Danced me
from stool to table, breath of ashes and fire starter.
The bar a night time crowd by lunch, an impromptu wake. I drank.
And danced my mothers, and we were making history with our tallies, here, here.
My aunties whirled me, their lesions kissed my ear, and they said,
for today, tonight, you are one of us, you dance. We dance through this.
We celebrate. Not one of us is left out in darkness.
Shoshanna Wingate is the author of Radio Weather, a poetry collection (Fall 2014, Vehicule Press) and a poetry chapbook, Homing Instinct (Frog Hollow Press, 2011). She is also a textile artist who works with natural dyes and foraged dye plants (Shoshi Designs). Born in New York City, she moved to Canada in 2004 and lives in Sackville, New Brunswick.
Evening Stroll by the Canal
by Jena Wooodhouse
Late today I turned east by the arched bridge at the village edge …
by Jena Woodhouse
Late today I turned east by the arched bridge at the village edge
to follow the canal’s trajectory, between tall trees and low levee—
a strange wind blowing fitfully, rattling the sabres of a ghost cohort.
A swan is nesting on the bank, a queen upon her makeshift throne—
her consort tacking back and forth, anxious and alone.
A chill breath lifts the trailing ivy tendrils from the trunks of trees,
sings an eerie serenade in balls of mistletoe, ruffles the canal's
meniscus, sets it lapping like a cat.
I glance over my shoulder: it’s deserted here, I should turn back,
but can't resist the stubborn invitation of the thread of track.
The channel is an enigmatic green, unwinding like a charm.
The more I walk, the more it lures me on.
The chateau and the village that I reach have strayed out of a tale.
I'll blink, and there’ll be nothing there at all. I blink, but they are real:
“The Three Emperors,” where three armies in turn set up
their headquarters, is solid as a rock. I am the revenant,
or so it seems, roaming stony streets like one possessed.
Walking back, I see the swan has tucked her head beneath her wing;
the male swan paddles fretfully, to guard her as she rests.
The northern European light drains swiftly to the west—
its running fire on the canal is doused.
The woods are listening, as if alert for signs of hobgoblins,
and there is something edgy in the wind...
Jena Woodhouse (Australia) has spent a decade in Greece and was recently (2015) granted a writer’s residency in France, at CAMAC Centre d’Art, Marnay-sur-Seine, the setting of the present poem. In addition to two published poetry collections, her poems have been shortlisted and have sometimes received prizes in national and international competitions. She has also translated poetry from the Russian and the Modern Greek. A third poetry collection is nearing completion.
Reindeer Herders
by Anjali Yardi
We move with the herd …
by Anjali Yardi
We move with the herd,
owning nothing we cannot carry,
stop with them by wood and water,
watch for wolves.
Our lives have merged.
Their flesh is our food, their milk our drink,
their skins keep us clothed, shod and sheltered,
their backs bear our burdens.
The reindeer follow ancient route maps
embossed on the brain’s soft topography,
pass sure-footed along river valleys,
swamps, forests, plateaus, rocky ridges.
Hooves can be cleats on slippery ice
or spread flat to skim snowfields.
Practise has made us nimble in their wake.
Where the herd halts we set up camp.
Across the white distance, ravening
shapes slink over snow, melt
into tree shadows. Under an opal sky,
water flashes molten grey and silver.
By morning dark paw-holes
will pockmark the trampled snow
where moss and lichens
were nosed out and grazed.
All night their warm breaths make
restless lacework on the freezing air,
their antlers bristle like forests of bare branches.
They know our voices and are not afraid.
Anjali Yardi was born in India and moved to Australia in 1989. She has an MA in English Literature and has written poetry all her adult life. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies in India, Britain and Australia. In 2004 she was joint runner-up for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. Her poem, “Venus’s Flower Basket,” appears pseudonymously in The Best Australian Poems 2012. She is married and has two adult daughters.
Ai Wei Wei / Breathing Through Silk
by Linda Rogers
Trust the dissident artist; …
by Linda Rogers
Trust the dissident artist;
he knows heads crack as
easily as sunflower seeds
and schools built on sand,
where fragrant Sichuan spices almost
cover the stench of corruption and death.
He spreads out one hundred million
porcelain seeds, each one perfectly
painted. Will that be enough to feed
the souls released in the Great Leap
Forward and Chengdu Earthquake?
There are one hundred million
reasons to walk in his shoes,
footsteps of ghosts who went
before him, as carefully as ants
avoiding diatomaceous earth
and resolute heroes swimming in circles.
The mornings Ai Wei Wei,
arrested for truth, sipped thin
soup in prison, we broke bread
on the rocks where circling gulls
opened their beaks to drop and
smash their invertebrate food—
where every story’s a sacrament,
one thing becoming another.
Never Sorry, Ai Wei Wei,
breathing through silk, does
not apologize for the toxic
dust that rises from his hand
made breakfast of martyrs,
seeds fired in crematoria.
He knows the breath exhaled from
graveyards and mouths full of
broken teeth is the wind of change.
Linda Rogers, poet, songwriter, novelist and journalist, past Victoria Poet Laureate and Canada’s People’s Poet, is an advocate for human rights, particularly those of children. Rogers’ most recent award is The Gwendolyn MacEwen Prize from Exile Editions, 2013. Her most recent poetry title is Homing from Ekstasis Editions. A mother and grandmother, she is married to blues mandolinist Rick van Krugel.
Photo Credit: Darshan Photography
Amber
by Alison Luterman
Two long teardrops of it …
by Alison Luterman
Two long teardrops of it
graze my shoulders, coolly,
as my mother’s tucking-in touch was cool,
nights she and my father went out
in the glamour of their long-ago youth.
How I held my breath then
not wanting her to go. She went
anyway; gone for good, eleven years now.
These earrings I’ve inherited glow
mellow against skin,
reflecting, refracting. Light of late
August caught in their elegant oblongs,
dark honey of the inmost hive.
And now they swing
awkward, out-of-place against
my wrinkling neck,
this wind that’s always at my back.
Amber was her song,
her go-to color, wine at sunset,
peaches poached in fire.
How we live to rue.
How love refracted,
deflected, bounces back
catches me off-guard—how we missed
each other, she and I
even when she was alive,
so that now, all these years
later, I feel her as a coolness
brushing my collarbone
a tug at the lobe, though I wouldn’t
know what to begin to say.
Alison Luterman has written two books of poetry The Largest Possible Life (Cleveland State University Press) and See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions). In addition to poetry, she writes plays and personal essays. She has taught at The Writing Salon in Berkeley, at Esalen Institute and Rowe Camp and Conference center; at Omega institute, Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference and elsewhere. Check out her website for more information.
The Antenna
by Mia Anderson
The antenna is a growth not always …
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.
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.
Aubade
by Bryan Walpert
Light brushes the white weatherboards …
by Bryan Walpert
Light brushes the white weatherboards
some unclaimed border of purple and pink,
strokes the windmills churning early air on the hills.
There are fifty-five turbines. In a bag, an apple
picked in an orchard seven kilometres from here,
placed on a shelf at a market garden. The woman who took the apple
from that shelf, who inspected it for bruises, found one, then bought it anyway,
would see the same light, standing in the same kitchen. Instead, she stares
at her hands, less like hers than her mother’s, the first time
she has thought of her mother today, though not the last, it’s early yet.
Early light, the earliest it can be and still be called light.
All the risks of the day stand between you and the next time you see this colour.
The light that slips through the glass of her window reveals a web
of lines in her hands, palm up before her as in supplication.
To whom? The kettle boils. 1.65 megawatts per windmill,
enough to power 700 homes. She was trying to tell you
something. Your wife. Though no turbine may exceed
forty decibels. It is that time of year, the whole of the working day
visible, leave with first light, return with the last, this time
will hardly last at all. Bigger close up, each seventy meters. It helps
she has things to do with her hands, that this moment
of self-reflection is circumscribed by the rattling she hears upstairs, children.
You see the day as a kind of wind. It will recede, leave you standing. One
of the weatherboards is rotten. Each has three blades. Nearly twelve
hours since you last spoke, half of that in difficult sleep,
the rest in the language only a stunned silence makes,
scrape of drawer, hard complaint of dishes, the refrigerator’s hum
forty-three decibels. Speech, if not absent, would be forty-five.
There are things information cannot tend.
There are things said that will take a long time to fade
as the colour fades now against the house, whitening, the clamped teeth
of the day. The sun rising. Someone will pick hundreds
of apples today. Rain will engorge the valley. Some neighbours
complain about the noise. Your wife was trying to say something to you.
Forty decibels. The windmills whip and whip. You haven’t heard a thing.
Bryan Walpert is the author of the poetry collections Etymology and A History of Glass, the short fiction collection Ephraim’s Eyes and the scholarly monograph Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry. A dual American and New Zealand citizen, he teaches Creative Writing at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand. “Aubade” is from his third collection of poetry Native Bird for which he is seeking a publisher.
A Bad Rap For Thetis
by Gary Geddes
What can I say that you don’t already …
by Gary Geddes
What can I say that you don’t already
know? My marriage to the mortal Peleus
was not a whim, or a moment of passion,
but something in the bones that told me
this union was important, foreordained
by the gods. I knew nothing of genetics,
or that the half-mortal issue of my loins
would create a deep, open wound, render
me vulnerable. Some claim I released
Zeus from his chains, took refuge
with Diomedes in a bed of seaweed,
and refused to save a boy from drowning
in a shipwreck. These are mostly lies.
I’ll admit to some shape-shifting to avoid
capture, the goddess of water testing
other elements, taking on fiery shapes,
winging it, using ground-breaking measures
to achieve my ends. These were the perks
of immortality that I wanted for my son
Achilles when I dipped him into the briny
waters of the Styx. Who would have thought
the thumb and forefinger that held him
by the heel underwater would have created
a weakness that led to his death and mine
and changed the course of history. Divine
intervention is no mere literary device,
my friends. If you should see me depicted
riding the sea nymph Hippokampos, Achilles’
shield in my right hand, or choose to believe
the lament of the kingfisher that I cut off
the fish supply as a result of petty displeasure,
don’t be too judgmental. Remember,
a mother is bound to mourn, the oysters
I bring to banquets are tastier than truffles
and the poet Apollo played at my wedding,
his honeyed lyrics blessing all creation.
Gary Geddes has written and edited more than 45 books and won a dozen literary awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), the Lt.-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence and the Gabriela Mistral Prize from the government of Chile. His most recent poetry books are Skaldance, Falsework and Swimming Ginger. He’s also the author of Drink the Bitter Root: A search for justice and healing in Africa. He lives on Thetis Island, British Columbia.