Gambling Everything
by Jayne Jenner
“Wash your balls,” my mom yelled …
by Jayne Jenner
“Wash your balls,” my mom yelled
when the Bingo caller kept calling B4
over and over. Everybody gave my mom
a dirty look, but she didn’t care.
She just kept waiting and
waiting for the number she pressed
with her finger. Harder and harder she
tapped, pressed. B6, BINGO, my mom cried out
and everything in my heart jumped.
Everybody looked at my mom kind of mad.
A man came over to check her numbers.
“Good Bingo,” he said. Then, he put 100 dollars
cash in her hand. My mom checked the bills
and put them in a stack in front of her. The balls
started bouncing again in the machine.
My mom held her favorite green dauber
and waited for the next number. I waited
for the clock to say eleven so we could go home.
Jayne Jenner is an LCSW with a private psychotherapy practice in New York City. She studied at Penn State University, University of Manchester, England, and Fordham University, Lincoln Center. Her writing draws heavily on her experiences growing up in western Pennsylvania and her international travels as a flight attendant for American Airlines. She is a member of Mudfish Poetry Workshop, and received a first place prize in The 83rd Annual Writer’s Digest Competition, 2014.
Letter to My Dead Mother
by Dorianne Laux
Dear White Raven, Dear Albino Crow …
by Dorianne Laux
Dear White Raven, Dear Albino Crow:
Time to apologize for all the times I devised
Excuses to hang up the phone.
Dear Swarm of Summer Sun, Dear Satin Doll:
You were my panic in a dark house, my mistake,
My maybe, my heart-drain, my worst curse.
Dear Scientific Fact, Dear Cake Batter Spoon.
I love you. I love you.
I knew after I fell for the third time
I should write you, Dear Mother.
Dear Pulse, Clobber, Partaker, Cobbler.
Dear Crossword, Crick, Coffeepot, Catchall.
You told me when you were 72
You still felt 25 behind your eyes.
Dear Underbelly, Bisection, Scimitar, Doge.
Dear Third Rail. Dear Bandbox. Dear Scapegrace.
How could I know -- I want to go home.
Don’t leave me alone -- Blank as a stone.
Dear Piano.
You played for no one. Your fingers touched the keys
With naked intimacy.
At the science fair we looked in a two-way mirror
And our eyes merged.
Dear Wreck. Dear Symphony.
Dear Omission. Dear Universe.
Dear Moon-in-the-sky like a toy.
Dear Reason for my Being.
You were the Emergency Room Angel
In a gown of light, the injured flocked to you.
You could not heal them all. Dear Failure.
No one on earth more hated
Or loved: your warm hands, your cold heart.
Dear Mother, I have tried. I think I know now
What you meant when you said, I’m tired.
I have no song to sing to your Death Star.
No wish. Though I kissed your cheek
And sang for you in the kitchen
While you stirred the soup, steam
Licking our faces-- crab legs and potatoes—
Those were the days
Dorianne Laux is the author of several poetry collections, most recently The Book of Men. The recipient of many national grants and awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Laux lives in Raleigh, where she is the director of the MFA program at North Carolina State University. She is also founding faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program in Forest Grove and Seaside, Oregon.
Rule of Threes
by Sandra Lloyd
I tend to read books three at a time surrounded …
by Sandra Lloyd
I tend to read books three at a time surrounded
by a trio of dogs as agreeable to me
as a ternion of adjectives before a noun.
Aristotle believed in three unities for plays
all set in one place, no longer than a day,
without subplots, or flashbacks.
I need this sort of frame.
Curios offer more pleasure
in triads. Three repetitions renders things true.
We progress from incident, to coincident,
to pattern. I arrange a cord of wood between a triangle
of stalwart evergreens and consider the men I've loved,
believe the third offers something of a knotty twist.
Like a triptych, I could display this fact openly
or fold it shut.
Sandra Lloyd is a poet and registered nurse with a BSc in Psychology and an MA in English/Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. Her poetry and prose have appeared in publications including The Antigonish Review, Prism International, The Rotary Dial, The Puritan, and Evenings on Paisley Avenue: Seven Hamilton Poets. She lives in Ancaster, Ontario.
Manure Pile Covered in Snow
by Thomas Lux
When the horses’ heads got too close to the beams above …
by Thomas Lux
When the horses’ heads got too close to the beams above,
and they pinned back their ears each time they saw me,
I had no choice
but to lay wide barn boards
on the four feet of snow
for thirty yards or so
from the stalls to the top of the pile.
Load a wheelbarrow—I favoured a pitchfork first,
next the shovel. Then get a running start
on the downslope board
from the stable door,
rush it to the pile’s top, and flip
both handles with a hard twist.
It was labour—and my father said
to do it—to be done.
Aesthetics? I had none.
So: I ruined a pristine mound
of snow. A mound so symmetrical, so round,
it seemed a Half-Sphere from the Spheres,
or perhaps a sky god’s giant tear
fallen and frozen, smothered by white.
And I soiled it, tossing one barrow-load left,
the next right, over and over. After each run,
I carved on the stable door: 1,
then 1, then 1, and one more,
then crossed all four.
And started another. I worked hard
until the horses stood level again
in their stalls, and accepted extra oats.
They were shaggy in their winter coats.
It never snowed again that year,
and never once four feet since.
Thomas Lux has two books forthcoming in 2016: a book of poetry, To the Left of Time (Houghton Mifflin Hourcourt), and an edited volume, Selected Poems of Bill Knott (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). He is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Robert Pinsky
by Sneha Madhavan-Reese
Passengers going to Hoboken, change trains …
by Sneha Madhavan-Reese
Passengers going to Hoboken, change trains
at Summit. Even in his crib, he considered
the rhythm of speech; as a boy, he studied
the drumming of sound. He would fiddle
with the saxophone for a time but later
find melodies in syntax. Passengers going
to Hoboken, change trains at Summit...
On stage in Ottawa, Pinsky’s no longer
larger than life. He presses his palms together
before and after he speaks. He stretches his arms
to show the length of lines, holds up fingers
to count syllables. His memory amazes me.
I turn words inside out, he says, and
I believe him. I even watch him do it.
He turns the library’s herringbone floor
into a poem about Cajun migration.
Truth is, I never liked his poetry much.
But I enjoy the man. He doesn’t lecture.
He makes the afternoon light with stories.
I laugh to learn of his boyhood reverie,
hearing the conductor’s drone, Passengers going
to Hoboken, change trains at Summit—his hand
moves up and down as he speaks—so rapt he’d forget
where he was going, forget to get off the train.
Sneha Madhavan-Reese was born in Detroit and now lives in Ottawa. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals across Canada, including Arc, Descant, The New Quarterly, and The Antigonish Review. The winner of Arc’s 2015 Diana Brebner Prize, she was also a finalist for The Malahat Review’s 2014 Far Horizons Award and a finalist for the 2013 Alfred G. Bailey Prize. Her debut poetry collection, Observing the Moon, is forthcoming from Hagios Press.
Thoppil Bhasi
by Sneha Madhavan-Reese
I didn’t know any names for fruits in Malayalam …
by Sneha Madhavan-Reese
I didn’t know any names for fruits in Malayalam,
and he didn’t know them in English, so I ran
up and down the stairs with every kind of fruit we had,
until we discovered it was strawberries he’d been wanting.
He was famous back in India,
a playwright, I think, or a poet. This was 1989;
I was 10. I was used to Indian celebrities—
movie stars and dancers—but this was the first
writer who stayed with us, as a guest of my father’s club.
His thinning, white hair didn’t hide his brown scalp.
Thick, black glasses framed his eyes.
I asked him to sign my autograph book,
and he covered a whole page with his native script,
blue ink on light pink paper. The bulbous letters
my father had taught me to read were a mystery of loops
in his fluent hand. I could make out only the top line,
the familiar characters of my name repeated twice:
Sneha-mulla Sneha-mol. Loving daughter Sneha.
I wonder what else he wrote to fill
an entire page for a girl who brought him fruit.
Sneha Madhavan-Reese was born in Detroit and now lives in Ottawa. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals across Canada, including Arc, Descant, The New Quarterly, and The Antigonish Review. The winner of Arc’s 2015 Diana Brebner Prize, she was also a finalist for The Malahat Review’s 2014 Far Horizons Award and a finalist for the 2013 Alfred G. Bailey Prize. Her debut poetry collection, Observing the Moon, is forthcoming from Hagios Press.
As Soon as We Are Born We Start to Die
by Jennie Malboeuf
You said your childhood home …
by Jennie Malboeuf
You said your childhood home
was emptied out and I pictured
a giant hand picking the house up
and shaking about its contents,
little startled people and all.
My favorite part of playing dolls
used to be dressing the rooms; choosing
a place for each piece of furniture:
the tiny computer with squiggly lines,
a ringaling wind-up phone, plastic
couches and paper rugs, a petting zoo
of felted flocked foxes out back.
By the time I’d get to putting on
the girl-dolls’ clothes and shoes,
dinner was on the table.
Jennie Malboeuf is a native of Kentucky. Her poems are forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, PRISM, on Unsplendid, and the Bellingham Review; work has recently appeared in Poet Lore, on the Cortland Review, and elsewhere. She has won a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Award and was a finalist for the Iowa Review Prize, Ruth Stone Prize, and Arts & Letters Rumi Prize. She lives in North Carolina and teaches writing at Guilford College.
By the Shore
by Rose Maloukis
I see them on the news …
by Rose Maloukis
I see them on the news
arriving by boat loads
famished, barely able to stand
I see them –
Those people,
those children
put to bed without food
though I don’t know how it’s possible
to sleep, that is, or
what to do…
I am comfortable, happy, sated
here in my kitchen by the shore
What do I know of hunger?
I see them –
Honey – orange juice and zest
set beside the bowl
Curtains billow, a wineglass of dark rum
Grease the pan, preheat the oven – clic…clic…clic
chopped dates, raisins, butter, cinnamon, nutmeg,
cloves, vanilla, a pinch of sea breeze
a wineglass of dark, the coming tide
clic…clic…clic, heat, boil, cool, mix, add,
add enough, add more –
crème fraîche
carrots in cake, why not?
let them eat, please
feed them as they clamor from the sea.
Help me,
I can’t do loaves and fishes.
Rose Maloukis is a poet and visual artist. She has a BFA from Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan. She was born and grew up in the United States but has made her home in Montreal since 1986. Her poetry was last published in a limited edition bilingual artist’s book, From the Middle – Sonoritiés du Coeur, which is held in the collection of both the national and provincial libraries.
Heirloom Tomatoes
by Bruce Meyer
White lycopersicum, purple, yellow tomatoes, …
by Bruce Meyer
White lycopersicum, purple, yellow tomatoes,
even black ones passed off as juicy truffles –
can you think of anything more beautiful
as a gift to bequeath an only daughter
so she will know how to scatter seeds,
how to partake of what could live forever,
to cherish what she cannot grasp for death,
the things she loves but must leave behind,
the way one loves a garden beneath snow
or an ancestor born under a long lost flag?
Bruce Meyer is author of 45 books of poems, short fiction, and non-fiction. His most recent books are A Chronicle of Magpies (stories), The Arrow of Time, Testing the Elements, and The Seasons, which won an IPPY Award in the U.S. and was a finalist for the Indie Fab Award for best book of poems published in North America. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Georgian College and Visiting Professor at Victoria College, U of Toronto. He lives in Barrie, Ontario.
Photo credit: Mark Raynes Roberts.
Sunday Drives
by Bruce Meyer
When we had nowhere to go we went there …
by Bruce Meyer
When we had nowhere to go we went there.
On sabbaths we chased the Lord of roads,
down concessions we made to permanence,
explored the dying country and the houses
on farm lanes peaked in a cathedral keyhole
where God sat in a dormer above the door.
My father bought an enormous four-door
sedan to pack the family, yet inside there
was room to stretch, the ignition keyhole
a port of entry to chicory and milkweed roads.
In memories of those Sundays I house
the secret desire for a lost permanence,
pulling over to pee and hearing the permanence
of birdsong, gravel dust caked to the door,
and larks rising in the fields. At our house
there was sustenance, enough love, yet there
were times when the heart ached for roads
that led to the world. The key had no keyhole.
Winter shut us in. A window was a keyhole
where we saw the yard buried in a permanence
of snow. Through frost I imagined roads
that offered the story of barns, a grey door,
signs of the past, words for continuity; for there
among the waist-high weeds between house
and barn collapsing as if a dream, I could house
an absurd thought of who I was, a keyhole
camera to capture my story projected there –
great grandfather labouring, the lost permanence
of hopes never attained, a path to the chapel door
strewn with the bones of knights on a road
that brought us this far. I looked back. The road
billowed and curled in dust the way an old house
is covered in ivy and memory, a creaking door
opening slowly in a breeze, a rusted keyhole,
an eye on the other side, a phantom permanence
that had to move on, that had to leave us there
as we drove away, each door locked, each keyhole
glistening in penitentiary steel; the road, the house
all lost to time, a permanence we didn't find there.
Bruce Meyer is author of 45 books of poems, short fiction, and non-fiction. His most recent books are A Chronicle of Magpies (stories), The Arrow of Time, Testing the Elements, and The Seasons, which won an IPPY Award in the U.S. and was a finalist for the Indie Fab Award for best book of poems published in North America. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Georgian College and Visiting Professor at Victoria College, U of Toronto. He lives in Barrie, Ontario.
Photo credit: Mark Raynes Roberts.
Histories
by Jordan Mounteer
We share in the appetite of flames …
by Jordan Mounteer
We share in the appetite of flames
as stalks of grass cinder, chasing the fire
which speeds like ants across the field.
Black smoke curdles when it touches
the air, its lunged shape pouring out
behind in enraged Scyllian tails.
Ryan’s father and grandfather behind us
barking orders, where to point the hose,
while they calmly lure and break the blaze
with shovels and rakes, their flannel shirts
nicked with embers. They say the grass
will grow back greener, taking root in the wake
of struggle. Ryan jokes about tradition,
how it can lodge in the most unlikely places,
its traction dragging like a frayed belt across
the appliance of our lives years after
we have forgotten its caliber and use.
A seditious cog in people’s tolerance.
You’d heard it before, all Doukhobors
were pyromaniacs, Sons of Freedom
and all that. But it was the other things,
the schools where they hit you
for speaking Russian, the years in jail,
that bolt down hinges on the door
where our custom for remembering will stop
to remove its shoes before it enters.
In his over-sized gumboots Ryan races ahead
to stomp out a rebel flame trembling
toward a clump of knapweed gone to seed.
Behind him the older men hard under
the fury, three generations carrying fire
like a censured injury, ironing their pounded
smiles, their grass hearts kindled as if
all their histories began with fire.
Jordan Mounteer grew up in the Slocan Valley and graduated from the University of Victoria. His work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Prairie Schooner, The Antigonish Review, Grain, Arc, and The Fiddlhead. He recently won the 2014 PRISM international Poetry Contest and The Adirondack 46er Poetry Prize, and his poems are forthcoming in The Dalhousie Review, Existere, and fillingStation. He is currently in Vietnam somewhere, writing bad werewolf romance novellas to pay the bills.
Shards
by Peter Norman
Your younger son, at seven, trod on shards— …
by Peter Norman
Your younger son, at seven, trod on shards—
A Molson bottle that some passing lout
Had shattered on the pavement by your yard.
You said, “Be brave.” He didn’t weep or gripe,
And even when the bandages that wrapped
His flesh went sopping red and smeared the car,
He kept a stoic silence to ER
And back. But anaesthetic does come out.
That night, his whimpering was hell to hear,
A venom slipped into your drowsing ear.
Nightmares rewound the decades, took you back
To slivers that you never did extract.
The point intrudes, the broken vessel bleeds,
And still more shards lie hidden in the weeds.
Peter Norman has published three poetry collections — most recently The Gun That Starts the Race — and a novel, Emberton. His poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets, and in 2011 he was a finalist for the Trillium Poetry Book Award.
What the Sea Remembers
by Felicity Plunkett
Haul and wail of sea-birds …
by Felicity Plunkett
Haul and wail of sea-birds
who make it their mirror and bowl
Rough lines that disclose
its crawl into land, its hold
Discarded things, repository
of the lost and wave-tossed, shellf-
racture, plastic, atlas
of breakage, axis
trashed and washed. Lost
plants, rootless and torn
laid out to curate, forlorn, and if
there are tears here, call them salt
The sea remembers. Its roar
is dies irem. White flat moan and call
of trauma, of recall. Froth
and spit of weeping. Trace
of all forgetting would erase.
Relics of a life, however brief.
In its vast archive my grief
is a small file. The sea has cradled
bodies, undone them, organ
by organ: the sea dead, the lost
to earth. Never buried. The sea
stamps its name on all you set free.
Felicity Plunkett is an Australian poet, critic and editor. She is the author of poetry collections Vanishing Point (UQP) and Seastrands (Vagabond Press) and the editor of Thirty Australian Poets (UQP). She is Poetry Editor with University of Queensland Press.
The Poetry of Money
by Ron Pretty
He joined the firm as a star, married his honey …
by Ron Pretty
He joined the firm as a star, married his honey
and, confident of his powers, set out on a wild
investment program. In time he found the right
speculation to invest in. His partners hoped he might
pull off his miracle & make them a pile of money.
He brought forth his plan as his wife their first child.
The word he had was so good even his child
could plunge in safely; he saw it simply as honey
for old rope, put the bulk of the firm’s money
into a nickel mine, certain that this was no wild
gamble, but safe as platinum or gold; he felt he might
begin the party, knowing every detail was right.
He watched the screen, sure he had made the right
choice; it seemed so obvious that any numerate child
could see it. He didn’t dream then that the bears might
get in before him, raid his nickel-plated pot of honey
but as he added up the figures, he knew in that wild
market he might have squandered all the firm’s money.
For weeks he laboured; trying to claw back the money,
struggled day and night, trying to set the ledger right
while his colleagues watched, ready to pounce like wild
beasts; as they stalked around him he felt like a child
thrown to the wolves, or bears with claws at the honey.
But did he see daylight? One dawn he felt he just might.
All day & night he worked with every ounce of might
to reassure his partners he could still secure their money.
They hovered at his desk like winter bees round honey
until they were convinced his calculations were right.
Then one of his colleagues went weeping like a child;
& he’d never heard a burst of cheering so wild.
The fear he could have failed them drove him wild;
he couldn’t stand the thought that he just might
have ruined it all: himself, his firm, his wife and child.
Lord he was tired as he counted his profits, the money
he’d laboured to get; his judgement might have been right
but he’s come to realise there are more aloes than honey.
For many months afterwards, cuddling his honey, he might
relive an hour of wild fear that he still hadn’t got it right –
yet still he corrupts his child with the poetry of money.
Ron Pretty’s eighth book of poetry, What the Afternoon Knows, was published in 2013. A revised and updated version of his Creating Poetry was published by Pitt Street Poetry in July this year. The results of the inaugural Ron Pretty Poetry Prize, sponsored by Five Islands Press, were announced on February 8 this year. Ron will be writer-in-residence at the Katherine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre in July, 2015.
Half
by Michael Prior
I am all that is wrong with the Old World …
by Michael Prior
I am all that is wrong with the Old World,
and half of what troubles the New.
I have not seen Spain or the Philippines,
Holland or Indonesia. In the other room,
my grandfather nods off in front
of Wheel of Fortune. I have seen his Japan
in photos—the last good suit he wore,
grey, tailored in Kyushu. Believe
Pat Sajak is a saviour: he divines new riches
like water hidden from a dowser’s
willow switch, trembling through
unfamiliar territories, proffered
like a makeshift cross. The same
strange faith should be proof enough
of my current crisis. There was a game
we once played. I’m in it now.
The wheel turns, strobes its starlight
across another centrifuge, that spinning globe,
a kid’s finger skimming its surface,
waiting for it to stop. This is where I’ll live.
Michael Prior’s poems have appeared in journals across Canada, America, and the United Kingdom. The winner of The Walrus’s 2014 Poetry Prize, Grain’s 2014 Short Grain Contest, and Magma Poetry’s 2013 Editors’ Prize, Michael’s first full-length collection, Model Disciple, is forthcoming from Véhicule Press in 2016. In fall 2015, Michael will be starting an MFA in poetry at Cornell University.
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.