Song of the Water Lilies
by Abigail Wieser
Have you ever watched a Water Lily grow? …
by Abigail Wieser
Have you ever watched a Water Lily grow?
They are creatures of the light.
Slowly, they unfold their bodies and offer
their scented song to the world.
Light does that–gently pulls the music
out of you, rendering you (weightless) yet
full as a hive of raw, unadulterated honey.
I am standing at a cliff’s edge–
arms open wide like a man on a cross– ready
to be delivered from the weight of things.
Time has worn me like a favorite pair of jeans
and now there are more holes in me than songs,
more air in me than warmth.
I am cold always cold. My flesh has reached
its limit and now cries in the night for the clock to stop
his wielding of cruel hands.
Have you ever heard such a sad song? I look at the birds
and envy the confidence they hold in their own wings,
the joy they express in the finding of a grovelling worm.
But the pieces of my heart are steadfast still– they wait
for the wooing of the light. Soon, it will rise and pour
like a jar of honey over me and I will be covered–
resurrected–
in sweet sticky delight.
My holes will become holy and my cries
will blossom into songs of victory.
Have you ever tasted such a song?
Richer than King Solomon, fuller than the fiery bush
or the ancient land as it wept waters of destruction,
where only faithfulness could save you?
I am young I am weak but I am learning:
the song of the Water Lily only rises
after receiving the light.
Abigail Wieser is a recent graduate from Millikin University in Decateur, IL. She has had poetry appear in various places, including Stepping Stones Magazine and Millikin’s literary journal, The Collage. She is excited to get married this summer, work on her book of poems, and bless the community of Decateur with the River Coffee Company she and her fiancé are starting this fall.
Overture
by Karey Willan
By cock and bull, tooth and oxidized nail …
by Karey Willan
By cock and bull, tooth and oxidized nail
you will whistle like Harpo Marx
while I write La Symphonie de C’est Fini.
The notes ricochet off the crags of your heart
as magnetic North guides tall ships to breech the waves,
before the topple of sails, being swallowed by endless sea.
A certain lifeline for one, it was tidily hidden
in your back pocket when we were dry-docked.
I thrash and recall old dreams of porpoises,
know why I learnt to swim at four in the cold of Blackstone Lake,
one finger touching bottom before racing towards light.
You pointed it out with a laugh, liking the linguistics,
how “lover” without the “L” becomes “over”
until it rose like an overture, a watery muffle of music
to break hardened earth, as if for gentle burial.
I replied with “Over/kill.”
Overtures are the sly, impish passes you made
when your kitchen-handy wife reached low for the meat platter,
put x-ray vision on old Harris lines in her bones hidden by a long skirt
your sour/sweet mouth twitching over a Gilbey’s gin bottle
in a live commercial your friends watched without buying
Me, having the coin to try the package and susceptible
to the subliminal encased in extraterrestrial signs,
a figurine in a snow globe floating unanchored in a styrofoam sea.
By the buffet table you motioned to me like Marcel Marceau
with your palms miming the movement up a staircase
to show me your love in a familiar but locked place
and I glimpsed funhouse distortions in the vanity mirror
before you came down to whistle like Harpo.
Through cracks there plays a scrimmage between ritual,
the scissoring open of shrink-wrapped goods from Ikea and
being stuck like a bad investor in a bear market,
until the slight push of one domino against another, as it will at 29 files,
gains enough momentum to make the Empire State Building fall.
This is physics. It is all seasons. It is the invitation of spring
flourishing with dewy buds, showcasing into summery green,
eviscerating the leaves by autumn with the last blazing colour.
When winter comes, by the barren of its snowy landscape there is no shock,
the symphony of our own construct now lapping us to sleep.
Karey Willan has been stringing words together for much of her adult life, either through working as a verbatim shorthand reporter or chasing to light a skittish muse. Karey’s fascination with psychology propels her art. She is an adventurist of the mind and BC’s mountainous terrain. Karey holds a BFA (with distinction) from UVic in Visual Arts and a professional writing diploma from Douglas College, where she was a summer intern for Event Magazine.
My Ill-Omened, Mid-Life, First and Last, Southern Wedding
by Lauren Williams
I had a hunch it might happen while collecting our licence. …
by Lauren Williams
I had a hunch it might happen while collecting our licence.
Why else wear his boxer shorts beneath my blue dress
and new coat, Nana's ring on a finger that didn't count?
Glass window paperwork at City Hall — our mothers' first
and middle names the same. Unusual, said the clerk.
The judge is in. Would y'all like to do it now?
I ran outside in deep winter to pluck any bouquet,
returned with a sprig of holly berries, pricking,
praying myself blind to symbolism.
From a waiting room like some old dentist's,
a policeman delivered us to the judge. I hung
back. The officer la-la'd Here Comes the Bride.
It went like in the movies, but I stumbled at the part
about parting: To death do us part, more like a toast.
Wanting to believe not the same as believing.
Signed, stamped, embossed, entered. His mother's ring
loose on my finger. Are you saying my mom has big hands?
Into the car to a pizza bar for a guestless, giftless dinner.
Arriving, my left hand on the door — bare! Panicked
scrabble through foot-well trash, the sunset rush
back to City Hall's gutters, luckless muddy grass.
All that looking down instead of up. We tried a
better restaurant. A Georgia Peach, then I was served
the wrong meal; the right one late, lukewarm, lacklustre.
Across town to his buddy to beg weed and moonshine.
The wife, post-surgery wan, took our wedding photo
in the basement den, silhouettes against dim light.
Left to right: her unfaithful husband; mine grinning harder
than before or after; me, ringless; and, soon-to-be-dead,
the lodger — best man there, turns out — holding a shotgun.
Found the ring in the car next day, wore it on my thumb.
Left it behind in the bathroom when I flew home to Mum.
He lost his job and hocked it before a year was done
Lauren Williams was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia; she now resides in the historic country town of Maldon, central Victoria. She began writing poetry in the early 1980s, and has performed widely, nationally and internationally. Lauren’s sixth collection, Cleanskin Poems, was published by Island Press (Sydney) in 2016. She is also a prize-winning singer/songwriter.
Return of the Spider Mother
by David Mark Williams
You don’t have to be cloistered …
by David Mark Williams
after Louise Bourgeois
You don’t have to be cloistered
in a darkened room, crouched over a candle,
to summon her. You don’t have
to make a scene, smash crockery or draw
any attention to yourself.
Only allow your anxiety to grow,
spiralling out of you in lines
that cover the walls of white corridors,
and outside are skeins of a broken web
caught on a barbed wire fence.
She knows that you need her,
picked up on your distress signal,
her eyes snapping open,
head swivelling on its smooth gears.
You’ve waited long enough.
Listen out for her spiked heels
clacking over the flagstones towards you.
Be ready to hold out your arms. Together
you’ll rise as high as a steeple, steadied
on pincers locked into the pavement cracks.
She will come back. She’s on her way,
the good mother, the fierce mother.
With her needle and thread, she’ll repair
all that came undone,
the sky, your lacerated heart.
David Mark Williams lives in south west Scotland. He is widely published in magazines and anthologies and has won prizes for his poetry in the UK and New Zealand. His first full length collection of poetry, The Odd Sock Exchange, was published by Cinnamon Press in 2015.
Seasonal Affective Disorder
by Catriona Wright
I answer winter with Florida, ….
by Catriona Wright
I answer winter with Florida,
Blue Moon beermosas, swamp
pontoon rides, fishy pelican breath.
As good a place as any
to drink myself to death.
Clouds piss themselves, rain
slamming mint and lilac
motels, palms, plastic
surgery billboards asking,
Are your cups half empty?
Fearing falling coconuts, I pull over
and watch two gators make tender,
minimalistic love in a ditch. I imagine
my skin thickening to gator hide.
As good a gamble as any
to hide from the future,
to make my life continuous
prologue. Hibiscus open their dumb
fuchsia throats to the humidity.
Hungover, I eat cold noodles
out of a styrofoam clam.
I stroll on damp, gritty sand,
picturing the melancholy
and mystical sex lives inside
those rainbow sherbet houses
precarious on stilts.
Veering between the drunks
blasting beer and truck country
and the drunker drunks blasting
breakup country, I step on something
sharp. A clamshell, or part of one.
Ridged blush, cream, orange, tinged
with blood, as good a sunset
Catriona Wright is the author of Table Manners (Véhicule Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Prism International, Prairie Fire, Rusty Toque, Lemon Hound, The Best Canadian Poetry 2015, and elsewhere.
Parade
by Mark Abley
Over an arch of light I call them home: …
by Mark Abley
Over an arch of light I call them home:
my burly, watch-chained, butcher grandfather
taking scant notice of the trout-filled Teme,
his delicate unhappy wife, a music lover,
stepping out as in their fleeting prime,
my mother’s devout and tender-hearted mother
beside her husband, once paid to keep the game
on a grand estate and now a gardener there:
all of them radiant, unscarred by blame,
their long-imagined faces no more a blur
until they wave ‘God bless you’ and leave the stream,
broaching the cowslip lanes of Radnorshire
where the darkened bells of St. Edward chime
and the beautiful calamities unfurl.
Mark Abley was born in England, raised mostly in Saskatchewan and Alberta, and has lived in the Montreal area since 1983. His non-fiction books include Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages (2003), which was translated into French, Spanish and Japanese, and Conversations with a Dead Man: The Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott (2013). His latest book, published in April 2015, is The Tongues of Earth: New and Selected Poems.
Dotage
by Kathleen Balma
Lover, let’s age swap: you lunge backwards and slough off …
by Kathleen Balma
Lover, let’s age swap: you lunge backwards and slough off
a double decker of years. I’ll slide into a sadder sack of myself
in time-lapse photography and wait. It wouldn’t take
long for you not to show up. The reverse of us
doesn’t work. The plus and minus of perv: man’s perk. Can you then,
as you are now, touch the future me as I will want (reverb)
to be (re)touched? Pen stripling comfort to my sag and stitch,
some message in a rocket for a youer me to read?
I would like to benefit from that missive tout suite, but who am I
to peep on my elder ego? She might slap me, or worse:
pity. Or—twist in plot—she may surprise us both and not
want touch at all. She may be busy with more anile tastes,
quilting and such, collecting obliques. She may take up frottage
with a known cuckold. (Mattress ticking’s the rub: better plain,
unsoiled.) A more selfishly sufficient bag may never live,
unquaked by anything but the cackle arts.
Yet, she’ll be a product of caress. My someday
skin must bear that. So, on the svelte chance you might
want her, lover, I’d send you off to that there now
at my nower self’s expense.
Kathleen Balma is a Fulbright Fellow and Pushcart Prize-winning poet from the Ohio River Valley of Illinois. She began her Arts education at Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, then earned advanced degrees from Southern Illinois University and Indiana University. An aficionada of Romance languages, she was an international student in Andalusia and Tuscany during her college years. She has also lived for extended periods in New South Wales, Western Australia, New England, Madrid, and Louisiana.
The Cadaver
by Josh Bartolome
No one had noticed that Santiago Perez was dead since his corpse kept on walking …
by Josh Bartolome
No one had noticed that Santiago Perez was dead since his corpse kept on walking even though his heart had stopped beating. He had trained his body to follow a strict routine that would continue even after his demise because funerals were so expensive for an old man working without pension in a foreign land. He had no friends or family besides the mops and vacuum cleaners which he kept in a stuffy old basement. Santiago decided long ago that his funeral should be attended only by cleaning appliances that could sympathize with his solitary condition.
Santiago preserved an illusion of vitality that fooled even the most scrutinizing observers. He persisted on cleaning the toilets which he had maintained for years with a youthful vigor that was missing during his life. He sang and danced while mopping the floors. He ate lunch with a family of sparrows and learned the long-forgotten language of all birds. He mastered the fine art of whistling a symphony using a leaf. His zeal for the simple pleasures of existence was so great that he shared his bliss by selling tears of joy caught in green glass bottles for a dollar each.
Only when his last pair of teeth fell out did the others realize his death. He was ungraciously removed when a foul stench of decay began to seep from his pores. Nonetheless, this did not dissuade him from working for his long-overdue funeral. He kept on sweeping avenues and parking lots and alleyways during winter. Passersby would pay his unfortunate corpse to stop for fear that he would sweep the entire country off the map. He wouldn’t listen. He had the tenacity which the living envies in the dead. It soon became apparent that Santiago Perez would toil forever and ever until the last bits of trash vanish from the face of the earth, until nothing remains, not even the sea.
Joshua Bartolome works as a hospital clerk by day and writes at night. An aspiring screenwriter dabbling in the horror genre, his short screenplay, “Larping,” was a finalist in the 2013 Los Angeles Shriekfest and the Slamdance Short Screenplay competitions. His most recent work, “Oubliette,” a tale of cosmic terror, was chosen as a finalist in the Providence Journal’s H.P. Lovecraft short story contest, and will be published August 2015.
The African Burial Ground
by Anna Berry
everything depends …
by Anna Berry
to those who built Manhattan
everything depends
upon
the black en-
slaved
paved with lash
scars
beneath the white
money
Anna Berry is an artist and writer from Scotland. Her visual art tends to comprise installations, usually paper, and photography. Her poems and art often riff around the idea that cognition shapes reality. This is related to her disabilities, including brain-damage, which dictate she inhabits rather a parallel universe. Ideas of great struggle often recur. Her work can also be quite political, taking the form of cultural criticism from the stance of an outside observer.
Into This World
by Mary O’Keefe Brady
The pressure of his head, pushing …
by Mary O’Keefe Brady
The pressure of his head, pushing
centimetre by centimetre down
the birth canal brings tears of
pain, of joy, of anticipation.
My boy will be wrenched
from his safe harbour to face
a world that does not want
to greet him, wrenched
from his watery hidey hole where
no gruff hands could drag him
by the scruff of the neck, stomp
his head to the ground, throw
him into the back of a police
cruiser. My boy will arrive momentarily,
screaming in unison with the protestors.
He'll be weighed and measured, pricked
and prodded, foot-printed and tagged,
his band matching the one on my wrist,
the one that says he belongs to me.
He will always belong to me, not
to nurses who will swaddle him tightly,
coo soothing sounds, not to doctors who
will listen to his heart, give the okay to
leave, not to the streets where he will ride
a tricycle, where one day, brothers will provoke
him to throw that rock, hurl that bottle, tell
him to drop out, dope up, it don't matter.
The pressure of this boy speeding into an intolerant
world makes me want to stop pushing, suck him
back up into that deflated cocoon and hold my breath,
hold him safe, until I can promise him a kinder
world, a fairer chance, a just tomorrow.
Just a tomorrow.
Born and raised in the Bronx, Mary O’Keefe Brady is a dual citizen of the USA and Ireland. Her debut chapbook, Time Out, is published by Finishing Line Press. She currently resides in New York’s lower Hudson valley and travels frequently, often to Charleston, South Carolina and that most magical Canadian province, Prince Edward Island.
Elena!
by Kevin Brophy
We are building the ruins …
by Kevin Brophy
We are building the ruins.
It is taking a long time.
There will be almost nothing
but what has not been plundered:
shattered shoulders of concrete,
glass, tiles, the deepest foundations.
What was here will have to be imagined—
Skies will be so empty whole cities
will stand imagined in them.
We are building the ruins.
It is taking forever.
This is what gives us time
to do it thoroughly.
Walls won’t hide the wealth forever.
The lifts will stop ascending.
The ruins will be shattered vowels
and last unbreakable consonants
left for latecomers to imagine
what might have been said
from a second-story window
on a Sunday morning late in April
when a woman called from the street
Elena! Elena! —
to her friend above.
We are building the ruins.
The work is never finished.
We will leave almost nothing in our wake.
We are building ruins upon ruins.
We do this for our children.
Dusk will eat the day.
Night will teach us its gnomic lessons.
Our bed sheets still repeat the pattern:
Each morning bed a crumpled ruin.
Elena, leaning over her red geraniums
on her window sill calls back down to her friend
in a voice that carries all that will be ruined.
Kevin Brophy is the author of thirteen books of fiction, poetry and essays, including Walking: New and Selected Poems (John Leonard Press 2013). From 1980 to 1994 he was founding co-editor of Going Down Swinging. He is patron of the Melbourne Poets Union and a life member of Writers Victoria. In 2015 he was poet in residence at the Australia Council BR Whiting Studio in Rome. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.
Photo credit: Nick Walton-Healey.
Elantxobe
by David Bunn
a woman mutters on the path above, …
by David Bunn
1. Poco a poco!
a woman mutters on the path above,
waving a fistful of plucked herbs,
reproving my rush up from the harbour.
Unkind wife, daring me to chase you,
fit to burst, up break-neck crumbling hills
below landslide netting, to scramble
the last gasping flight to our square
where the grandmothers perch at dusk
like birds on their village bench till late
and shout in their aprons like they have time
to burn, like something new happened today,
just now, and must be told and retold,
gathering vehemence with each recount,
as though the tide is not about to turn.
2. One oar
Flung on the deck, worn grey from churning green water
blue as the Virgin's mantle till salt tore the pigment from you,
you are cracked and destitute and twine rebinds you
but your double lies off in a boat shed.
A lifetime working a quiet harbour and this is what becomes of you –
salt-flayed and failing, but somewhere an unsullied self abides.
3. A problem with water
‘Green' will not serve for this misted harbour
when the tide is in and the water billows
like a flung sheet falling to a bed
like dark glass dimpled as it cools.
Someone hammered pewter over magma;
or it's the hue of cloud-saddened conifers.
The harbour glowers deeper than polished stone,
a chunk of liquid emerald, big as a football field.
4. A battered red-decked dinghy
Behind by the sea wall she hovers on glass darkness.
Braided coils of light loop the navy-green around her.
Salt spray, sun and gales, the fret of mooring lines,
have scoured her deck to a mottle of dulled rose.
She stirs, she skates on living water. Swerves
her battered bow towards the entrance.
She’ll skip port on the turning of the tide
and then come the big blows.
David Bunn is from Melbourne, Australia and spent many years working for the labour movement. He was shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize in 2011 and that same year was joint winner of the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, which is awarded through Island magazine in Tasmania.
Story of a Leaf
by Sarah Burgoyne
I leaf. I come to my means. I tip the branch—a final hymn note. I am the feast. …
by Sarah Burgoyne
I leaf. I come to my means. I tip the branch—a final hymn note. I am the feast. The sun-spent afterthought, wasted west. A basement of light. The same letter of an alphabet. The foreign wind chant. The summer’s amnesia. The numb sum of it. The sieve of last light. The tree’s last count. The damned sweetener.
I am teething with beams. I am likening. I am kinding from the boughs. I am minding the stem. I am lisping yellow across a coast of green. I am keeping notes on the smallest animals. I am blessing the gnarled reaches. I am filling with sea dreams. I am dancing stomatas. I am nooning my election.
I fell. I tufted a clamorous spirit. I took care. I wrote my name in classical Japanese. I turned as I went. I turned as a boat on the waves. I harmed nothing. I bore my death’s descent. I jayed the light that sank in everywhere. I read no maps. I doused the air. I passed beyond meekness. I fainted in the liquor of autumn. So I went.
I was eye-longing. I was rendering seasons. I wasn’t stopping. I was billing winter. I was birding blindly. I was churning the memory of my flight. I was glooming the jump. I was housing summer months between me. I was self-imagining. I was furnishing grey. I was thinning bedless sleep. I was shallowing the heights. I was reciting the moss, the wintry pity.
I have come to my end. I have dressed in superb costumes. I have spent my last days without. I have prowled the reaches of sleep. I have scribbled your breath as thought. I have kept along. I have settled a home in the grass. I have wound the songs of light. I have connected parent and child. I have roosted among talons. I have appeared suddenly lost.
I have been kept along. I have been sober all my life. I have been a burning tongue in the fall. I have been winding up. I have been gunned gracefully by gusts. The moon has been moaning over me. I have been blazing into history. I have been unspeaking. I have been reading my life backwards. I have been indexing forgettable pages. I have been always coming to my end.
I had skulled the tip of summer. I had given the whole thing up. I had lined the tree’s madness. I had gnashed to the end. I had had degrees of first flight. I had awarded nothing to myself. I had limboed sullen selfhood and good order. I had waffled my brothers’ names. I had left the tomb of increase. I had aged unseen water. I had interpreted private wonder.
I had been glossing the skyline’s throng. I had been going unnoted. I had been acting the monstrous beard of the tree. I had been stringing the drenched map of fate. I had been digging down in my stem. I had been cluttering the last thousand years. I had been raging stupendous and impure. I had been preserving the tree’s rhymed hands. I had been flourishing among the great choiring bugs.
I will doze on the final touch. I will eye the face of the dog. I will be tranquil in Athenian dreams. I will move between countries of darkness. I will command inept attention. I will drown in the pressing wax of children. I will choose the canal of diffidence. I will stay. I will tally my life by mounting into dark.
What is the final touch going to do? What is the fabulous city going to be? Where am I going to find a milling neighbour? When is the full light going to be cut off? The vital bog sunk in restless memory? Who is going to eye the unborn birds? When is the world going to have turned enough? When is the abominable wind going to leave us to our hung sleep? When am I going to sink totally into the broken web of earth? Enter tranquil nighthood? The thought, merely lately.
I will be fully sinking. I will be praying to the narrowest tunnels. I will be spelling my name in blades of grass. I will be interrupting no one. I will be opting for foxes to further me on. I will be kneeling unseen. I will be peeking on my fall’s flight. I will not be calling to stop. I will be purely staying. I will be seeing my grave as blue. I will not be fearing. I will be running myself under. I will be one time seeming foamly. I will be travelling not. Done flight. Dumb flight.
I’ll have relaxed in defeat. I will have no wit to be afraid. I’ll have returned as a stray to the fold. I’ll have honeyed the season’s dusk. I’ll have applauded the theatre of air. I’ll have belled without voice. I’ll have stood still for many weeks. I’ll have strove not to desert nor be deserted. I’ll have been all-returned to soil. I’ll have snowed as colour. I’ll have strung my hopes limb-high in the iris of the sun, where the dead winter will have unconceded to remain near its beginning. In its numb foreign poetry, combly and frail, I will have left.
Sarah Burgoyne is a Montreal-based writer originally from Canada’s west coast. Her first collection Saint Twin is coming out with Mansfield Press in 2016. Her chapbook Love the Sacred Raisin Cakes was published with Baseline Press in 2014 and Happy Dog, Sad Dog with Proper Tales Press in 2013. You can find her work online and in various journals across Canada and the U.S.A.
Father Is In Insurance and Out Most Nights
by Gayelene Carbis
In my father’s car …
by Gayelene Carbis
In my father’s car
parked outside the commission flats
in Surrey Road South Yarra
where my mother’s best friend lives,
my brother is beeping the horn but
I don’t think it blasts
all the way to the eleventh floor.
That hand on the horn
is the only thing
that can flush my father’s face.
We wait and wait:
the pitch of night surrounds us like an island.
In green trees and dark bushes
the hood of the car is as mysterious as undergrowth.
What’s he doing?
boredom descends on us
with the darkness
and we see the moon like a trimmed fingernail
that seems to smile. Its light comes slanting
through the windscreen dimly and I am
dumb with knowledge I cannot name.
My mother waits for the three of us
our dinner cold and the lights out
to save on bills.
We end up paying anyway.
Gayelene Carbis is an award-winning writer of poetry, prose and plays. In 2012 Gayelene was awarded a Scholarship for a Banff Centre Residency; read her poetry in Banff and New York; and was Shortlisted for the Fish International Poetry Prize. Her poetry has been widely published in Australia and overseas. Her latest play will be performed in New York, Chicago and Melbourne in 2016/2017. Gayelene teaches Screenwriting (RMIT) and Creative Writing (Melbourne University).
Personal Creed
by Jabez Churchill
I believe in both Gods, …
by Jabez Churchill
I believe in both Gods,
El Papacito and La Mamacita,
the Father and the Holy Mother,
and in their Sons and Daughters,
nameless in the rattle of the rest,
begotten as leaves, as light,
being of the same substance,
seen and unseen,
with which all things must flutter.
I believe we are incarnate
with the same photosynthetic Spirit,
without judgement, without exception,
all destined to fly.
I don’t believe that any gospel,
flock of metaphors,
their wings clipped,
comes close enough to Creation
that we should criticize,
less condemn another,
leaves of different colors,
nor should it relieve us
of our personal responsibility
to blossom,
delight in the wind.
Born in California, Jabez Churchill was educated both there and in Argentina. He’s been practicing Civil Disobedience since 1969. A mariner and single dad, he is currently teaching Modern Languages at Santa Rosa and Mendocino Colleges. Working with California Poets in the Public Schools, he’s been teaching poetry to young adults and at-risk youth since 1998. Churchill is currently Poet Laureate of Ukiah.
A Good Day's Work?
by Phil Davey
Last night as you curled up naked …
by Phil Davey
Last night as you curled up naked
perplexed you asked me
What’s so wrong
with a good day's work?
And so this morning
sponging up your crumbs
from a hasty breakfast
I clear myself space
which as you labour
provides me surface
to savour your words
in lingering bitterness
What's so wrong
with a good day's work?
Too lumbered then with plum-stuffed chub
with deep-dug chunks of Parma cheese
with bubbling jugs of Lombard red
too drawn to hips in bedded crispness
I dared not answer but teasingly kissed
soft fair down around your rims of lips
Then brimming a glass with dark amaro
improvised rhymes to beggar the question
There was a young lass from Milan
who travelled to town in a tram
All day in a bank
she slaved till she sank
in the arms of her lazy young man
Like spring-beached seals
we shrieked and snorted
rolled and contorted
flexed and cavorted
until
(half-crawling)
half-keening
half-dreaming
we lowered the blinds
on a murky midnight
moiling like moles
towards a loamy peace
Phil Davey has dual British and New Zealand citizenship. His poems have been shortlisted in the Montreal and Bridport Poetry Competitions and published in Oxford Poetry Now, Poetry London/Apple Magazine and Illuminations. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of New Brunswick and in Film Studies from the University of Exeter. After years in Chester, Oxford, Cambridge, Trieste, London, Bedford, Milan and Varese, he now lives with his wife Chiara in Brussels.
There Are No More Horses Here
by Johanna Emeney
All the tools are still greased against rust. …
by Johanna Emeney
All the tools are still greased against rust.
Dust kicked up from the shed floor
or swept through from the unmetalled drive
sticks to lines of hammers, chisels,
a posthole digger, a tractor wrench, their shapes
chalked behind them like dead men on sidewalks.
To take them down, to grip them, means grit—
a long, dirty handshake with The Farming Life:
the acknowledgement that preservation costs,
is not pretty or comfortable. Usefulness
has a scent, and obsolescence is the threat
hanging back there with the ill-packed hame,
the bitless bridle limp in idleness,
its leather so perished, to fold a rein
would crumble it like thick wet cardboard.
Johanna Emeney recently completed her PhD on the topic of medical poetry at Massey University where she has also enjoyed a role as tutor in Creative Writing. Emeney delivers the Michael King Young Writers Programme with her friend Rosalind Ali. They also work with older adults, migrant youth and local teens on various Council-sponsored writing programmes. Emeney’s book of poetry Apple & Tree was published by Cape Catley in 2011.
Escape to Grosse Isle
by Ann Giard-Chase
It happened quietly …
by Ann Giard-Chase
It happened quietly
as night bled into darkness,
as light poured into day,
and he walked slowly
over the land where his family
lay like soldiers under the loose
sheets of earth. Here they had labored
and endured, plowed and hoed,
and dug the raw white jewels
from the fields, knowing all along,
I suppose, there would be no letting go
of the ropes, no mercy flowing
from the fists of those who held them,
bent their spines to the dirt.
They were expendable as stones
back then—these broken shards,
these torn threads of him
buried in the murmur and shadow
of an island. This is not a happy tale;
it happened a long time ago
when my great, great grandfather
was young, too young to suffer such
sadness, carting death around like a child
in his arms. I imagine he boarded the ship,
ran his hands along the rails, mingled
with the wretched and famished souls,
their bodies all tangled up like knots—
arms entwined, backs humped against
the hull’s planks. Soon, fevers struck,
boiling up from the darkness, rising
from the hold toward the sails that billowed
overhead like a thousand white shrouds.
Surely the priests had taught him
that death is only life again as he clutched
the crucifix to his chest, fingered the black beads,
closed his eyes to the scalding filth,
praying one day he would light some lamp,
and turn some corner in a place where time
dulls the cruel claws of memory,
and escape into a new life in a new land.
Ann Giard-Chase is a descendent of Irish immigrants who fled the Potato Famine. She grew up on a dairy farm in Vermont. She is a published poet, has raised four wonderful children, and works as the HR Director for a municipality in New York State.
Stillborn
by Vicki Goodfellow-Duke
You rocket into the world …
by Vicki Goodfellow Duke
I.
You rocket into the world
propelled
by a gush of water-fuel, warm
and not yet blue,
small as a doll
hand-sewn,
my love
great enough to loose a sea,
tonight, your first night
in the earth.
II.
I dream of you at six,
teach you to read,
my lips rounding over
the oo in moon, so carefully, carefully jumping
the cow
you keep your eyes down
as if you know
not even I
can get you safely to the last rhyme.
III.
No worry stone,
with a dead daughter,
pin-pricked
in a deep rub-groove, thumbs
knit and bind
this blanket of a hundred moons.
IV.
Tonight in my mind
I build a house for you
from cinder block and ash,
watch you sweep with a horsehair broom,
see how you manage
the angles,
the geometry of home.
I chase you
through rooms of wintergreen
and light
you, deaf,
softly-feathered, slip
into lethe.
Vicki Goodfellow Duke teaches in the Faculty of Communications at Mount Royal University, Calgary. Her poetry has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, Room Magazine, CV2, The Grist Mill, and New Millenium Writings. She has received various awards, including The Dorothy Sargeant Rosenberg Memorial Poetry Prize, Cyberslam, The Ray Burrell Award, and Prairie Poetry Friends’ Prize. In 2007 she was the recipient of the Shaunt Basmajian Award for her chapbook, The Year We Quit Believing.
38 Michigans
by Eva H.D.
You are thirty-eight Michigans away from me …
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.”
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.