You Have to Love Them Enough to Let Them Be Wild
by Kathleen McCracken
That’s what Steve said …
by Kathleen McCracken
That’s what Steve said
about the mustangs
up on Pryor Mountain –
no sugar cubes, no carrots
no coaxing, stroking, gentling
no whispering
no ropes, no tires, no pick up trucks
no dust storm swing low choppers
no Judas horse
no gathering, no holding pens
no PZP, no freeze brand
no breaking in, no putting down
no auction block, no slaughterhouse
no flank strap, no fast track
no stockyard, no consignment
no snaffles, bridles, saddles, spurs
no blankets, shoes, or blinders
no rodeo, no latigo, no cincha
no clipping, combing, currying
no conchos, braids or bells
no ranches, no reata
no binder twine for breech births
no ligatures, no doctoring
of tears & rends & bites
no vaccination, no inoculation
no sterilization
no intervention
just bales & bales
of air
seep water, galleta grass
the animal vegetable mineral
earth
exacting, punishing, available
Kathleen McCracken is the author of eight collections of poetry including Blue Light, Bay and College (Penumbra Press, 1991), which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, A Geography of Souls (Thistledown Press, 2002), Mooncalves (Exile Editions, 2007) and Tattoo Land (Exile Editions, 2009). Most recently, a bilingual English/Portuguese edition of her poetry entitled Double Self Portrait with Mirror: New and Selected Poems, was published by the Brazilian press, Editora Ex Machina.
Photo credit: John T. Davis
Odile, The Black Swan
by Una McDonnell
Impossible to look at her without thinking dark water, depths …
by Una McDonnell
Impossible to look at her without thinking dark water, depths
where light doesn’t reach. In the diner on Dalhousie,
her presence commands the booth, though only the decrepit
at the counter sees the water rising, water-
line gurgling just beneath her chin. Flutter
of a dark wing that briefly stretches. Sally, a regular, orders
coffee between johns, eggs at 4 a.m. They arrive, sunny side
silicon perfect. Minivans line up to glean sorrow
from her eyes. If only I could dance, says Sally. When the sky
turns pink, she’ll sleep. Odile once had an act involving lit black
candles and a snake. Smoke she could conjure on demand.
Rose on stage, an angel from the black lake.
They all desired her, but one. Before Champagne Rooms,
loose laws, when looking was enough—
She holds her mug as if it could contain her.
The transistor radio tin-tin-tins demented heart songs
tie a yellow ribbon … and getting caught
in the rain… and I’ll never have that recipe again…
Pale-skinned fries rise like broken limbs from plates, tendrils of vinegar
seep down. The scent is grease, acid, hot breath and chrome.
There are no new ways to be alone. There are no new ways to mourn.
Una McDonnell has recited her work at readings and music festivals, and on one occasion, in a boxing ring (Jill Battson’s Fighting Words Series). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Her work has appeared in Arc, The New Quarterly, Ottawater, Prairie Fire, Rampike, and Musings: An Anthology of Greek-Canadian Literature, and has been on the longlist for Prism International’s Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize, and twice for the CBC Literary Awards.
Photo credit: David Irvine
On the Other Side Of An Hour
by Amber McMillan
Let’s say you had known then what you know now: …
by Amber McMillan
Let’s say you had known then what you know now:
on that morning you came to visit your friend at home,
even when you knocked on his door, let’s say you’d known
when you entered his room that he would already be gone:
let’s say you held a mess of wildflowers in your arms;
you had brought the blooms to improve the atmosphere,
to lay them along his quiet body and in so doing draw
communion to him and the slow opening of stained petals
spread along his forearm and stretching to his bare shoulder
where you imagined he would have placed them himself.
Let’s say instead of losing, or held at bay as you were,
you had traced the loose map he kept guarded in his mind,
a private reckoning that laced, like stars, a to b to c—let’s say
you had seen it all so clearly it was as if you understood:
the end, the beginning, love, the cockeyed cedar tree.
Amber McMillan is the author of The Woods: A Year on Protection Island (2016) and the poetry collection We Can’t Ever Do This Again (2015). Her work has appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, PRISM international, Best Canadian Poetry, The Walrus and others across North America. She lives and works on BC’s Sunshine Coast.
Sewing
by Bruce Meyer
Each darting plunge …
by Bruce Meyer
Each darting plunge
like fortune’s wheel –
the bobbin spinning
to her toe’s touch,
her tongue locked
between front teeth –
such concentration
held our lives in check;
or when she’d baste
my sister’s puff sleeve
or hung nautical drapes
to keep nightmares out,
she’d snip a length
as if to cut a cord,
then pull a seam
to test its strength
on a wear-worn dart.
Piece by patient piece,
she fashioned our lives,
a Singer, her delicate art,
racing to beat the light,
dancing on heads of pins,
repeating patterns of memory,
until line held tight.
Bruce Meyer is author of more than 60 books of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, and literary journalism. He won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Prizes in 2015 and 2016. His most recent books of poetry are the award-winning The Seasons, The Arrow of Time, and 1967: Centennial Year.
Snow Crabs
by Bruce Meyer
The crabs are there, melting into …
by Bruce Meyer
The crabs are there, melting into
their familiar habitat, fallen on
zoology’s harder times, patient
yet pure as the driven snow.
They are seldom seen by anyone
because no one ever speaks of them.
They are fauna’s seedless Clementines
before the word for orange was said.
Like memory of what has no name,
they bear the invisible weight of time.
They eat the silence of a hidden life.
Like a zodiac sign after daybreak,
or the silent truth below ocean storms,
they love in white and delicate bodies
masked from everything but a name
and multiply throughout the winter,
learning to sting in a veil of ice.
They count among the raw spring stars.
They pince the sun until it melts them.
A lone streetlamp cranes its neck
to count the diamonds of their eyes
Bruce Meyer is author of more than 60 books of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, and literary journalism. He won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Prizes in 2015 and 2016. His most recent books of poetry are the award-winning The Seasons, The Arrow of Time, and 1967: Centennial Year.
Aubade
by Mary B. Moore
Karl foregoes jogging today, burps …
by Mary B. Moore
Karl foregoes jogging today, burps
the coffee carafe for one more slug
of umber pluck, and brief-cases, lunch-bags
it out the door, into the Sacramento sun,
the understoried sycamore and elm,
the hydrangea-blue skies. He pauses in the Subaru.
Wishes catch up with him, wannabes.
He’s ariaed a few, poemed some.
Two cardinals red-shoe the bare oak limb,
red song, red wing. A phoebe tuxedoes the eave.
What they be, they do. Karl hums
the tenor part from Aida,
seconds the first tenor, keys
the ignition, sings and is singing.
Mary B. Moore’s second full-length collection, Flicker, won the Dogfish Head Award (judges, Carol Frost, Baron Wormser, and Jan Beatty), and the chapbook Eating the Light, won the Sable Books’ Award (judge, Allison Joseph): both appeared in 2016. Cleveland State published The Book of Snow (1998). Georgia Review, Poem/Memoir/Story, Cider Press Review, Drunken Boat, Birmingham Poetry Review published recent poems. She won Second in the 2017 Pablo Neruda Poetry Contest’s Second Place Award.
The Story of Us
by Anna Murchison
As is the custom with starting new things, I am doing this not well but with the intention of …
by Anna Murchison
As is the custom with starting new things, I am doing this not well but with the intention of
improving. This you & me, which we may as well call us – this face to face & heart & lung(s) &
other vital organs we’ll be needing for this trip, most impressively in your case brain (& please
do notice how I flatter you here because it may be some time before I do that again) – as
terrifying as that sounds, & is, & will be, feels to me to be nudging like a fat tender grub towards
something not uncomfortable, towards not gross, inching its way into the fragile world of light &
air & utter transience. It is a feeling not standard.
I am a pretentious little thing, including & especially in relation to matters of the aforementioned vital organs – i.e. heart, lung(s), brain – & I feel the kidneys, too, deserve mention here, given their job of filtering out all the crap. I imagine there will be plenty of that ahead of us on account of us both being human n all, ergo, fully weird.
Or is it the liver? & what the hell is a pancreas? Perhaps if I had listened more instead of undressing
with my eyes the man I will simply refer to as Mr Biology (albeit my execution was
meticulous). Cellularly speaking, he remains not insignificant – which is more than can be said
for the box of frogs he had us dissect & spear (in not that order). There’s nothing quite like that
timeless combination of amphibian death & bad aftershave to stir the primal lustings of a
thirteen-year-old. I am sorry in advance for all the crap your organs will be required to deal
with. & I will just add here in my defence that failing science is a long-standing family tradition
(with the exception of Phil the doctor who we mostly don’t talk about, hence the parenthesis).
Anyway, this is me saying hopelessly hopelessly but with what I hope you will assess to be a
commendable level of enthusiasm that I am more than moderately impressed with the start we
have made, despite my opening gambit & notwithstanding our various inadequacies,
idiosyncrasies & other nouns which makes us sound more complete than we currently are. The
thing is, I think that together, in time, we might become so – that in time you might teach me
important things such as how to use words like ‘antecedent’ & ‘diaspora’ for reasons other than
fashion or fear, & that I might teach you things, mostly smiling-related, such as how to smile at a
leaf & at not winning the lottery & at good things happening to bad people such as bad people
winning the lottery, & that together we will grow worthy. & armed with this shared knowledge,
this shared worth, we will go forth & make a story which we will breathe into the eversphere so
those passed into energy may admire us for our valour & our pluck, & blow: Well done.
Isn’t it funny how verbs are called doing words & adjectives are called describing words etc.
when presumably all words are just trying to be themselves? Perhaps we should just let them be
– or at the very least stop typecasting them.
I also apologise for my insistence on believing that my casual (mis)use of language in some
intangible but charmingly hipster way heightens my appeal. I hope to soon grow out of this. For
now, I will sing along the exceedingly long floorboarded hallway of our soon-to-be house & at a
certain point, just here, I will stop. to listen. to the story of us. Are there children? Are there
cakes with candles? Is there loss? Are all the usual too strange too wonderful things of life
present?
Anna Murchison hails from Tasmania, a wild, anarchically situated island (see: bottom of the world) inspiring a rich literary tradition. Anna started writing poetry as a means of not losing her mind while working on her first novel. People tell her this has proved only partly successful. Anna finds herself responding to the prevailing noise of narcissism and self-interest by thematically deep-rooting her work in the messy subsoil of life while stubbornly seeking its light.
Stranded Conch, Alabama Coast
by Peter Norman
Not quite beached but perched …
by Peter Norman
Not quite beached but perched
on a sandbar yards from shore;
water only inches deep
bares the conch to air
and cormorant and gull.
Tipped by surf it lolls,
flesh-side up, shell in sand,
and writhes to right itself,
its meat the dense, freckled
pink of a piglet’s tongue.
A blot resembling mussel-shell disrupts
the pink—operculum, I’ll learn:
a door the conch shuts fast
when it retreats and seals itself
inside its fabled home.
We two in swimsuits huddle, gape
and prod—until a snort
from the shell’s long siphon states
the creature’s urgency to self-propel
to deeper water. So I push it free.
We stand. Backs ache
from stooping, shoulders from the sun.
Country music booms onshore:
a man acquired a woman, built a home—
or lost those things. I’m never sure.
We wade back to the land.
We carry buckets of the shells
we’ve picked up—polished, vacant, bright.
The living conch has veiled itself in sand
and sealed its doorway tight.
Peter Norman has published three poetry collections, most recently The Gun That Starts the Race (2015), and a novel, Emberton (2014). He lives in Toronto. Read more at peternorman.ca.
Syzygy (Scrabble with Ivy)
by Felicity Plunkett
Edge, swerve, disturb, you’re all ….
by Felicity Plunkett
Edge, swerve, disturb, you’re all
verb: pressed to you, wilfully
irresistibly, like ivy, sighingly, I climb like
an adverb unattached, insouciant, this high
wire, thighs and strive, brine and hive, like
glide and tine: riskily, out along the wire
wildly shuffling the letters I have to find
my lines, a sign: my evergreen, my ground-
creeping, my hedera rhombea, my
araliaceae, my nouns, my verbs, my rising
to scale these outcrops, my um-
bel, my unlobed adult leaves, my
fertile flowering stems, my
marginal list of small words to hold
the edges of other words, fold
into yours like buds or lovers, and my
you are fine, high-scoring, blithe, you
spell out my secret names (bind-
wood, lovestone), syllables
no one uses except to access this
bingo, palmately, this lucky hand, this
random allocation, all squiffy squeeze, as I sigh
against artery and inferior rib in the crush
of these tiles and us, defying windfall damage, my
greens deepen, words like birds arrive
to disperse seeds like leaves, until my –
like a happy hand of letters, like
za or qi – and quixotry – this syzygy.
Felicity Plunkett’s is the author of Vanishing Point (UQP, 2009), Seastrands (Vagabond, 2011) and the editor of Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, 2011). Her new collection is forthcoming with Pitt St Poetry. She is an Australian poet, critic and editor, and Poetry Editor with University of Queensland Press.
Caesura
by Erin Rodini
I remember hearing about them, the babies …
by Erin Rodini
I remember hearing about them, the babies my Grandma never had,
and though I’d never held such a seed in my body, I felt the want
of them. Five children with ghost-spaces between. She believed
unbaptized souls went to Limbo, which to me meant low,
so I saw them spread like mica in the soil beneath her roses,
and in the gauze of grasshoppers that rose with every step
through summer grass. On my Grandma’s ranch, I watched
a barn cat lick her living kittens clean, leaving some still
sacked. Little grapes, their mother’s warmth unreplaced by their own.
When I bled, I locked the bathroom door. Later, I pressed a still-
frame of my only ultrasound inside my Grandma’s copy
of The Secret Garden. Little unblossom, little mausoleum.
I’m not religious anymore, but I grew up with God,
the grandfatherly one who knew I was bad sometimes,
but loved me anyway, and I could always talk to. It’s a hard habit
to break in the cathedral of my sleeping daughters, that consecrated dark
gauzed in white-noise, a halo of nightlight. My prayers are always
some variation of Don’t you dare, and Please. Somehow, I know he was a boy.
The middle brother. So little now, so nothing. My daughters don’t know
the word God. They know earth and death and rain. They’ve watched
that silent sleight of hand replace a caterpillar with an iridescent bud
of wings. They’ve seen me clutch a spider between paper and a plastic cup,
only to crush a mosquito against their bedroom wall, its body smeared
with our family’s mingled blood. They are learning to be merciful
doesn’t mean to be good, only powerful enough to choose.
After our cat died my oldest kept asking Where is she? I know she’s dead
but where is she? First, I spun a heaven-place, then I changed my mind,
stood her barefoot in the garden and said Here, look down.
The dirt is full of root and bone. Oh, my darlings we are so small.
Lie down, back to summer grass. Feel how we are always falling
into that star-spread black expanse. And feel too
the way the earth holds us and we are held.
Erin Rodoni is the author of Body, in Good Light (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2017) and A Landscape for Loss (NFSPS Press, 2017), which won the 2016 Stevens Award sponsored by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. Her poems have been included in Best New Poets 2014, nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and honored with awards from AWP and Ninth Letter. She lives in the San Rafael, CA, with her husband and two young daughters.
Ode to My Period
by Kate Rogers
My “great aunt” rarely visits …
by Kate Rogers
In Cantonese women tell each other
“Yi ma lai doh”: My great aunt has come to visit.
My “great aunt” rarely visits
now but she found me in Sichuan
half way up the slope of Er Mei Shan.[i]
I was on the way to the peak
with four other women when great aunt beckoned
the monkey to leap from his leaf nest
in the mountain camphor tree onto
my pack full of apples. The monkey bared his fangs
when we shouted and waved our arms.
He lifted the pack flap and reached in for two pieces of
fruit. Then later, the raven that sauntered into
the women’s toilet in the monastery garden
didn’t fly away when I squatted over the stone hole,
plucked my used pad from the bin. He ambled
outside, scattered scarlet petals
of its blown blossom on the breeze.
Great aunt has retired since that climb,
but sends notes in the beak of
a dark bird. The stain of her sunset returns
after an afternoon of love.
[i] Buddhist holy mountain in Sichuan province.
Kate Rogers’ poetry collection Out of Place debuted in Toronto July 2017. Her poetry is forthcoming in the anthologies, Catherines the Great (Oolichan), and Twin Cities Cinema (Hong Kong-Singapore) and has appeared in The Gaurdian, Eastlit, Asia Literary Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Morel, The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment and Culture (Wilfred Laurier University), Kyoto Journal, ASIATIC: the Journal of the International Islamic University of Malaysia and Contemporary Verse II.
The Carnivores
by Linda Rogers
say grace and photograph …
by Linda Rogers
say grace and photograph
the animals on their plates:
pink lamb and rare beef,
radioactive Fukushima fish,
so underdone they might get
up and walk or swim away.
Thanks and Amen.
While we name our martyrs, War
Children stopped in their tracks,
their flight patterns
are outlined in chalk
on streets where blood
flowers push through
pavement cracks, bomb
craters, sinkholes and
holes in the ocean,
their souls transposed
to yearning hybrids, algae
blooming and poppies
growing in killing fields
from Flanders to Damascus
to Sierra Leone, flesh so
underdone we might be
forgiven for thinking
prayer or shock therapy
might get them moving again.
Linda Rogers, a Victoria Poet Laureate and Canadian People’s Poet, mother of four, married to mandolinist Rick van Krugel, writes fiction, song lyrics and literary and social criticism. Her most recent novel is Bozuk, a Turkish memoir from Exile Editions. Forthcoming is Repairing the Hive, the final book in her Empress Trilogy and Crow Jazz, a short story collection from Mother Tongue.
25 November 2016
by Margarita Serafimova
It is morning, you look past me to the windows, …
by Margarita Serafimova
It is morning, you look past me to the windows,
and your eyes fill with light,
your eyelashes are jewels, reflections of your inner beauty.
And I – I have the strength to not for another instant
turn my gaze away from you
Margarita Serafimova has published two collections in the Bulgarian, Animals and Other Gods (2016), Demons and World (2017). Her work appears (is forthcoming) in London Grip New Poetry, Agenda, A-Minor, Trafika Europe, Minor Literatures, The Journal, Noble / Gas, Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Birds We Piled Loosely, Obra/ Artifact, Futures Trading, Poetic Diversity, TAYO, Ginosko, Dark Matter, The Punch, Window Quarterly/ Patient Sounds, Peacock Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, In Between Hangovers, and elsewhere. Pieces of hers.
Old Blue Suitcase
by Chloe Sparks
by Chloe Sparks
Born and raised in Australia, Chloe Sparks spent the better part of the last decade living in Vancouver, BC working on various film and television productions and at a local newspaper as a research assistant. She is working towards a Masters Degree in Communications and building a social media presence.
Homestead
by Elizabet Stevens
Let the fox go back to its sandy den …
by Elizabet Stevens
Let the fox go back to its sandy den
Let the wind die down. Let the shed go black inside.
Let evening come.
Jane Kenyon, Let Evening Come
Alders, subtle but insistent, crowd the lane
Barbed-wire guards raspberry and wild rose
Waist-high grass hinders humans
and hides the fox
creeping like a landlord
among his butchery of bones
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Big snows, rain and scorching summers
have worn away traces of the man who
played the organ, cut wood
a woman who baked bread
Wind blusters in the trees
shushing echoes of children’s voices
Let the wind die down.
Only a shed remains that once held stern talks
embraced calendars of bogus blonds
displayed expired license plates
a clutter of broken furniture
nails, rake and a hoe
now empty
Let the shed go black inside.
Darkness may be a comfort
please
Let evening come
Elizabet Stevens lives where she was born in Southern New Brunswick. Her poem “Homestead” is from a recently-completed collection, Blue Forensics: a case of heartbreak. Her work has appeared in literary magazines and received recognition in poetry competitions. She has taken part in readings as far away as Effat University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia where she was an instructor. A former journalist, Elizabet worked for the CBC, and was a contributor to the Globe and Mail.
The Wall Said
by Derek Sugamosto
The wall said …
by Derek Sugamosto
The wall said
“The Cloudy River Gang”
in red;
I’m certain of the color
but the words change when
I look back;
the first two words framed within
an otherwise unspoiled patch of wall,
a patch long preserved
by a newly absent fixture;
“River Gang” was passed over
by the shadow of a bobbing branch;
elsewhere in the same house,
I snap a picture of a shattered pink toilet,
then recline along the floor,
taking in the glue and nails, the joints
and tags that mark the underside
of furniture and cabinets and counters;
I disrupt and rearrange
the floor’s unaccountable grit
with each pivot of perspective;
as I drove away
to the next scheduled location
the windshield was crossed
into a sequence of spaces
that offered the day’s photos
for review; images accurate enough
to recall the negatives
slumbering in my camera
and transparent enough to reveal
the road rushing forward,
ecstatically aligned.
Derek Sugamosto was born and raised in Southeast Michigan. His work has previously appeared in apt, Wisconsin Review, Orange Coast Review, Coe Review, Dogwood, Sheepshead Review, Two Thirds North, Dewpoint, Qua, Paper Nautilus and Sugar House Review.
They Are Drawn Here in the Springtime
by Bruce Van Noy
Perhaps they were orchids, as if Theodore Roethke …
by Bruce Van Noy
For Mariel Hemingway
Perhaps they were orchids, as if Theodore Roethke
had been called here in the dead of night, drunk again
wandering into the yard through a broken fence, in darkness–
past the swing set, past the hammock, past the children’s
stray toys, past the plastic trays of daisies, and the small
carefully folded envelopes of wildflower seeds:
to the garden, planting orchids under the apple trees;
those loose, ghostly mouths: I am dreaming; she laughs, smiles.
My wife is planting flowers. But late that night, in the quiet
cool hours near dawn, smooth, delirious roses sing the delicate
dream of her skin to my lazy fingers; my hand touches orchids
in moonlight just dreamt, falling, and falling, and falling
through her long, long hair. “Orchids–”
“Yes–”
Bruce Van Noy was born in Seattle, raised in North California, educated in genetics and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkley. He studied poetry with Barney Childs at the University of Redlands. A former commercial fisherman in Alaska, and a professional ski instructor based in Ketchum, Idaho, he currently lives on Orcas Island, a few miles off the far north-western coast of Washington, and a stone’s throw across the water from Canada.
Song from Cadiz
by Zoe VanGunten
What do I care …
by Zoe VanGunten
What do I care
if one team wins?
If the night is warm and wet,
Let's hunt snails!
Let's live together!
tri li li, onward...
Come to my table, salt shaker,
don't hide, I've already seen you
a long ways back
I've got crystals and herbs
aye, lad
I have wax and it's from bees
marbles blown of glass
sheep skins and saltplenty of salt,
but these lines to Mirabras
are for you and you only
I started them
when
I saw you from afar
Zoe VanGunten reads and writes whenever and wherever luck strikes: Toledo, El Rito, Austin, Pamplona, Sevilla, Santa Fe—always on the bus at the last moment and happier nearer a window. This poem was written during a snowy Alamosa winter in the company of two very old German breed dogs and a tall bundled man faceting gemstones in the garage.
Tranquil
by Bryan Walpert
I’ll probably cut this line, …
by Bryan Walpert
I’ll probably cut this line,
maybe this one, too, and the next,
the one that describes the blanket—
it’s no good, you keep it,
the line, I mean, though you can have
the old blanket, too, whose rough wool
scratched us all winter on that couch
you’ve taken with the music and the Terrier,
leaving only a few unmatched dishes
and a memory I no longer want:
the day the snow surprised the city—
you at one end of the park,
me at the other, dog by your side,
the spot we were to meet in the middle
an objective correlative of all compromises
with which we would surely collude,
the whole silly city out shovelling,
the white world masquerading
as some sort of moment—take it all, crate it
up with the photos, pop it all in the boot
along with all that we once felt
for one another, take everything
but this poem you’ll never see
me cut line by line:
fold, spindle, mutilate—it’s going,
you’re in charge, my queen, my subject
no longer, once I’ve cut these last few
about the books we'd planned to read, the dog
I'll tell you now I hated, the day I can’t stop
thinking about, which ended with a blanket,
an old couch, and started with the snow
laid out between us like this cold, blank page.
Bryan Walpert is the author of three poetry collections—Etymology, A History of Glass, and Native Bird—as well as the fiction collection Ephraim’s Eyes and the scholarly monograph Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry (Routledge). A defense of poetry, Poetry and Mindfulness, is forthcoming this year. He teaches Creative Writing as an Associate Professor in the School of English & Media Studies at Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. Learn more at bryanwalpert.com.
Afternoons in and out of Paradise
by Julie Watts
the loose-throated peals …
by Julie Watts
the loose-throated peals
of children playing, float across
fences, and into everyone's afternoon.
I remember one like this
shouts, climbing walls
crawling through keyholes
leaping into sick rooms
where he lay, dragging
his boated chest
over the barnacled air
spat into jars
raged as best he could
his wintering world
his wife calling out
turn down the volume
of our play, our high time
to scream
the afternoon scuttling itself
images of white sheets
disgusting jars
life at the other end, looming
incomprehensible
yet enough to haunt the ignorance
of our greenest days
uncomfortable with our plucked
fruit, yet comfortable with the distance
such a distance, a forever –
breathe in and out
and it's gone –
that afternoon like this afternoon
with the high spirits of children
thrilling the autumn
trees
I think of him, long gone
and ungrasped
by the scattering pirates, boarding
their backyard ships.
Julie Watts is a Western Australian writer and Play Therapist. She has been published in various journals and anthologies including: Westerly, Cordite, Australian Poetry Anthology, Australian Love Poems 2013 and the Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry. In 2016 she won The National Association of Loss and Grief Award and was short listed in the Newcastle Poetry Prize. Her first poetry collection, Honey and Hemlock, was published in 2013 by Sunline Press.