contemporary poetry
Kateryna Kobylianska is a Ukrainian abstract artist based in Montreal. With a portfolio featuring over 20 exhibitions worldwide, she has been pushing her artistic limits since 2018. She is getting inspired by nature, cultural theories, and the whole wild ride of human thoughts and behavior. The artwork: “A big bird flying away from the small cage”
Vallum is so pleased to congratulate the winners of this year’s Chapbook Award!
Congratulations to all three poets for their outstanding work.
We’re honoured to share the shortlist for the 2025 Vallum Chapbook Award.
Each manuscript: a world. Each poet: a force.
Thank you to all who submitted.
Check out our Poem in Re-view section featuring the great poem CAUGHT by Angeline Schellenberg.
Explore the poems of contemporary poets for the donation price of $2 CDN (in digital format). We’ve also published a special, limited print edition of 100 copies for this first issue of the series: Summer 2025. ($8) Happy reading!
Check out our Poem in Re-view section featuring the great poem SKATEBOARD from a chapbook by Thurston Moore and John Kinsella.
Check out our Poem in Re-view section featuring the great poem MORNING by Jeffrey Mackie
Check out our Poem in Re-view section featuring the great poem PABLO PICASSO VISITS JAMES JOYCE AND THEY DISCUSS YOUTH
by Michael Mirolla
Congratulations on winning the 2024 Vallum Chapbook Award with A Mass Choir of Little Things!
T. Liem: In this work images and memories accumulate with a weighted pace, whole stanzas repeat like time-slowing refrains, and certain words become chant-like as in “A Letter from The Sea” with sea and see. This feels like a particular kind of musicality. Would you talk about where your experience as a drummer intersects with your experience of composing poetry?
Check out our Poem in Re-view section featuring the great poem Prelude by Jan Zwicky
Check out contest guidelines and send us your best work; we look forward to reading it!
T.Liem: The Whole Catastrophe was a pleasure to read. With my pencil in hand, I was tracing ideas, underlining phrases, and noting recurring lines. There is also so much sound-joy in reading it aloud, hearing your patterns of assonance and slant rhyme. It is this musicality that lets readers draw themselves along the earth with your speaker. These are poems which also feel like invitations. Congratulations on this publication and thanks for taking the time to talk about it with me!
Check out our Poem in Re-view section featuring the great poem “DIGITAL BATH” by William Grant.
A Mass Choir of Little Things seems sculpted by decay. Poet and percussionist Ockert Greeff examines physical evidence of impending disaster and recent loss, from leftover clothes to leathery faces. Bodies and landscapes bear wounds of time and the promise of finality. In one poem, his mother giggles like a girl; in the next, she cannot recognize him. But Greeff’s sparse, vivid language also finds life within endings. He imagines his elderly mom as a baby turtle wading into the water; he chronicles organisms that persist. An orange pickup truck in the desert, a swimmer lifting his arms to the sky. Greeff’s preoccupation with “the dark mass that is taking us all” reveals a gentle attention to existence — the rhythms of a haircut, the silences of a funeral — figuring death as one part of the story.
Check out our Poem in Re-view section featuring the great poem “SEPIA” by Frances Boyle.
“In Jami Macarty’s The Whole Catastrophe, every asterisk indicates something precious. Macarty uses the poetic form to create space for what is otherwise omitted: the fresh air outside car windows, the stars blotted out by city infrastructures, a friend gone too soon. Chronicling a road trip to the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico, Macarty reflects on fragility, greed and the disasters we must withstand, from toxic feedlots to carbon monoxide poisoning.
If you would like your work to be considered to appear in Vallum’s new digital series, submit your poem. Guidelines for the “POEMS FROM THE CROWD” Series Submissions are accepted from September 15, 2024 to January 15, 2025. There is no fee to submit your work. Submission Requirements: Poem: Submit one poem with a maximum […]
Ockert Greeff, for his chapbook: “A Mass Choir of Little Things” Excerpt from chapbook: * * * I let go of my yellow lunchbox Watch it swirl away in the dark water Past the boy who cannot give up He is swimming, lifting his arms up High out of the water, […]
Check out our Poem in Re-view section featuring the great poem IN THOSE DAYS FATHER REPAIRED THE CLOCK by Yi Lu, translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Check out our Poem in Re-view section featuring the great poem FALLING FROM HEIGHTS (VIEW 2) by Patrick M. Pilarski
Our talented facilitator, Heather Brunet, recently conducted a workshop titled “Poetic Maps” at St. Gabriel Elementary School (SEEDS classroom). Known for her dynamic approach and ability to connect with students, Heather introduced a powerful method to use metaphors, guiding sixth graders to explore and express their chosen places through poetic language. The workshop was a […]
Check out our Poem in Re-view section featuring the great poem “THE MAN WHO COULD SMELL TIME” by Tom Wayman
Check out our Poem in Re-view section featuring the great poem “Deer April” by Patience Wheatley
Theophylline: A Poetic Migration via the Modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo)
By Erín Moure
House of Anansi Press 2023
Reviewed by Bill Neumire
Savor our Poem in Re-view section featuring the enchanting poem “On-Train Slashin'” by jwcurry
Exciting news! Tara McGowan-Ross shared her thoughts on our outreach program in Native Montreal. Take a peek to see the positive impact and stories behind what we’re doing. It’s all about community and making a difference. Check it out!
Savor our Poem in re-view section featuring the enchanting poem “Whistle” by Susan Gillis
RECURRING AWAKENING by FRANZ WRIGHT “Franz wrote fearlessly about mental illness, addiction, and loneliness, as well as about faith and the unending beauty of his world, no matter how broken; he never wrote a line that wasn’t fiercely important to him, musical, as witty as it was deadly serious. Franz lived for poetry—at times it seemed […]
From the Immediate to the Timeless: A Conversation with Maya Clubine
Life Cycle of a Mayfly chronicles more than the life of a river bug. Maya Clubine’s collection, winner of the 2023 Vallum Chapbook Award, takes mayflies as a departure point for thinking about ecosystems, interdependence, and the lessons that we pass down through generations. Clubine considers the growth of a fly from nymph to imago alongside changing seasons, bird migrations, a father’s passing, a daughter’s return. Along the way, cycles tangle like a fishing line. In this interview, critic Rosie Long Decter talks with Clubine about structure, repetition, and the relationship between the cosmic and the minute.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Submissions for our Vallum Chapbook Award 2024 are now open!
WINNING CHAPBOOK: PUBLICATION + $300
ENTRY FEE:
$25 for Canadian entrants, $30 for U.S. and international entrants. Submissions and payments are processed through Vallum’s Submittable account.
Exciting News: Two New Vallum Chapbooks Now Available! 📚We are thrilled to announce the release of two captivating chapbooks that have been carefully crafted by talented poets. These gems are now available for you
Vallum 2023 Poetry Award-winners!
Honourable Mention: Murray Mann, for poem: “How I Kept My Pace with the Mountains”
Vallum 2023 Poetry Award-winners!
Finalist: Diana Hope Tegenkamp, for poem: “so I can bring you with me”
Vallum 2023 Poetry Award-winners!
First Place: Bridget Huh, for poem: “Touching the Verb”.
We are pleased to announce our winners for the 2023 Vallum Poetry Award!
We are thrilled to announce our short list for the 2023 Vallum Poetry Award. It was a pleasure to read everyone’s work and we are awash in gratitude and admiration for these poets gracing us with their work. Congratulations to the shortlisted poets! Murray Mann, “How I Kept My Pace With The […]
Casey Flynn is a stay-at-home writer-dad and may or may not someday have a PhD in religion. These days he enjoys his 1.5-year-old daughter’s dramatic recitations interspersed with singing and dancing.
The task at hand,
the questioner mumbled,
is to ascertain the moment par
of when untruth becomes
truth
of when truth becomes
subservient.
coming up over the hill
then down a chill
into slivered light, a shiver
walking across green, grassy wholeness—
A pull so she pivots on her heel. There’s a little girl clutching a book.
Galatea smiles consciously, imagines the process of petrification.
The girl’s eyes are a dark name scratched in an oak tree.
I read about you in art class. You’re my favourite. Medusa is too.
after the deluge, there’s the quiet. one colour
blue, an eyeless blank sky where i once felt your mind
close over my own like water in water.
death was a circle i broke when i surfaced,
emptiness splintering down on my shoulders — light
falls all over me, not passing though.
I’ve started carefully extracting you from family photos. Slice/slash. Thankfully scissors. Thankfully fire for a last labour of lost love, I blacken your aching silhouette ‘til that one shot becomes a queen sized bed, my small frame curled against a shapeless ghost. Do you know the one? Call it foreshadowing: I’m asleep, feeling safe. Your […]
Everything starts today. If renewal were easy,
we’d all begin again. We’d drop our endless searching
for four-leaf clovers that declare us topped up
with good luck. Our efforts at self-improvement
The closest thing I have to a heritage
is a photograph of my grandmother
being fake-arrested in a fake saloon
in Arizona. Two cowboy actors aim
in the first photo
the apple is whole
In the mid-teens
You gave me a tuner
In Mayuhe, which I’ve
After
the joy of seedlings and
hopeful tiny plants,
what about those static seeds?
yes it is both river and sea
is a simple pleasure, 2×4 uprights
of old deck railing nailed
together for a compost box
using straightened nails. Each
board the same length, so
no sawing. Each dimension
Pygmalion, one arm draped across the cool white shoulder of Galatea,
the other hand dangling a martini glass, or maybe, in sensual fingers,
a cigarette in a holder. He rivets attention forever, her enduring form
endorsing his obsession. O, he compels, he scintillates.
Water when separate seeks again a place to pool. Tonight under the full autumn moon I feel the pull to return to water. The dewy heat from my heart moves away like the yellow leaves blowing from the tulip tree. Since you left, my body longs to return to a place of its kind. It […]
it hits me at the strangest times
snow falling down on my hands
standing outside the psychiatric hospital
sometimes the snow is so silent
i think i’m the only one in the world
and i’m alive, i’m alive.
my sister is dying at times she states it
her life parsed
phrases/phases terms/terminal …
A cure for root rot
How to burn this tree down
How to separate
the bones we bury
and the ones we carry
Mid-journey, turn and look back
at the tracks you’ve made, the line
you’ve furrowed into mud, into snow,
a weaving cursive through the slop.
Trees parked on the Boulevard of City Lights wait for the signal to change
from restless rapture to loving outrage at the taking down of his words,
jelly beans of rhyme spilt out in a golden stream.
Trees with arms outstretched like St. Francis drawing the birds in white chalk
across a charcoal sky, statues of the world reaching out for poetry.
i’ve seen it before with potted plants
whose roots expand to bloom in places too small
while others wait to be given soil beyond measure
from Life Cycle of a Mayfly, the winner of the 2023 Vallum Chapbook Award The sun sinks down toward the thin horizon. The weary peacock falls asleep inside its crowned flask. The Philosopher sits on a rock and jots a few brief observations about a river bug above the Black Sea. The river bug flies, […]
Returning home from evening mass
in the big car,
they were like canal boats then
sliding through the loose gravel, in the back seat
she pushed my cuticles up
with a silver file not unpainfully
“Intellectual curiosity about one’s own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery,”: so writes the American poet, novelist, and essayist Siri Hustvedt. So quotes the Chilean-born Québécois poet, novelist, and essayist Nicholas Dawson as he investigates his own illness, pushing through the multiple layered skins of depression, turning it over to examine it in this light and that, as a prism that might allow some strand of light into the complex, ailing self.
“The problem is that I’m a stranger to myself,” Délani Valin writes halfway through her début collection Shapeshifters, in “What are the Ethics of Picking a Stinging Plant?” The third paragraph of this clever, subtle prose poem continues…
Interview by Lauren Turner A contemporary study of the institution, Gravitas boldly explores academia’s tendency to tolerate gendered abuse. Amy Berkowitz lifts the veil on the ordinary violence that female students are subjected to — violence that goes so far as to interrupt their writing practices and distort their relationships to words and literature. Illuminated […]
Vallum is so pleased to congratulate Maya Clubine as the winner of this year’s award for her chapbook Life Cycle of a Mayfly, which will be published in the fall alongside a new chapbook by Karen Solie! About Life Cycle of a Mayfly Maya Clubine’s careful poetry avoids the easy delineation of beginning, middle, end. Rather, cycles of […]
We are thrilled to present six exciting and beautiful chapbooks as finalists. Click through below to read excerpts and come back soon to find out the winner!
from Show and Tell, a collaborative chapbook by André Babyn, Sasha Manoli, and Misha Solomon, a collective finalist in the Vallum Chapbook Award contest for 2023
from Tinderbox by Zak Jones, a finalist in the Vallum Chapbook Award contest for 2023
from The Solve by Medrie Purdham, a finalist in the Vallum Chapbook Award contest for 2023
from Life Cycle of a Mayfly by Maya Clubine, a finalist in the Vallum Chapbook Award contest for 2023
from a short history of longing by Karan Kapoor, a finalist in the Vallum Chapbook Award contest for 2023
from Basement Bedroom by Alicia Byrne Keane, a finalist in the Vallum Chapbook Award contest for 2023
It’s the summer solstice
The day the darkening begins
If I keep walking west I can precede this time again
In a year. Not much stamina
Foot-shoes sore
This collection pulls and weaves the wool of the ideal and ‘real’ over (and under) critical aspects of identity; it is a small representation, a particular angle and nuance, on broader themes of culture, race, ethnicity, colour, ability, and queerness. It is my taste flight of fancy in the growth and inspiration that has come from ‘winging it’ as a queer artist of colour: each collage piece is a different flavour of ‘the dreamy and not so dreamy’.
half is more than none, sense is the line you draw.
you can’t see the horizon, even so i found a place. our promises are heat waves
but our bones vowed to step forward.
I dream a basement
in a boarding house
and I must go
down into its splintered
silver light searching
for cargo and machinery
crouched in corners
everything flashing
When I was younger
There were fewer machines
Later I sat in an office
Surrounded by wires and lights
They didn’t keep me alive
But somehow connected
I dreamt we were a family
of Dilberts with Ziggy noses.
Mom was snapping
the sordid candid portrait—
time-lapse, time-delay.
heat into my hands,
befuddled old dog
pushing against my arm
with its beseeching nose
and eyes, till I succumb,
Every night, in our dreams, we make a space
for us, somewhere no one else can find.
This evening, we arrange a rendez-vous in Gizeh,
where time is an eternity—a sparkle that blinds,
slicing lips in prismatic laughter, we can forget
future anxieties far too many to mention.
I dreamed I dug my own grave and looked
at the clouds as they lowered my coffin.
You weren’t there. I know this, because
even when I was dead I wondered.
Unlike me, time moves on quickly.
You rooted your life
in magic numbers and rabbit’s feet
instead of something concrete
like your mother’s religion
now your perception is fading
so you set the clocks to military time,
try for one more hour of catching angels:
charge your stones, the moon is full
but veiled in vapour
pull the stars closer to your lips
that gave me nightmares
or maybe it was the giant hole
in the logic of importing butter
from New Zealand
or the giant hole in the ozone—
wait, isn’t that healing? Didn’t we do
one thing right? I don’t miss hairspray.
Or maybe it was the giant gap
between me and the suffering
and yet I am still suffering,
still count myself among them,
paper cuts versus daggers
My reflection fades and distorts in the fogged damp
of double-panes, hanging against a fading, ice-blue
afternoon. Beyond the window frost coats trees
and stones not yet snow-smothered. It’s a ghostly world,
dead as the moon.
Experiment
as you like: on your back
circled by vultures, your hands muffled
by your pillow. Still,
every night, senseless ocean worries over
the little deaths that
fold themselves
inside the big one.
Throat songs at midnight light
swing wavering sharp, land
soft as shrouds
rise again and again
eternal as rock echoes
eternal as ghost kisses
At an average of five a night
that’s over 300 million daily in Late Antiquity
alone, or the Mediterranean Pagan-Christian
Intermediary Period, as my department
Was last rebranded. Funding cut.
Break the seal, play on double fast-forward,
salient images only pause on, note
and if typical stamp TYPICAL
that gets in and kills every last one, that fastens
on what it finds there and leaves a gory mess, yes
a nightmare is being trapped with its slippery
muscular intention and the means to do it
to smell the rancid Mustelid before it
weasels triumphant through a small wire hole
A stutter-self, a shadow without edge,
a last echo, mitochondrial must,
every question I don’t want knowledge
of or an answer to. What lives in dust
I don’t dream anymore.
Since I moved into this house,
My sleep is deep as the sea.
Flying only happens in dreams.
No one sees the moon-chord
direct the dead through the underground
or bones grip roots.
We lengthen as herons mid-air.
Our past melts yellow for the day’s heat cradle.
i feel its twisted desire
it hisses an incantation
calls down the shadows of
betelgeuse bellatrix saiph rigel
to pin my shoulders my hips
against the bed
The blackberries aren’t ripe,
haven’t quite reached the cliff’s edge
from which there is no return without thorns
scratching like vinyl
Have you ever found yourself in a dream
following a path that seems familiar
a rutted winding way surrounded by uncertainty?
You pass through shadows of the forest
You cannot see ahead, but continue
trusting what you must
somewhere in New York, a woman collects
our dreams—
ear-tags our fleshy sleeping psyches and lines
them in neat taxonomies on her shelf
in mine, the bees have gone extinct and the fish
have sunk to mud and the backbones of
our ecosystems have collapsed under human weight
This space
was found
in a dream of tomorrow.
I wander through sleep
into these red squares,
and the light is of a kind
I have never before known.
What you need: a sheet, a pen, a
hand, I
use my right to write.
If your dreams are ending
badly, put them into words,
like this:
those images follow us
into nights’ labyrinths crevices mud and monotone scumble
How do you know you haven’t been infected
by the fungus that turns ants into zombies
and then erupts from your head, its fruiting
bodies releasing spores, which in turn infect
we promised each other we wouldn’t
But you’d told me long ago you never planned to live past 30
But you didn’t even get to be 30
But while you’d always wanted children, I didn’t, that hurt you
But as a child in elementary school, they labelled you “delinquent”
But as a teen, being a dropout made you “badass”
Vast and lifeless
Imagine: it holds nothing, ever,
But its own damaged mass.
It travels alone
Bound to us
Like some old beaten dog
It had been forty years since
I’d seen her face to face. No
surprise, I couldn’t remember
how Julie made that planchette spider
from forks and a glass.
I pull aside a dreamer
who doesn’t believe
in the dream
Its not the duration I say
But the rhythm of hell
and my thoughts
are kick drums
syncopated
Listen,
there are five things here:
The Sky
This Home
Birdsongs
Us
and Patience
I dreamt
my lover gave to me a wolf’s pelt.
My first response was contentment.
Sleep-buoyed, I knew this as important.
What if you had been born? And with you, the sky—
in the night-ness of all things between
my dormant grief and his. And with you,
I was seven levels deep inside myself
on
floating a
lake
of ganglia
each level had a door that led to another door opened
with a sound I translated as
Winter pushes unto the land & a cold flame rises. A palmprint fades from the glass & the child wonders where it leaves to. A letter has just come in from the old country & everyone gathers around. Cousin Mac tells of a dream he’s been having lately in which he finds himself in a cave running
the summer I spent on the lake
I dropped some semaa as we jumped in the canoe
kwe told me stories of mishipeshu
of violence and death and vengeance
the wind picked up and blew against us
the entire way back
I do not think one should read poetry at night
just before sleeping,
for how can someone lay down to rest
when poems lift up your mind
as in “Bullet Points,” or Love is the love of
who we are, it is a form of knowing…
three hours of tremble
on a thin blue mat i trace
escape routes on google maps
fantasize quiet in my palms
i am fevered and adept i bode
vibration bid low on eBay
I come to
in the black
and it’s pouring
and I’m not
sure which
house I’m in
not that I have
If you like, you can begin with a choice: inside or outside?
Ask, what are you doing there? I think you’re in our bed… I guess
our bed is still warm. Are you? Other things follow, you.
this morning, a hole appears in your stomach. you rinse dishes that
roll inward. sprinkle flowers which disappear. your heartbeat ragged
like stems rotting in still water. it is no small devastation. sprung
without antecedent or count in. just a slow sink.
To say they distanced
to say it wasn’t about spit
What began as a statement of rot
after reading a book about rot
Jake Byrne interviewed David about his new book, Dream of Me as Water, in late 2022. They spoke for an hour. This is an excerpt of their conversation.
Thus, with the poem “Everything,” begins Gary Barwin’s latest poetry collection, The Most Charming Creatures. Barwin, who has written 26 books, is also a composer (he earned his PhD in music composition) and multidisciplinary artist. Progressing in four sections, The Most Charming Creatures—follow-up to Barwin’s recent 2019 Selected Poems: For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe—takes its title from a science monograph. Explaining the title in an interview with Open Books, Barwin said:
When I heard Harbour Publishing were releasing a posthumous book by Patrick Lane, I knew it would be a must-read collection. Lane became one of the finest writers of his generation or any other by writing poetry at once easily accessible and breathtakingly lyrical.
Trailer Park Shakes is a lot of things, and in being a lot of things contains a lot of things to like. It’s working-class writing, in the classical, economic-theory sense: this is not the writing of a suburban expatriate who just learned the word “kyriarchy” in their MFA. This is not even the explicitly Marxist poetry of writers like Joe Wallace, Avery Lake, or Brendan Joyce—it expresses, in fact, the violent ways capitalism robs the most economically vulnerable of the material requirements for organizing (From “The Slow Creeping Feeling that Everything Will Not be Okay”: “rebellion quelled by the almighty dollar / I’m too busy / I gotta go to work / I got a family to feed”).
A Review of Time out of Time by Arlene Paré
In winter I’ll know
by the harsh call of raven
and in spring, by blossom.
In summer, a warm wind
i’m really sorry for spreading erroneous nutritional information I don’t know if I believe the world is enough to hold the door to a drowning lullaby, to be_right_back.zip but before you find a way to RollbackTM the space in-between, it all happens very quickly you fall asleep waiting for your friends to join your […]
We are thrilled to announce the the winner of the 2023 Vallum Art Prize is Luce Hua for their series of collages “Of daydreams and nightmares.” Hua’s work is immediately compelling and evocative, revealing and reveling in the layers of each collage. Bolstered by an artist statement that is beautiful, playful (as you will see […]
War Canticles George Elliott Clarke Vallum Chapbook Series, 2022 35 pp I was married to a ghost on a mountain in northwest Seoul back in 1994. A trivial enough anecdote; I mention it to suggest that I might know a shaman when I see one. George Elliott Clarke is a shaman. […]
Poetry for Our Future! In 2021-22 VSEAL continued offering workshops through our Poetry for Our Future! outreach program. Our partner organizations were QPIRG, Spectrum Productions, Lasalle Elementary, the South Asian Women’s Community Centre, Unravelling in Rhymes, AGIR, Yellow Door, the Dawson Boys and Girls Club, Say Ça, Bridges Adult Learning Centre, For Francis Public Library, Sioux […]
George Elliott Clarke reads an excerpt of his chapbook War Canticles.
AND HERE THEY DREAM (ii) Then the hallways multiplied. Your aunt was there, wandering, a book held in her hands. She’d sewn patterns into the pages, but many were still blank. She approached you, urgently: “I need help with this one,” she said, pointing to the book—at which point you left the dream. […]
This issue features new poems by Lambda Literary fellow Nora Hikari, Terry Watada, Evan J, and more. Plus, an excerpt from George Elliott Clarke’s War Canticles, as well as
Leah Oates has B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design, an M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a Fulbright Fellow for study at Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland. Oates has had solo shows in Toronto at Black Cat Artspace and in the NYC area at Susan Eley Fine Art, The Central Park Arsenal Gallery, The Center for Book Arts, Real Art Ways, The Brooklyn Public Library and at the MTA Arts and Design Lightbox Project.
Write me to sleep,
Gently—lying
Beneath the beams, listless
As I am.
Blue bells, blue bonnets, blue
pool above it all; finished rain
settles dense vapour in violet
hyacinth combs, dousing air
Even here, along
an avenue as dementedly luxe as Fifth,
the sheer aplomb
of late-November ruthlessness
gets noticed.
A pair of zebra doves
pay a visit, pecking about the grass.
I’m in the close shade
of an old twisty pink trumpet tree.
(largesse of autumn)
how shadowy the trees
to replace the taciturn
with another quietude
Once I could have loved.
But love was cleaved damp
from my body. Carved soft
and wet from the rest
of my hard existence,
cast aside, with everything
that could be renamed
“submission.”
The little body, washed;
cleaned; swaddled;
transferred
from broken hand
to broken hand
to crib—
Recounting things overheard
in the unfamiliar places of childhood,
I never heard mentioned the radiation
of granites.
I am looking at pain,
my world turning brittle-edged and bright,
my body becoming a meditation on shards—
thoughts, incandescent and ecstatic.
My email bleeps. The sky goes grey. Cars ease by the mute bell
tower. Time’s cosmic joke—it speeds up when
you need it most. I thought I had wrapped my mind
around it like a bow
And has a vision of a mountain lake,
feather oil mixing with rain
The water at the shoreline a quivering mother
berating the rock
Before me mounds of food on Formica,
crooked mouths of porcelain at parties.
Before me staged smiles in tempered tonalities:
and we’re going back in time.
The cheap bleed of a red-tinged photograph—
and another, and another.
Charred cinnamon
scent of warmth, that lick
of gold, as much or more
than what it touched—
Not even the body of a lover—remembered,
of course, as all there is, in the end, is
memory—can ease you back to any place
you’d ever want to say you know
like the back of that lover’s neck after love.
Snarling, snapping, eyes wide
As he lunges at my wheelchair.
Each frostbite bark rises,
defensiveness a frozen mist.
after “The Ballad of Othello Clemence” by George Elliott Clarke A ghost, I no longer know how to weep yet grieve the madness of false words believed. I recollect how I adored recitations of your exploits, how I traced the outline of your calloused hands, …your biceps, your lips; marking them ……with my scent, curling […]
we had to draw the old temples on a map from memory. they were destroyed centuries ago, rebuilt to different gods & destroyed again. now they’re grassy platforms, marked & open, as if the air stays holy when not even rubble remains.
yeah, okay, the world is on fire,
but I have two AC units
in my fourth floor apartment.
they’re not the window shakers,
but what Kelsy affectionately refers to
as “R2-D2s”
in my old town the white boys from College Street
hide guns, weed, & bicycle parts in a wooded area
off Conotton Creek Trail. C said even the cops
smoke back there, shoot up, & leave the needles
stuck in the trees.
My grandfather’s boyhood friend
would visit on a long June afternoon,
and when it came time for him to leave,
I would walk the old men to the corner bus
that ran south toward the city.
Have we come so far
and emerged nowhere
—A.I. tracking faces,
movies on demand—
Open fourth—relaxed but defiant
chin up, shoulders back
fingers intertwined behind her back
the clothesline stret-ch-es
across the length
of the backyard
proof of father’s handiwork
a when is [human] only when still/“alive” to the naked eye. Our
menace’s specter-rose rise-rises poetic, enveloped by sweet-
tooth/teethed fiends of possibility, non-noxious toxicity.
You said you asked how much
the ox-eyes cost and that I answered
midnight.
She—
aroused by crispening air—
takes off, a sudden blossoming
of white wings, long feathers.
The egret flies slow.
Ungainly, lopsided.
Flaps above
the yellow grass-tips.
Sometimes it takes two hands wrapped around to pour
if the vessel is full, if the liquid is at the lip.
Sometimes a curve forms from my wrist to forearm to rest
against thick glass or the raised ridges of spotted ceramic pulling
tendons to match the melting morphing slopes of my organs.
In the car lot,
I used a fob to lock
the only car’s door
as an old man
walked down from the hills
with an old dog
slowly trotting behind
stopping to smell every post
of the old wood fence
that kept the sheep
near the old ring fort…
The house flowers
in light. Be-
low that,
dirt. Deeper,
a glacier. And deepest:
fire.
Niceties?
We spurn bandages, medicines.
Lee rallies, bids us see Virginia as precious,
ourselves as audacious,
oblivious to high, Deep South percentages
of the deep-sixed…
Frankie Barnet is a Montreal-based writer. Her debut graphic novel, Kim: A Novel Idea, is an auto-fictional blend of real-world pain and celebrity fantasy that tells the story of a grad student trying to make sense of an online world and her own stubborn sadness. Protagonist Frankie spends her days scrolling Kardashian Instagrams, reading about sexual violence on social media, trying to help her boyfriend process the loss of his father, and talking to her vicious but infinitely wise cat Catman.
It would be hard not to be amazed by Ottawa poet, editor, critic and publisher Amanda Earl’s incredibly expansive, inclusive and long-awaited anthology Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry (Malmö, Sweden: Timglaset Editions, 2021), a book funded, in part, through an impressive crowdfunding campaign earlier this spring.
Invoking Willem Dafoe, Neil Armstrong, Ryan Gosling, Shia Labouf, Nicolas Cage, and Peter Falk while also tapping into American Psycho, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Instagram—Paul Zits, author of the previous collections Exhibit, Massacre Street, and Leap-Seconds—creates an ironic speaker who marauds the earth searching only its “Instagrammability”…
Although Sylvia Legris’s sixth book of poetry, Garden Physic, opens with a poem titled “Plants Reduced to the Idea of Plants” which are then further playfully reduced to “woodcuts / (circa 16th century) reduced to Victorian floor tile,” this collection clearly accomplishes just the opposite: it elevates, celebrates, and even apotheosizes plants…
We are pleased to announce our winner and finalist for the 2022 Vallum Poetry Award! Please congratulate our Finalist
We are thrilled to announce our short list for the 2022 Vallum Poetry Award. It was a pleasure to read everyone’s work and we are awash in gratitude and admiration for these poets gracing us with their work. Congratulations to the shortlisted poets! Abdulkareem Abdulkareem – “Self-portrait Of The […]
An essay by Dennis Cooley on “J’Accuse.”
Join us on Saturday August 13th from 12 – 4 pm for a poetry pop-up. Featured poets will be in the store, ready and equipped with a typewriter to write poems upon request. Say hi, browse their chapbooks, books and check out the store!
Each year Vallum Society for Education in Arts and Letters supports workshops throughout Montreal, Quebec and elsewhere. The next workshop has been made possible through a partnership between Unravelling in Rhymes and the South Asian Women’s Community Centre, along with the Atwater Writers Exhibition. Details below!
Join us on July 23, 2022 at 3:30 PM ET for an online launch of issue 19:1 “Bridges.” Featuring readings from Robyn Maree Pickens, Meghan Kemp-gee, Matthew James Weigel, Julie Mannell, and Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi! The reading will be approximately 1-hour and Zoom’s closed captioning will be turned on. The event is open to all […]
We are so excited to read your work, but we’re giving you an extra two days to get your Poetry Award entry ready! Take the weekend to polish off your submission and get it to us by Sunday July 17th, 11:59 PM EDT.
We are thrilled to announce the winner of this year’s Chapbook Award!
Scott Cecchin (pronounced “ch-keen”) is a queer poet living on Traditional Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg Territory, in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough, ON.
Elena Bentley (she/her) is a disabled, bi, and Métis/settler emerging poet, editor, and book reviewer from Saskatchewan.
Karen Mandell has taught literature and writing at various community centers and schools in Massachusetts.
Each year we receive hundreds of entries and we are grateful so many poets trust us with their work. After much consideration, we are so excited to announce three finalists for this year’s Chapbook Award.
The 2022 Vallum Poetry Award is open for submissions until July 15 The winner of the Vallum Poetry Award receives $750 and one finalist will receive $250, as well as publication in Vallum magazine. The submission fee is $25 for Canadian entrants, $30 for U.S. and international entrants. Payments are processed through our Submittable […]
19:1 | Bridges This issue features an interview with bpNichol Chapbook Award-winning poet Matthew James Weigel and new poems by rob mclennan, Johnson Cheu, Jami Macarty, and more. The issue also includes poems from the 2021 Vallum Poetry Award winners, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi and Robyn Maree Pickens, as well as reviews by Bill Neumire and Deanna Fong. Artwork is from […]
More than a decade after George Elliott Clarke’s first Vallum chapbook, The Gospel of X, we are thrilled to announce the publication of War Canticles in a limited edition of 125 copies. And we’re publishing it in the spring, rather than the fall, because it’s been a long, difficult winter and we deserve some poetry! Visit […]
Winner of the 2022 Vallum Cover Award “Entangled” is a series of paintings dealing with the emotional and psychic landscapes brought about by the pandemic. In the artist’s own words: When the pandemic hit in 2020, the world quickly transitioned from “normal” to the unfamiliar: new rules, new information and new ways to live our […]
Hands
on the iron rail
guarding
against the sea
I know what it means to feel sorry
I’ve been sorry
The relief of rainstorm. They were both happy
to see again. The court choir broke open
It is a serious
responsibility
I don’t know who
or I pretend not to know
From Hanlons to Centre I walk.
My parents were married on these islands, in the town
Where is the bridge between my body and yours?
This wobbling I in watercolour,
The bridge over Mayo River
Cracks hard in the winter air
Outside, a thunderstorm darkens. Violence lurks.
At a border. An office. An airport. A market.
I don’t know if I believe the world is enough
to hold the door to a drowning lullaby, to be_right_back.zip
tree leaves fly stylishly,
another successful shedding of maples.
On some days, my body
feels like a stranger. I sit
Famously abrasive, O, old rumpled legend, this
retired poet, contained and stationed past the Seigneury of Rigaud,
in Valois, a village within the village
I’ve been in this house too long.
I’m forgetting where I come from, forgetting
The letter said I was in.
Ma in the small dark room.
A cup of tea. She sipped slowly, seriously.
Let go, said every full moon you woke
under. All your tarot cards, recurring
I love looking downriver—under
the last two bridges before the harbour
An old woman stows her sewing in a wicker basket,
hikes up her black dress
and leaps
Traffic slows around
the corner onto the Monroe
Cold wet sand
shadows in eclipse
the moon forgets
you’ll forget the colour of the carpet
on the spaceship’s bridge. (The action always
feet touching ground is occurring everywhere I walk
I kill something is occurring surrendering to melancholy
I celebrate the Brooklyn span of grandeur,
the lean red muscle of the stately Golden Gate,
It’s /brij/ or, in Old English, ‘brycg’
A way, a noun and/or verb (as in movement: to bridge a gap or chasm)
and floating adrift among the spheres
I harmonize while washing dishes
onlooker with stars behind my eyes
It feels, no looks like a pearlescent pond.
It’s quiet, reflecting a faraway sky that moods
neither dawn nor dusk. It looks, no
feels like the lightest pressure on wet leaves
You are a bridge.
You reached out your hand
And found me.
Trees, grown tall at a vale crevasse, crowd its edge.
They long to fulfill their purpose.
my city the city, or wherever I’m flung into the arms of back-alleys and streetcorner loot: the art
of lower class feeling: to start at the shoe. Asphalt: faulted at the foundation and sinking.
it was lunchtime & you sliced pale not scarlet bananas onto bread
our lungs were the scent of fruiting as we sank our baby teeth into sweet
our lungs were young & sprinkled sugar was our first illicit
the scent of mother, brother, & I wound deep into my limbic system
THREADS OF A NETWORK: A CONVERSATION WITH MATTHEW JAMES WEIGEL INTERVIEW BY ROSIE LONG DECTER This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Matthew James Weigel is an artist of many disciplines. His work includes poetry, visual art, and scholarly research, projects that he weaves together through explorations of colonial violence and acts of […]
Dream of No One but Myself David Bradford Brick Books, 2021 David Bradford’s Dream of No One but Myself sifts through fragments of memory, imagination, and documentary debris, trying—and necessarily failing—to answer the subject’s driving questions: “Who am I (to you)?” and “What do you want (from me)?” At its core, the book is a […]
Nicole Rayiza Fong’s second poetry book, OЯACULE, immediately announces itself as a different kind of reading experience–with a dramatis personae, staging, and theatrical dialogue, the collection embraces a hybridity of theater and verse.
ENTANGLED “Entangled” is a series of paintings dealing with the emotional and psychic landscapes brought about by the pandemic. In the artist’s own words: When the pandemic hit in 2020, the world quickly transitioned from “normal” to the unfamiliar: new rules, new information and new ways to live our lives. One of the most […]
Four-day workshop (March 5, 6, 12 and 13): Coming back to yourself through poetry, play and performance AGIR in collaboration with Vallum Society for Education in Arts and Letters is hosting a four-day workshop series facilitated by Angelic Goldsky. AGIR Montréal (Action LGBTQIA+ avec les ImmigrantEs et RéfugiéEs) is an autonomous non-profit organization, by and […]
To Revision and Beyond!—A Poetry Workshop from Page to Stage Calling all poets! You’ve written and rewritten your poem, maybe even workshopped it and incorporated the feedback of others to make it stronger—more poignant, innovative or musical. Now that you’ve accepted the gift and branded the poem “finished” (or close enough): what now? Lock it […]
18:2 | The Power of Words At long last, Vallum‘s newest issue has arrived! This is our first-ever digital only issue which is being released in conjunction with our new website. To celebrate the occasion, this issue has been made available to read completely for free online. This issue features a translation of Daniel Saldaña Paris by Louis Sanger, new […]
Matthew James Weigel’s 2020 Vallum Chapbook Award-winning work has won Meet the Presses’ 2021 bpNichol Chapbook Award! Here is what judges Jennifer LoveGrove and Jordan Abel had to say about Weigel’s work: “Matthew James Weigel’s It Was Treaty/It Was Me is a uniquely unconventional and innovative poetic exploration of colonial archives, in which Weigel explores his personal connection […]
Dottie Gordon is the featured artist for Vallum 18:2 – The Power of Words. Artist’s Bio Dottie Gordon (JG) // // * 1993, Canada. Dottie is a textile printmaker, illustrator and painter who is self-taught, but grateful to have had the guidance and care of many mentors and a considerable amount of support from their […]
Advice and Rebuke (1) You will lose your way quite a few times. What with the repetition and the salary, you won’t find cause for singing. Even so, you will look for the sacred in giving up, in the sepia tone of things, in the dissolution of enthusiasm. (2) If you have any […]
WORDS Words say everything, he said. So many words to say everything, I say. So many times to be sure everything is said. Then the words have the final word: Let us live here, we who have no place else to go. Author’s Bio Nominated for the National Book Award and twice-nominated for the Pulitzer […]
Mspsieleld by Sgtrane I’ve nveer been mcuh of a splleer my teehcars uesd to tlel me soohcl wasnotmy ftroe Iwas furttuane to psas, asyousee I’m lkucy to hvae ajob taht dsnoe’t need sniplleg osierwhte, I’dbe uemnlpeyoyd onthehood tankhs, dadandmom, forthe flmaiy beiunsss asCEO I slhuod do rlaley good Author’s Bio Neil Garvie resides in Comox […]
Being I & Being Human: a Bilinguacultural Poem 1/ I vs 我: Denotations The first person singular …
1122 VIEW STREET The building’s gone, but its shadow’s not, torn down, white adobe, and, behind the red door, a paved courtyard open at one end where past notice I at one time lived. Worn rugs, walls aslant, scaly acoustic tile and a window I’d not lock, ivy-draped to shroud a burglar’s light-fingered escape the […]
According to the survey If I had one word to describe myself? Irrepressible. One fruit? Strawberry. One meal? Garlic prawns with a peanut butter sandwich. One piece of playground equipment? The merry-go-round. What a delectable monster I’ve become it seems, wading through the middle of life as if it were a strange kind of kiddy […]
Enjoying a Walk Around a Frozen Lake ……….Came a sound: a sparrow-Mozart …..…..…..…..…..playing a tiny rusted piano! …..…..In the gathering light, I stopped. Straining to hear, …..…..…..…..…..I could almost feel …..…..ice expanding into the path of least resistance, starting in the mind, …..…..…..…..…..down the throat …..…..to the heart. The sound scattered—the wind on the lake […]
Inhale Evening burns pale blue edges while yellow-brown smears separate that blue from oranges, reds, and purples extinguish in black cityscapes and trees tops. Above, blue drains to night, spreading to black. And the sun sets to sleep. And we all sleep. Cities pretend to live on, awake, lighting the night with electricity, the sun’s […]
We Still Had Scrabble When we lost our way with words, when I could no longer talk to my mother, all utterances turned to confusion – ……….Now that you married your father… We still had Scrabble. Simple joy in adding a good word, working the edge, reaching the dark blue square, or triple word score […]
fetoscope fetoscope noun fe·to·scope | \ ˈfē-tə-ˌskōp\ definition of fetoscope 1 : an endoscope for visual examination of the pregnant uterus 2 : a stethoscope for listening to the fetal heartbeat my mother works as a receptionist, my father, his grasp of english still slippery, works in a factory down the street. the shipping truck […]
Idle and Steam Obligation exists as a stabilizing force. Without it, our flesh would slide from its bones. This suggests obligation is also a physiological force. And it is, at least insomuch as every social pressure is felt by the body. Sitting in this same spot on the sofa, the right side, the side closest […]
Onions This argument is about onions. The proper way to cook them. The shadow of my father, standing over my shoulder, a dark heft, the abused child turned to a man: belittled, cowed, gaslit, instructed to ignore his own father assaulting his mother in front of the three siblings. In the kitchen he tells me […]
“Get Well Soon” Cards in the Behavioral Detention Center I have black and white prints from Thomas Kincaid, to fill with sharp Crayolas. Winter fleeces of Salmon for these kids sleighing and sleighing. I move scrawls to fill in time. We think you might be ready to go home next Tuesday, they say. Outside, pine […]
Emergency Operation in Clouds Songs are too happy, sermons too long. Poetry whispers through the cream and the fear until the spin of service calls us to attend. We raise our right arms and scribble a promise, asking language to stand in our stead and fix the burning engines of the underworld. I am here […]
Driving Home From the Restaurant, I Forget One Word The night is bitter winter chill, the car unfamiliar, streetlights yellowing the driver’s face as he concentrates on the road. Off-guard, my father asks me, “Have you got far to drive tonight?” The car is unfamiliar to him, the streetlights yellow my face, but I don’t […]
With Condolences The cards people sent when my mother died— reproductions of vases filled with pastel flowers, empty green forests, beaches with ebbing waves, friends and family meant well, but I only believe half of it: Your mom had a good life and is in a better place written in long hand. But then: May […]
Suffer for the Words Did you suffer for the words? Was it painful to put them out when they had come in aright? How did you bear the carnage, the disemboweling of your own fresh first thoughts? Does crimson flow on every page, in bloody bone-cutting sparseness, so clean there’s no meat for the dog? […]
Ableist While you were sending flyers for running groups to people in wheelchairs you sent me a job ad the month after my retirement; a retirement, —I know—that you didn’t agree with, ignorance clouding your sight like a thousand mosquitoes, buzzing over my words of permanent and disability, poisoning your flesh until your tongue cut […]
MOTION After Mayor Gregor Robertson’s apology for the City of Vancouver’s role in the 1942 internment of Japanese Canadians THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT this writer-poet does hereby claim full perspective for their experiences. With both self-determination & sustenance, the writer-poet completely informs their sense of historical displacement, under- stands the colonial nature of a […]
IN MESHES the I, this I, an I is an uneven piece, a mismatched piece …………….a piece tugging at the corners that encase it, contain it ……..trying to stretch them, undo them, redo them the “corners” (which are not necessarily corners or at right angles) form a puzzle, a net, a fabric ……..……..……..……..……..……..in which the […]
Talking Apple Another night like this I’ll be split nerve. Say it’s the wind’s rattle, somethin’ crazy, juddering. The limping house quivers a bone, bruises a calf, & humming a pretty heel, breaks my mistress’s shoe. A feeble dance. Broadway’s fumble–up-the-stairs; its blunder –back-to-bed. Fraying the carpet’s thread. Beating wool & silk. Unravel blunder. Cloud […]
PORTRAIT OF THE POET AS TARGET I’m reading A.M. Klein’s The Rocking Chair – rescued from the basement bargain-bin of a now bankrupt used book store – just to kill a little time while waiting for my wife and kids on a bench by the loading area at IKEA in the heart of old town […]
Gesture On my way out of his room I said I’ll see you. He raised his arm. I didn’t think he had the strength. His forearm straight up, his knuckles facing me, he pumped his fist, bright, bitter glory in his eyes. Was it an insult? Was it pride flaming in him even when he […]
What it Means to Sing Forward i cycle through phrases of songs calling us alien, dirty, virus-infecting like the lady who struck me and screamed to an audience of fairies for five stops like shattering car windows— a Chinese doctor who couldn’t arrive at work like laying-off a factory manager after a decade like tethering […]
The history of the unknown What recoiled in the white moth, the glacial eyes, the history of the unknown. Glass slippers for the moon I said, and meant I flew into that flame, immolating the self. Obituaries for saints, and cockles and bee padding pistils, the golden blossom of the marrow. Loving hounding sounds, that […]
ESTATE they’ve replaced the apricots with apricot walls now they’re painting the stairs sixty years ago, every relic was sixty years nearer to hand the gold clocks on the ground floor hunker down in fifteen-minute intervals though only the duct tape ignored on the counter tells the time I walk outside for fresh air but […]
Afterword: Inheritance Author’s Bio Maurya Kerr is a bay area-based writer, educator, and artist. Maurya’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has appeared or is forthcoming in Blue River Review, River Heron Review, Inverted Syntax, Oyster River Pages, Chestnut Review, Mason Jar Press Journal, Harbor Review, and The Future of Black: A […]
Excerpt from DES MONSTERAS signal bars | wi-fi | time | headphones | battery <DES MONSTERAS …….share | send To lose someone when they, or you, are still new is to lose whatever was real and also all the possibilities. In my first year my mother was often whisked to hospital. I assume that […]
Pluviophile Yusuf Saadi Nightwood Editions, 2020 Deifying rain and language, Yusuf Saadi’s debut poetry collection, Pluviophile (lover of rain), flows with a playful dedication to the music of words. In an interview with Ariel Gordon, Saadi said, “I don’t have a theory of language or understand it at all, really, but I do often find […]
rushes from the river disappointment stephanie roberts McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020 Part way through her latest book, rushes from the river disappointment, stephanie roberts’ speaker essentializes much of the collection when she says, in “Now I Know,” “that first loss wakes the whole heart to its task / sometimes forever.” In roberts latest book, the […]
SOME LEAVES Gary Barwin and rob mclennan above/ground press, 2020 In a collection with a title that rings Whitmanian, seasoned collaborators with over 50 books published between them, rob mclennan and Gary Barwin offer five brief pages of poetry that come closer to feeling very Bradburian, examining the the collision of nature and the technology […]
Nothing You Build Here, Belongs Here Sara Cahill Marron Kelsay Books, 2021 The title of this book of poetry by Sara Cahill Marron suggests not just the provisional nature of our gig-economy servitude and the impermanence of late-stage capitalism where everything can be swept away in a moment, but also the alienation of contemporary urban […]
THE MIGRANT STATES Indran Amirthanayagam Hanging Loose Press, 2020 Indran Amirthanayagam has published seventeen books of poetry and recorded two albums with Haitian musicians. He is both a US diplomat and a citizen of the world who writes poetry in English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, French and Portuguese. From the rousing preface to the final poem […]
WHERE BEAUTY SURVIVED: AN AFRICADIAN MEMOIR George Elliott Clarke Knopf, 2021 Renowned poet George Elliott Clarke begins each of his books of poetry with an epigraph on beauty; fittingly, then, the title of his latest book is Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir. In keeping with the former Parliamentary Poet Laureate’s lifelong preoccupation with the […]
The Eleventh Hour Carolyn Marie Souaid Ekstasis Editions, 2021 Both the title of Carolyn Marie Souaid’s latest collection of poetry and the book’s cover graphic—the former warning that time has all but run out, the latter depicting a burnt orange moon overhanging shadowy, monolithic industrial buildings—threaten the reader with a premonitory, possibly dispiriting literary experience. […]
WALKING INTO AUGUST IN EAST-END TORONTO 2020 Is it how spruce don’t think, just do—arrange their boughs for things withwings to dip andglide on through? Or how the yellowcrane looms—strange arabesque-sur-bleu, distraction-dance, wide arcs boom-swung and slow—dwarfing all thatgrows nearby? Stow yourthrone in a box on high look down waydown to read what’s spelled below […]
WHITEWASH White is waves bright as crinkled sunlight—or sunrise, done up in foam White is Grevens Paerecider, Ironworks Pear Eau-de-Vie, Lunenburg County Winery Montbeliard Pear Wine, and Belle-de-Brillet Poire-et-Cognac White is the missing link* between Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor White is a spic-and-span E.R. with a scatalogical surgeon wielding a shit-smeared scalpel White is a […]
Nisha Patel is an award-winning queer and disabled artist. She was the City of Edmonton’s 8th Poet Laureate, and the 2019 Canadian Individual Slam Champion. She currently works as the 2021 Regional Writer in Residence. She is a recipient of the Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund Award and the University of Alberta Alumni Award of Excellence. Her debut collection COCONUT is available now at Glass Bookshop. You can find her at nishapatel.ca.
Nisha Patel was one of the finalist of the 2021 Vallum Chapbook Award for her chapbook Not a Disorder.
ORION My boy came into the room and said, Mom, you are the hound, Dad is the hunter, and I am the— but he couldn’t remember, so stood there, silent. I wanted to know, but forgot how to speak, form my lips into language, started to say dear or hart or morn—even though I knew […]
CONSPIRACY THEORY a circle of reason / a proof that cannot be proved or disproved / a mad mixture / a template for order / cast, shaped, readymade and launched / requires immediate response (response must have no minor errors) / a distrust, a witch hunt, an elaborate dance / behind the scenes / eyewitness […]
WHAT IS WORN IS WHAT HAS LIVED The wild rose was full with winter birds settled on the risen snow. Chickadee, nuthatch, junco. And in another house, your dying nearly complete. And the air thickening with snow, but the birds remained. How the heart closes a door so silently, nothing disturbs the quiet. And you […]
POSTCARD FROM THE ICE STORM — Independence, Oregon. January 2021 Dear N— Gone to bed happy, one hundred percent chance of a snow day, they say— midnight—gun-shot reports of tree-trunks cracked in two, ice-glazed oak chandeliers shattering on the rotunda floor. Utility poles crushing cars, the arctic insurrection cuts internet access, freezing assets and truth conditions. […]
TAPAS The first time I thought I was queer was after kissing my best friend in 7th grade. Or maybe …………………….. it was when I ate an apple. ……………………………………… The curve of the core and ……………………………………… seed so hidden and ……………………………………… poisonous. Maybe …………………….. it was drinking tea ……………………………………… with another friend and playing chess. […]
ONE MORE MOUNTAIN SUNRISE One more mountain sunrise, golden light, clouds of peach and lilac. The forest calls – I answer. Road dust and moss, pinecones and birdsong. I was going to write a poem for you. Instead, I chose one more mountain sunrise. Sally Quon is a back-country blogger, dirt-road diva, and teller […]
No thing, a zero in the amber of time, then one. At the edge of the mind a soft rime: then one.
The brook was running clear. Now it’s gone. I’m here, cried the killdeer, I’m here. Now it’s gone. Jewels of rain like We’ll grow rich with water, Like every number were prime. Then one. We built a small house in the womb of the woods. Twice you gave birth there. Now it’s gone. A storm sky etched by lightning, dissolved by light. Twelve bodies trenched with lye, then one. My name flashed in your mind, the[…]
DES MONSTERAS, excerpt signal bars | wi-fi | time | headphones | battery <DES MONSTERAS share | send We came off the mountain and I was still holding the stick I’d used to prod at the fire and as a baton to conduct us, singing; also to point at our paths and the solstice […]
if the forest heard is …………… it’s mirrors …. over ………………offering ………. until
a ….. jungle ….. here ……………. turn …………………………………… .dressed
leaping in ………………………………………………………………………. … mistakes
…………………………………………… are, as they all say ………………. embarrassed
…………………………………………… over—whelming …………………..mushrooms
…………………………………………………………………………………………… images
ONE SHOT OVER THE LINE — after Kevin Carter Necklacing: the act of hanging a tire soaked in petrol around a person’s neck then lighting it on fire It gets heavy after a while and they always fall over crumpled into a pile of human remains in the sand the smell stays in your clothes […]
have you forgotten the terms of this pact, the lines we once lifted from songs that remind me of bells and stems, a collection of waves, a kill, a cure, a whim made permanent, arcane
did we ever lie close in the black of a room belonging to no-one, switched like breakers curved to conduct the pitch of a laugh, a meteor shower, a shimmer, a culvert, a quarry turned sleight of hand so thin the grasp of whispers held for hatching plans to stay somewhere within your reach, an iceberg, an archive, steady, remote unflinching, done and[…]
THE GIRL The girl from high school—not my high school—had long straight hair and a foxy face and her body, a cylinder, with slightly wider hips, was perfect for the sheath dresses she wore. Vee was a Circassian, famous beauties in their day, well-prized as slaves, her mother a refugee from Turkey, never marry a […]
THE SECOND PERSON HAS DEPARTED A gold sequin dress isn’t any use in a fire. I scribble down every cypher I gathered about you. There is no kindness in letting you know when the world unclasps, emptying its prayer palms of us, our preordained survival. Did you expect me to carry a gun? asks the […]
chapel street shifts pitch deep winter;
its edges, sharper its scents brighter, brittle
like peppermint ……………. or bone
.
where fever …. bush frozen
berry holly reaches its thorns to bristle
my fingers with its bitter tang
…………………………………. where deep
QUICKNESS 1. let there be bears when you need bears and quickness like with rocks something that says watch 2. let there be quickness like with bears let the past arrive when you need sky like a wrist let the future 3. let the bears let the quickness let the rocks the sky let the […]
PERCENTAGES I’m 100% sure that I’m not 100% sure who I am. I’m 78% sure that I’m not a good person. I’m 75% sure that I’m not a bad person. I’m 82% sure that my favourite colour is blue. I’m 100% sure that I’ve never used needle drugs, but I’m 100% sure that I’ve thought […]
DANGEROUS DRIVING ………. I clocked you on the verge as I dawdled in the slow lane— …. knew I shouldn’t stop but slowed and rolled my window down— ……………………. you pulled out sharp ………. your bumper glancing mine. …. Now my heart’s a demented engine: It brakes at green lights ….. speeds up at red […]
THESE BODIES, SOMEHOW how quickly the past has burned with throttle and forgotten fire with lifelines and bloodlines and scalding astronomy how dense the eyes of the mind thick to the tongue, sweetening of shadow and raw as yew bark, peeled free with fingernails or the plying of a rusty pocket knife how vast and […]
TANKA Sous l’oeil vif-argent Tes pensées s’accélèrent Fresques zébrées d’or Crépitent soudain Tes paroles Perséides Author’s Bio PAUL-GEORGES LEROUX has published poetry and short stories. As a screenwriter, he has written and co-written both documentaries and fictions. He has lived in Iceland, France, and Greece. His poems appeared in poetry magazines such as Mouvances, […]
CLOUD …………………… like a metaphysician …………………… on call, the cloud scales to meet your unique business ………. needs, no matter where you sit ………………………… in the celestial …………………………………………….. org chart curls range from kinky to soft ringlets. whether ………. you’re black white Asian …………………… Latin Mediterranean ………. or any glorious combo of the above, there […]
THE CULTURAL BOOK OF THE DEAD — for James Dean The little bastard speeds into the canon …. An icon cloned on postage stamps ….On posters Transfiguration of a fan-fuelled self-absorption ….A leather jacket stoned on youth ….brooding fast-forwarding ….You know the reaching for a six-pack, the remote A script the cause for grief The […]
PRIME MOVER Teapot Dome North of Casper, near the seeps Of crude at Powder Spring That brought the early wildcatters West into Wyoming Speeding over drilling fields Where oil and water meet In pools beneath the horsehead pumps Lifting on the downbeat Up ahead a hundred feet A kiting bird of prey Pale wings flashing, […]
NOTE After we met I emailed you and asked if you wanted to have coffee with me and give me advice about finding an apartment in New York since you had recently moved there but you never responded because I think you assumed the apartment thing was just an excuse to see you again and […]
JURISDICTION OF THE SELF-CLEANING OVEN [Alberta in late 2006] That booze-wise, two-stroke shill the party boss. An assembly close to thirty years redundant. Civic revulsion stillborn. PR gloss the face of untried force: plain truth best blent with ooze, like bitumen under a cap of moss. More realtors by the day, his agents, sent corkscrew […]
WARRANT OFFICER HAWKO —for Jason MacPhail Crow-nosed; cigar stub of a face, slaps blueberry pie into an outstretched tin canteen cup like an insult. Acting as if I was a freckle-wristed Dickensian character holding out a bowl for more. Slams in sludge-brown army stew, tills the muck with ladle; churns it until the mess-kit metamorphoses […]
THE WEIRD KID SEATED AT THE BACK OF THE CLASSROOM Speed freak is what they called him No speed was too great for this maniacal son Backing up in an easy roll his heartbeat quadruples Intensity white hot against a delicate summer breeze Engines simulate orgasm as pistons compress and eject their fluid Moonlight invigorates […]
SPEED Saint Senna saw God, so he said, as he zipped around the track at 300 km/hr. Slipped beyond design constraints, was a genius in the rain, this Brazilian bad boy not from the wrong side of town but the wrong hemisphere. Trashtalked with his motor mouth, showing up the Europeans at their sport on […]
THRIFT Thrift, thrift. Will’s word for speed, acceleration, ………. tempo of betrayal, the time it takes to hasten ambition, poison your brother, ………. marry his widow, speed up accession. Thrift is the itchy finger on the trigger, ………. split-second timing of do or die, blink of an assassin’s eye—thrifty shutter speed ………. in the quick […]
WHY WE CRY ON PLANES Barred from our devices It’s painfully apparent— The world goes on without us. Inhaling the stale air Of many moods, Our freedom to choose Clooney or Witherspoon, I bear the breakneck interval Silently chanting Cancun, Cancun, Cancun. Author’s Bio ANDY MCGUIRE releases music under the alias John Alice. His […]
HESITATION MARKS I have worshipped the wrong gods and grace in the space of one heartbeat, ridged with bright shards of broken glass. My future lit by bridges and their burning or hot-wired to this smear of light and speed, tied up with ribbons into the shape of a man. Author’s Bio A. GARNETT […]
A NONPARTISAN CONVERSATION WITH GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE Interview by Henry Kronk Henry Kronk: You were just elected [or, as I should have said, appointed] to be the parliamentary poet laureate. Congratulations, by the way. George Elliott Clarke: Thank you, Henry. Merci beaucoup. HK: Would you have thought twice about [accepting] that appointment had Stephen Harper’s […]
WINTER WIND How do you kick up your heels with such gusto at three in the morning? Your rage rattles windows and doors, your wails mournful as a banshee scorned Awakened we dangle on bedsides like tree branches bent from your rampage. Click here to watch Katherine Noone read this poem. Author’s Bio Katherine […]
CHAINSAW DHAMMA After the pre-dawn hour of chanting and meditation in the dhamma hall on Setting in Motion the Wheel of Dhamma lokutaro yo ca tadattha-dipano (that which is beyond the conditioned world) and after the hot oatmeal prepared by the anagarikas in white …………………… lay attendants remains of frost dripping off the kitchen […]
INCORPORATE WORLD OF THE CORPORATE LEADER After reading Redesigning Leadership by John Maeda Twit for tat subject lines @ in pseudo aphorisms— the leader seeks to climb on his own shoulders the kinship of his own acronyms into his last name. Where is the ship of his leadership? Who is stirring at the wheel? The […]
HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM HOME Woken by the erratic siren; coyote weaving the valley chanting code: three yips, a howl, pause. Looped. The moon floods the frozen world, the coyote’s voice stitches together our careful, private distances. So close at one point she seemed just under my window, calling up. Calling on all the […]
THE MEGAFAUN: FACT OR FICTION? It’s thought they died with their necks bent. The twelve-foot splay of their antlers the tonnage of their antlers driving their muzzles into ploughshares. A sacred knot in their shoulders a perpetual shrug in their shoulders heaving their bodies over plains endless with grass their heat through continents of ice […]
UNTAMED HEART Candles spark and flicker on the Cardiac ………. Unit, one for each year of my mother’s untamed ………………. heart. Her ticker flutters wilder than the rhythms of eighty-eight birthdays before. Beds in the Quad ………. cradle four heart patients, one for each chamber ………………. of the wordless heart. The lifespan longer than a […]
CORD First the forces: gases, heat and radiation; stars. We are stardust sing the physicist and bard. We are quartz and bats and roses, we are poetry: Rimbaud, Blake. Baudelaire, Bidart. We’re fugue of Bach and Glass; Celan. World gets into us every breath. Yes to every sentence. I held to the imbecile cord—till it […]
BESTIARY There is no place to hide before God ………. whose name we invented as if our imagination needed a shelter from the storm or a hut of our own to come home to or, perhaps, a safe to put away our terrific ………. treasures. There is no place to hide before animals, ………. themselves […]
BEDLAM SPRING* write in ink as green as arsenic wallpaper that killed Napoleon take photo of azure hole in clouds inebriate your eyes chartreuse leaves their new spring leap into fresh untamed season but bide a while bide a while burn your Russian amber drink your Irish tea stay away from strange men on the […]
SCHIZOPHRENIC the story starts with a daughter image of a white dove & stops with a shrinking room the crushing ceiling rushing to meet her between the beginning & the end his voice visits her from time to time the sweaty fear of fear glides by, a bicycle he wears a cock-feathered cap she has […]
SHIFTING BASELINE SYNDROME A cup of coffee was always a dollar fifty. The fisheries were always at their current level. From the windows of an airplane the Great Lakes were always noosed in four-lane highways. The land was always distributed in neat tight little stamps. There were never any birds here. A moose was always […]
THE BEAST IN THE GARDEN “Mountain lion tours Gourmet Ghetto” —Berkeleyside (headline), August 31, 2010 Pecking and pecking at the chicken-coop wire The chicken cannot hear the chicken-keeper; Eggs fall apart; their shells cannot hold; Loose embryos are spilled into the world, The bloody yolks are spilled, and everywhere Sustainable ingredients are spoiled; Chefs waste […]
THE SCURRYING WHITE MICE DISAPPEAR Where have they gone? The cage door unlocked is left open but that answers nothing. The snow outside will hide them if they are successful in crafting flattened versions of themselves and leave through the space where the high wall ends. This is only the nothing that is. Not a […]
RATATOSK In the Old Norse, “Bore-tooth.” Family: sciuridae, from the ancient Greek: skiouros, meaning “shadow-tailed.” He is a streak of red zigzagging down that grey ash, hind legs outstretched as he runs away from the Eagle. He has new words for Nídhögg, can easily leap onto that scaly head, whisper them into his ear, brown […]
THE WEED THAT GROWS WILD The weed that grows wild That you can’t stomp out Green leaf purple buds The weed that gets you talking Laughing Presence weed, fabulizing weed Washington’s weed That makes a great shirt Weed you can’t ignore growing on the path So aromatic That weed you had once in Ireland In […]
PASS THE NOTE in the palm of your hand. cup it in the hollow between life line and the lines of children. sometimes I check mine to see if my wife is pregnant again. pass it like a drug deal on a crowded subway platform and the train’s about to come. somewhere there is […]
APPLE TO APPLE In the season of apples suspended in air, wood piles and winter spiders, you are lost with a canvas bag; an apple a book and a camera. Travel past previous windows, a green house between here and not take a photographbooks hold clues, save the apple for later. You fall forward from […]
LAST EVENING I STUMBLED Last evening I stumbled past smokers in doorways of boarding houses, ex-sailors’ rooming houses beside the inland sea, & up the gravel road again towards the lighthouse poised between two harbours now its panning light engulfed by Christmas strings of orange & white, & sat still on a Muskoka chair, its […]
THE LONG STUDY Mother, now listen to my words. I see Your soul in anger; this is a foolish and an evil rage. Oh, I know when we stand before a helpless Doom, how hard it is to bear. [pause] —from “Iphigenia in Aulis,” Euripides The Mother talked to me as if I were drawing […]
ODYSSEUS In the worst moments, when the sea rises up to engulf him or fires the arrows of the sun to scorch his eyes, the image he clings to is not the nymph, or the sorceress, or his wife or unknown child. It’s the thought of roots, strong and hale past death, stretching into the […]
DECOMMISSIONED PLANES It’s not easy to pull the track blinds, look for cedar waxwings or passenger jets through dad’s cheapo binoculars, check the furnace filters, pilot light, as engines rumble overhead. Decommissioned planes in long-term storage in the Mojave are obsolete yet invincible. Because of the dry climate, they don’t rust, parts are recycled or […]
CONCUSSION 0H08D (or “Back Way To The Mental Hospital”) Haphazardness with uncertain quirks. The last main corner juxtaposes a junkyard. Psychiatrists never follow a script, what you feel is tolerable. The obvious route has padding that stops mid-air. Every change conveys ability, impromptu symmetry. If you jump you’ll feel it later— your sunken body escaping […]
PTERYGOTA Two moths lie perched on a May leaf quivering downwind beats jacked legs torque, coursing electric They are the underdogs of meetings, the pheromones calling lost bottle, directionless longing for her. He looks at her with lidless kaleidoscopes. He does not speak English but he knows what love is. It is written on the […]
ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE But it’s gotta be Authentic And we both know We’ve never known Real love (Not even close) They sing about it And it’s gotta be Out there Somewhere (Please darling Leave before We get any deeper) Please tell me you believe Author’s Bio DAVID ROMANDA was born in Kelowna, […]
LE THORKELL MÁNI L’Univers dans sa patte de marbre Tient déjà solidement mon cerveau Il m’envahit, me parcourt Me libère, me désarme Me d lestant de tout mon superflu De ce monstre agité De cet acharnement de drames Au profil de mes traits Se découpe ma vie Tout contre mon coeur Un animal de lumière Criblé […]
LE LIVRE DES MUTATIONS Dans le wagon-restaurant le fortune cookie conseillait sobrement: N’ajoutez aucun Bonsa à votre jardin. Je ne laisserai donc plus entrer une nouvelle arborescence dans ma vie. Ses branches déploieraient Quatre saisons de petites tristesses. Le sentiment laqué de ce qui s’en va, Le noir tunnel de ce qui s’en vient. Le […]
THE FALL October ripens as the fallen apples rot on an orchard bed. In the woods of Golden Acres Park, daylight descends whitely on branches, leaves, and the crushed-stone path that winds through the trees turning in fall. It is afternoon, is customary on the bed of stones for a hoary slumber to pin a […]
RUNNING AROUND LISTENING TO THE CARS Up to my ears in work, a family in the background, those late 80’s found me in a metallic blue Camaro listening to “Drive” and driving I was the streets of Woodstock and roads of Oxford, especially from spring ‘86 to fall ‘88 Stopping for humid night tennis and […]
OIKONOMOS If there’s no getting over it, you’re going under. I’m afraid We’ve always been religious in this way. After the fight over the microwave You swore never to give an inch. You said Life was too short to share, which scared me: No one thinks of life that way when they’re in love— Like […]
THINGS SHE IS AFRAID TO DO IN AMSTERDAM She cannot enter a coffee shop. No way could she swim into dark caverns of leafy decor where people nibble cakes and cookies, smoke and drink coffee. If she smoked a joint she could forget herself, abandon control and reject the diamond in the carbon. As a […]
FAMILY HEIRLOOMS Quartzite A crevasse decorated with icicles rose ahead, as if the deep cleft just now surmounted had not provided sufficient majesty. We considered clusters of clouds; they contained almost everything that was important to us. Schist Not this dent du requin, nor the quartzite and schist, granite and gneiss, which, despite their styles […]
EPIPHANY yes is it possible that there lies buried deep in the irascible and rough-hewn pod ………. of the wild purple vetch a pearl-green orb so perfectly matched to the bleeding gold of the setting sun no certainly not in colour or grandiloquence but in a numinous glowing intensity of such power that it flings […]
HEARTBLEED VIRUS — for Dominik and Phoebe Diamond She added one to my one: but no-one saw this fling as more than binary. My processor said “it’s just for fun”— good enough for now, anyway. But O her 0 got to my 1, my fan superheated, all or none, her cipher stuck in my circuit: […]
FIG LEAVES In our doing and undoing, in our designs, the nakedness we try to hide: the corpse beneath the sheet laid out upon a stainless table. Plainly there, plainly. But we go on in our intricate designs. The clink of glasses, a swirl of opulence upon a porcelain plate, the tasteful tie and jacket, […]
OLIVES It’s always the springy stir plan, plant, hope slipped into earth-skin’s slopey pores (soon to be cellular mirrors) ………. glinty, green, spring flares ……….sprung from soft mossy pads as you slice on the chopping board This truth’s a bit musky for most ……….(like the unwashed uncle ……….invited for fettuccini champignon) “Tsk, tsk” or “snicker-snicker” […]
THE YEAR THAT SLOVJ ŽIŽEK FARTED The bride was displayed in her seven dresses—and one more—to the women, who could not take their eyes off her. At last the bridegroom was summoned to the chamber where she sat enthroned. He rose slowly and with dignity from his divan; but in so doing, for he was […]
Jay Winston Ritchie: When did you start writing poetry?
Monica McClure: I always wrote poetry …. I remember covering my lilacpainted walls one day with black fabric and writing very disparate poems on the walls. One was an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem that was about the death of a friend, and not accepting that death. I loved the brazenness of it. It goes: “You have gone to feed the roses so elegant and curled but[…]THE WISDOM OF CONFUSIONS One mustn’t confuse a scintilla with the Antilles. A scintilla is small The Antilles, also. But on a larger scale. A scintilla is closer to an iota, not to be confused with Antarctica. An iota is dotless. Antarctica is dotted with penguins. This is how you tell them apart. Iota […]
BUZZ Self-actualization and its derivatives were fun words Are you feeling self-actualized today? I’m so self-actualized I achieved self-actualization last night It could mean anything Libidinous silly virtuous Mockery just heavy enough to taste It webbed in your mouth Cotton candy Today, it’s empowerment When you allow your staff to take on your despised task […]
MONTREAL CHIC Montreal looks like two chapped lips slightly parted on a map. Take that, Toronto! Take that, New York! But Italy —you chic leather boot from 40, 000 feet up— Goddamn you, Italy. You always have to look the best. Author’s Bio Joshua Levy’s work has appeared in Oxford University Press, Maisonneuve, Feathertale […]
FOUR FROGS For the past half century, I have never seen A single frog in this city, not even in the whole country But there are four big-mouthed frogs leaping around Afar in a ricefield of my native village, four frogs Squatting under the rotten bridge on the way leading To an unknown town, four […]
SPIT The coffee bean bit that must have clung to the mug’s rim, now aswish in the coffee with which my mouth’s awash (—like a beached fish ………. flung, returned to the surging ocean’s rising tide— ………. or perhaps like Pinocchio or Geppetto spat ………. from a Moby Dick’s rancid gastric insides—), the bean bit […]
Artist’s Bio Yoann Cimier is a French photographer based in Sidi Bou Saïd, Tunisia (North Africa). His practice is centered around human and landscape, in the Mediterranean area. His series (like Nomad’s Land) rely on a minimal or even sculptural approach to photography. His technique, which is part of the control of chance and coincidence, […]
WORKING TITLE Why, it got so bad that they began to laugh before I opened my mouth. —Dorothy Parker It’s not just the gin, I can assure you. An empty round of lives we bring to this blank page of a hotel, whining to be filled; the envy of every foyer and curtain club that […]
ODE TO JOY Something in the way you say papoose makes me smile. A nail file can come in handy in a jail cell in Mexico. Row boats are particularly romantic during foggy weather. Has anyone ever told you peacock feathers look fetching on you before? For the record, crazy glue much prefers to be […]
INTERMARRIAGE My wife—québécoise catholic, meaning lapsed—of eight hours is opening wedding presents in our hotel room. The tall blond shiksa Ken’s found himself (my uncle Herbie’s description) raises her blue eyes and bewildered by such family generosity, declares The first three presents are from the same couple—did I meet Mazel and Tov? Author’s Bio […]
Artist’s Bio Louis Perreault (b. 1979) lives and works in Montreal. He deploys his practice within his own personal photographic projects and in the publishing initiatives to which he collaborates. Founder and co-director of Les Éditions du Renard, he also teaches photography at Cégep André-Laurendeau. His work explores the notion of place by trying to […]
A SHORT DELIBERATION ON BEING A CREATIVE PERSON AND THE RELATIVE UNIMPORTANCE OF THINGS glossary: important, as in needs attention, could wait …………… Important, as in needs attention now …………… unimportant, as in never has and never will need attention there are twenty-four hours in a day, at least a few of which are normally […]
PRIVACY ACTS I’ve just been asked to sign a waiver so the boarding-kennel manager can hand out information to the vet ………. about the cat in an emergency—a recent edict of ………. the privacy act. I’m glad society’s concerned about protecting data on the cat’s behalf. He is a private animal, without a doubt, ………. […]
WOODPECKERS AND TV we make the forests but they suck woodpeckers do not suck woodpeckers have no forests there is no TV for woodpeckers they know the forests suck the woodpeckers are darling they do not suck there is no TV for woodpeckers we avoid the forests during firelight and with little darlings but they […]
THE OUTSIDER Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down today. Nothing gold can stay. — Robert Frost — S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders Snide comments about the nature of […]
IT’S WINTER THE GODS LOVE high and wind-swept where rivers begin and snow whirls like Sarasvati circling Brahma, his lust growing five faces to keep ten eyes on her but that comes after mountains moon, sun, an ocean of stars after darkness and light differ in winter, the gods shed headgear and garlands, sandals and […]
PAGE FROM A LOST NOTEBOOK It wasn’t a comic rhyme for someone’s birthday, but a serious poem, my first… ………. …two major classes of cardiac fibrillation, in praise of my brother—then young and strong—sitting hunkered, ………. atrial and ventricular— over a guitar, beside the campfire. ………. the rapid, irregular, unsynchronized contraction of muscle fibers— “Jumbled […]
THE SWANS FLEW OUT OF THE SUN like scorpions of the air, like locust. We shot & they fell like laundry sacks. Bad idea. More came. White plumage blocked the sun, like weather. Like one bird. We watched the swarm from our parks & balconies. We shut down the city. We shot with antiaircraft guns, […]
AT WATER’S EDGE Let still water be your mirror and noonday clarity frame your face breathe according to the slow rhythm of butterfly wings—closing, opening let water trace the outline of your body as you slide through it— notice past infiltrates present— cup the water, redolent of leaves, in a curve of cheek, blow it […]
AN INDENTATION IS ALSO A WHERE fires in the interior once gave ash that stormed over mountains. a glyph of troubled carbon …. vicarious on the wide green leaf of a sunflower proved there was no defence for a july of bleak material. back then ….definitions parsed moments of our falling into them until even […]
NOR’EASTER The house on Atlantic Ave ………. teeters on the embankment’s ………. edge— ………. a feather could send it crashing. The black-blue sea there’s no stopping ………. kicks in the door, strangles shore. House’s floor: water’s feet. Walls: sand and froth. Salt: a tarnished coating. Wind: a burglar wrestling shutters ………. whistles a tune about […]
HELICOPTER To propel upward press through the clamped-down lid a two-way bed is all that’s needed. A mutable bed, a mutual bed. One moment replaces another. A tear table, a tea bench. Inexact, uneven rotors supply lift, pull vertically. To feel the All— the wind’s lid open in the dust. Author’s Bio JAMI […]
SHADOWGRAPH 141: TO TRACE OUT A SHALLOW FIGURE (poetry detected in douglas osheroff’s nobel physics lecture, 1996) news to them! ‘worlds just waiting/to be discovered.’ (school: children passing.) ‘the lower we go, the cooler we get…’ (the arctic circular.) when i married my results… beckett, ‘waiting the verdict!’ big fish, god caught/in one mind. (the […]
KAKAPA BAY As if at the near edge of an expanse of blue chemise, froth scallops the lava collar bone of a rock point. Past the slate roof line of the house below us, the air is all fan snap, palms batting off wind. Across the water, behind a light haze, Haleakala visible atop Maui. […]
AS FAR AS I CAN TELL A lidless idleness designed to mesmerize, out of which hesitancy and reluctance give way to calibrations minute but not insignificant, day in, day out, rocked by the tidal bed the shell it’s attached to is attached to, complacent in its mantle of unconscious soft tissue, it grows radially as […]
HOLE No sharp-shinned hawk perches on the roof rack of his car and scans for song birds; the reddening ivy along a stone wall deepens in hue; when he picks a sun-gold tomato in the garden and savors the burst in his mouth, he catches a mock orange spray in the air; and as he […]
IVY LEAGUE GRADUATION SPEECH Though you graduated from here, you have only dragged things out: eventually you will be spared nothing. After so much has been done for you, you will know what it is to be a means for others’ ends, your time a commodity, your life something to sell. They’ve told you to […]
LEAP DAY BIRTHDAY Today, a bright one in February, sun made it down almost the whole way into the courtyard. Knucklebones of tiny trees. Arc of shadow on brick and glass as something enormous comes near, and decides to withdraw, peering out of the vertiginous blue, as it does sometimes. No, the off-years are better, […]
EILMER OF MALMESBURY He had by some means, I scarcely know what, fastened wings to his hands and feet so that, mistaking fable for truth, he might fly like Daedalus, and, collecting the breeze upon the summit of a tower, flew for more than a furlong. —William of Malmsebury The votive candles flicker but […]
FINDING THE FIELD WITH NO ROADS I cast my bread on the waters, what I’d wanted and loved shuffled off on a raft, waved, promised to call then never looked back. Sometimes grief braids a rope, crafts a cage or a prison. I set the last brick, found a noose coiled round my neck. What […]
SASKATOON AT THE END OF JUNE Just outside the zone the tourist map describes as downtown there’s a giant pile of some commodity that recently was underground. Gravel, road-salt, potash, coke? Giant piles stand out in this geography. The wind, though strong, is temperate that drives the grit on Twentieth against my cheek and then […]
DIETARY RESTRICTIONS At night I dream of performing polygraph tests on pomegranates. By day I watch Tampopo and think slurp, slurp. Poco a poco I even begin to feel the miso-loaded mist on my face, to taste the universe distilled to a rococo so-and-so of noodles and beef. I can’t even seek the brief, shame-inflected […]
SHIFTS OF BEING Distant parish bells chime for morning prayers. Overhead, … buzzards circle, …… slyly waiting as I munch Bavarian pastrami & brittlekorn on the brow … of my golden meadow’s ………. evolutionary fold. So begin exclamations in this fertile orb of life, … in this search for biological marvels across atmospheres of altered […]
TO MY MOTHER, ALOUD Send your snail mail and I’ll hide the table salt. When I stamped my last mail-order bride, she threw the book at me. Her velvet twinset in divorce court the only good pairing that came of our match. Now, I work hotlines pushing human tissue samplings: primed for fucks or transplants. […]
HER FIRST FIRST NATIONS BOYFRIEND That summer she saddled a cabin of tank tops and shorts and rode them every day. But at night, the counsellors collected elsewhere. She spent her time speculating: which cigarette liked which scrunchie? The older blonds, coasting between semesters of limestone, got claimed pronto. The juniors breathed in almost any […]
SYLLABIC ACROSTIC: HOODOOS (BRYCE CANYON) A tall, thin spire of rock that protrudes from the bottom of an arid drainage basin or badland. ……….. —National Park Service Bristlecone Pines’ storm-scoured roots twist into limestone slopes yielding to ice that widens cliff-face caverns and grottoes, erosion’s slow slide gliding counterclockwise underneath afternoon’s unbroken blue. Numinous lithic […]
BOCIANY (STORKS): AFTER CHEŁMOŃSKI It’s the current he supposes. To be warmed by faltering electricity. Women watch men watch football on dying televisions, men between beers. Storks grasp bramble and twig, not as souvenir, but as living theatre. ~ Chełmonski’s Poland, oil on canvas, circa 1900. A son and father in a field on a […]
OAHU seeing something there a glint, quick light rippling in the tide half a heartbeat closer dark, silvered triggerfish back and forth . . . back and forth ships and planes and submarines reconnaissance, surveillance—coastal helicopters, back and forth, back and forth . . . in the tide, the triggerfish in the boxes up the […]
SAN GREGORIO San Gregorio has been there before her before those two wild dogs were. An ancient temple that I saw before but had not seen until now, now that I wanted to climb up its hill, feet digging into the glittering orange soil a sand mattress with olive tree springs spring almonds stone-cracked, savoured […]
RUPTURE Pearls in a silver bowl, half the clasp, no string. Among the smaller stars, fallen planets. I was your final dance. The night and its prophets, all your eyes watching. You were a road, a river; now you’re spindrift, washed up. Where everything, eventually, is finished. Boarded up. Abandoned. Your cities of ruin. Little […]
CARBON COPY Your third life starts the split second you die from a vaccination gone awry. Consolation: consciousness restored from a lifetime of metadata hoarded on Google servers. Virtual no more, a superhuman subroutine emerges from primordial digital soup, an avatar so flawless your lover and mother barely notice the quiet fleck of death gleaming […]
BOG PEOPLE and what voyage, spouseless, strangers have we embarked upon? if something untoward happens on this unseasonable Calgary day, unexpectedness and privacy its own crypt earthquakes, an overflowing Bow River pterodactyl-disaster, pre-punishment for what we could do (if) in another millennium which two Bog People would we be? museum exhibit, exhibitionism evolution, devolution a […]
HUNTER GATHERER The Serengeti holds the naked man. Bare body hunched like a pink flamingo straining water for detritus; evolution’s fallen angel. The hairless string bean of the animal kingdom. Opposable thumb, binocular vision; cunning as a noun going straight for the jugular. I’ve studied the universe for the billiard game it is. The slow […]
EVOLUTION Not a surface-world of steady, predictable motion. We’d much prefer the soft curve of canoe spooned by a placid lake, with little to no tidal break to upset the measured stroke. A demure hand would have no trouble navigating this rich velvet soupe de jour. But: something churns … grunts out with a little […]
TEXT ME WHEN YOU’RE DONE, WORLD Acceptable in thy sight could mean anyone. I am transforming. Watch that dog on the corner with the luscious coat of rust. It could be me. Hearing is going but I can still smell the rose lance-petals of beloved fireweed. Flames sweep over the land. Terror comes every night. […]
XLV They want a voice that performs its wry ownership of literary pedigree, that airily scatters namedrops into a liturgical giving of finger. Matthew Arnold elaborated on the flawless logic that hears genius wherever genius abides: those first-rate men seriously thought, they seriously felt, and their musicality demonstrates their sincerity … although these days, a […]
20 What is a desert? This grips the machete that cuts the cane. What is smoke? Hoisting the basket of coal to the head. What are liberties? They pull on the tall boots that protect ………. against snakes. What is a wage? In the vapour of sulfur fields it brings the sarong tip ………. to […]
THE WORLD WITHOUT We cut ourselves on this regret like glass. Turn when there is no turning to be had—the small threat of our hands naked and shivering into the floating globes of our air. Shriveled grey of the salt-faced sidewalk to guide us—This is our own fault, own paws coy and dipping too […]
TRANSMUTATIONS* Not when, how or why, but what for, and where to, in the face of chaos and expansion, from the Big Bang to an Unheard Whimper— All Things Counter, Original, Spare, Strange* are rigged in our favour or we wouldn’t be here. Something will come from nothing: nothing to water, water to a single […]
AVES — for D. C. I Each passing shadow a prodigy of light Oblivious to origins. The cloud, with the back of its hand, dismisses the brilliance of the field Grazing the darker geese below. A dissembling vee Its dimensions the shape of restlessness To which I contribute my own, ceaseless, pose. Poised along the […]
AND THE GRASS, IT GROWS — with thanks to Madhur Anand It begins with the sun. Or it begins elsewhere, earlier, further away, but we will not. We will stay here, we will say it begins with the sun and not the sun but in the sun, in the heart of it, where the […]
LAKESHORE Along this strip you could once find vintage Thunderbirds pulling into burger joints before the movies, and afterward they’d go ripping up and down the pavement, surfing on the lake breeze. That was when the edge of town boomed and everyone went to Lakeshore to eat in diners caressed by the cool wind, and […]
TOPICAL PIECE: NOVEMBER 18, 2014 I am near the front. Geeta is complaining about the terrible Canadian headstand. So she renovates mine. Abhi’s hands under my shoulders feel like hydraulic jacks. Gulnaaz has to hold my ankles to keep me upright. Take her to the wall, Geeta commands, with two tri-folded blankets under her head. […]
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES FOR JOURNALISTS Try too hard to fit into a size 12 Times New Roman font weighing in at just under 200 words because that is the formula for blind and readable judgement, along with spell-check and 11/2 inch margins unless there’s an error, then the margins are set to 0 because there […]
LOVE SONG AS FIELD NOTES In heavily-wooded sequences the song ……. in my timed records ………………… varies from 2 to 31/2 seconds of notes burning down to a glow ……. In the space age of our courtship ………………… our love wore a cocked beret In the 18th century of our marriage ……. love enters ………………… […]
THE LOWERING OF EARS Thirty thousand locks, like colonies of commas. All those pockets and roomy pauses, where our words refuse to fit. Every question is as boundless as a shark-eye. Each parenthesis a fishhook— the worm, your furrowed brow. I ask trivial things about the art scene in Calgary. Avoiding her name like nettles, […]
LEANING OVER Leaning over a bridge in Bickford Park, larks and ermine burgle the Serviceberry. The chains we lug about keep me upright; it’s not falling I fear but the wilderness below. We slow down to swallow sound, rustling leaves and swaying grass—shielding Spring ciphers. Somewhere in the underbrush of seasons past loom answers […]
CUTE BEAR Rock darned ….. to singsong the elements ….. out my pocket .. the ghosts too many ……. in the quiet too quick before ….. our bedtime … followed …….. by robots of the night This is your prone breath ….. in the first heat wave ………. so sticky … with no touching I’m […]
STANDARD DISTRIBUTION Averages sentence most to ordinary measures of disappointment: mute car batteries and burnt toast what passes for catastrophe. The benign masses easily distinguished from those exiled to the margins, nature a balanced equation. The scale bends, extremes arcing, electricity pouncing from one prong to the other. Authenticity sounds out of tune the […]
THE PACIFIST If you knew, you could crumble empires a wink at a time. True power is not to inspire awe but to corrupt, twist moral gravity until it rains skyward. Your degraded youth stirs fear so potent it threatens to eclipse all bounds of discretion. I prefer to keep you broken in the […]
RESCUE Hope is the thing with feathers— That perches in the soul— ………. —Emily Dickinson A spell of fresh hells has you composing nothing. Muse flown, focus flailed and you—reluctant to rip the bandaid off—attending to broken news, concocted truth, cannot look away til now, to notice how molten light out there muffles particulars, bevels […]
WHEN LYING WAS IN VOGUE Even laughter was a lie. Even sadness. The way highways stretched beyond the next curve with their markers every tenth of a mile & their exit signs promising fuel & coffee, the possibility of a bed with its vague suggestion of desire. Nothing so tawdry. It was winter. Snow didn’t […]
PRISIM INDEX He turns and it is 11 o’clock, face pulled into light’s straight tail boastful of time the slaves it illumines. Of us, smiles; beacons somewhere in a forest, a satellite swings its arms cupped and wide, hugging you a path made for you, the prisms that index spines. I thumb through your […]
BECOMING HISTORY History is a cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of man. ………. —Percy Bysshe Shelley 1. Your breath almost imperceptible, the burr of hummingbird wings, as your chest rises and falls like the tubular flowers they scour for nectar. Then it stops and you become history. 2. As I walk home […]
GHOST That hearing of footsteps just that once when I was young— the screen door first, then linoleum, then carpet, then a pause then footsteps again, returning, carpet, linoleum, door, but no one coming or going no one crossing my view where I waited, turned in my chair, to see— could just as easily have […]
ARS MEMORIA Come: enter the theatre of my mind. Like Giulio Camillo, I invite you to step away from the bustling Venetian waterways, the charismatic, swarthy gondoliers, the mask vendors, merchants, and friars, rival factions of pundits and academics— and transcend onto a higher plane of awareness. You are not a stranger or spectator here. […]
BUZZING In awe and envy of the space-black fly as its peppercorn-body bounces ………………………………………… [like spitfire] off the edges of our attic bedroom, aware by the time it collides with another juggernaut of drywall it has already forgotten the intimate pain of pavement. Runaway punctuation from an ill-crafted sentence, the fly is faster […]
WORDS ARE POEMS AND POEM ARE POETRY Each time I phone home I hear about the conclusive water the lack of rain how the dams are drying up how the supplies are ending in a matter of days. Here the rain has been unremitting for a month straight busying itself with green leaning against […]
CURRENT The sludge-slow flow of a runaway current opens a path we can’t continue, tugs at what no hand can pull along. It’s how even water loses memory, travels a direction it cannot find, ……………….. a body let loose of its own skin to separate itself from what it belongs to— depth, surface, flow, source. […]
UNBEARABLE PARADISE self was a song almost coming to mind in beginning to be able to sing it walking through dark forest light breaking canopy until a clearing alone yet not feeling so the context of the journey a mystery in the absence of remembering no word for forgetting a need to advance to find […]
TILES AT JULES The tiles at Jules fix everything in my life. The tiles at Jules take me back to everywhere else I’d rather be. These tiles remind me of the dinner Nicolas took us for: a memorable meal at that bistro in Paris, where the tiles are just like the tiles at Jules and […]
THE CONSOLATION OF TREES with much taken away … it is a small mercy dementia patients have trees … their remaining presence ceaselessly focusing the horizon a horizon offering nothing that isn’t in the present tense but with much already lost maybe it is luck to have trees opulent … flooding the sky in dementia […]
2020 Winners 1st place:”Walking Into August in East-end Toronto 2020” by Judy Barlow 2nd place: “Border Crossings” by Mary Trafford Honourable Mention: “Linger Factor” by Josh Feit, Honourable Mention: “we lost ahmaud” by Esther Johnson, Honourable Mention:”As Unnoticed As Possible” by Michael Trussler The winning poems appear in Vallum 18:1 | Space. Thank you to Lillian Allen, our 2020 contest judge. 2019 […]
ROOST Quieter now, the engines, the road work, the generator, cement truck, track layer, steam roller, pedestrians hollering over the chunking of bike gears, the colossal vents of the curling rink, goose communication, your slow stabs of thought, and a winter of crows above, a system settling in over heated laces of concrete, under darkening […]
POEM THAT DOES NOT MENTION LISA Billy told me that thorny vine was the Devil’s Own. You’ll have to dig up his root and it’s a runner. I do not like the digging of holes inside them so many rocks and roots that want to joust, to unshovel me, so I snipped him with my […]
IT’S NOT AS IF I DON’T KNOW WHAT I NEED TO DO it’s not as if I don’t know what I need to do. …………………………………………………… this beautiful old barn. its owls and mice, musty air, misty pale yellow light … coming through high windows— a musical staff, populous motes singing across the lines. here […]
FINAL CALL We shared a climate neither could breathe, its truth hanging low like smoke. Tight-held hands, then tight-held mouths. We reeled ‘til our whirl reversed, unwound. So many memories I keep behind bricks not quite high enough to stop the leaking of tarnished light. Blame the years, if you need to. More distance than […]
MEMORY how can my brain remember to close my lips for the m lower the tip of my tongue for the s touch the roof of my mouth for the d so I can utter the words my sister died after my sister’s brain forgot how to breathe Author’s Bio Adele Graf’s poetry has […]
HUSK A night rain beats the windows, pushes a tree to the ground. I am writing you a poem on curls of garlic paper. The poem rasps, odorous, a minced head pressed by the side of a knife. It rains and rains in my kitchen. Heavy drops collect on the ceiling, skitter down the […]
THE SUN SETS, ETC. Air balloons over Gatineau. A setting sun. A family canoes across Dow Lake. Cyclists on the gravel trail. And in the park she sits alone. And she can’t describe. And she can’t be described. She’s lost solutions. There’s no solutions. They disconnect. Like Hass, trees sway like something. Like Muldoon, […]
THE INCOMMENSURATE / Though incommensurate with itself language nonetheless Somehow shoots a few arrows into the vanishing point of things which have come here from a great distance Which makes it clear we have come here from a great distance or are asleep To the future or for example the untenable proposition of flight […]
WAKING IN THE PRECEDING Hello my forever ago, don’t worry, you won’t be reading this much longer. You will have already returned in the body of a snowcloud which is suggestively, fashionably, only ever one second old. Yes darling, it’s me, it says as proof that in space, though there are many silences, fleeting […]
THE TRUTH HUNTERS Five o’clock in the camp of the Truth hunters: Talk, round and smooth as party balloons drifting on the evening air; almost casual, yes, beneath a fog of urgency. Seasoned veterans all beneath the canopy, canap s in hand, martinis, gin of only the highest calibre arming to encounter the countess and the […]
LAST OF THE CATCHERS I’ve never caught sight of what they catch, boys Static as old men, old men less awkward Than boys, patient as herons, as lizards Wrists flicked quick as tongues, flies pierced and deployed The lines cast far and teased, cast far and teased What cold voids the hooks slip through, […]
MAMILLA POOL Brambles hamper access to the ancient reservoir. The pool—agape and empty, dried to stone. The impulse was to save. The one hard lot was in the ground. We wanted fresh pool-water, in the months of hottest heat we wanted mainly to be slaked; pay attention; pray. If praise could fill the pool […]
FAITH So I read this poem about a rare spice with an unpronounceable name, and before I know it, I’m catapulted into sex and some car crash of emotions, and I think: Why can’t I write a poem like that? Why can’t I come up breathless like I do from under the surf for […]
FLOATS TO THE SKY Initially I did not plan …………. a painting of a ladder ………………… faithful to phantom ……………………………. noises before sleep wearing a clean chemise …………. beneath dirty shorts ………………… under a worn abaya ……………………………. in my pink slippers with my red cheeks in the shop …………. for spots of vitiligo ………………… and […]
ONE SAUCY LITTLE CLUE we’ve seen a thought but it was so quick we only got a glimpse not immediately realizing what we’d seen flash of red heels little tilted black hat a veil over the eyes satin stillettos that seemed to have rockets attached as the thought escaped nimbly as if its route […]
A SEVEN-STORY MOUNTAIN She climbs the ben …………… the ragged, ……………………. jagged brae, seven stories soaring to Eden’s sunlit peak. Bounded by southern seas, the mountain is the world, its two paths up or ……………………. down steep bluffs canopy white spires hover as she scales to surmount the top ridge crested with a stream, […]
PILGRAMAGE When the peregrine goes for the kill it’s the fastest creature on earth. On a column of air it wobbles, wings an upturned cradle for the surge of sky. Up there, a static speck to the naked eye, its eye is faultless, unwavering the world condensed to a single atom, a collapsed star in […]
WALTZ I kissed you from the left, after you debunked the afterlife; she kissed me from the left, as if to neutralize you were warned by text of horsemen, you were warned by text of flames; she begged me to drown with her but she found the sea too cold. you saw and you believed […]
TO FILL IN THE BLANK Forms and questions on everyday slips require that I fill in the blank, that I answer in a single space —Who am I— for taxes or something or a census for jobs, of course, most usually for me they say, quite casually wife of a house. Almost extinct, I am. […]
BUTTERFLY remember me like this: limbs swinging, voice singing, me swimming through the world with fierce butterfly, arms-only, slowest in the pool but damn well determined to make it. remember how when you talked to me, you never knew where the conversation would go, if we would talk about mars or cannibalism or chimpanzees […]
A LOOK BACK Cradling the top-tasting gin-soaked ice the lines between whispers against neighbourhood regulations— Obscure the view Our thoughts have trouble living next to poetry careen from pillow down to city sidewalk the sun the air the stillness ………………….. is still …………………………….. consumes chews cuts holds complaints dear Author’s Bio Jessi […]
A MUTENESS In the heatwave. It’s cold in the reading room and always have I work to do. A scholar opposite gives a little whinny Close to where I started. And far. Lake coming out the taps. Close. Close-ish. And far. Touching. Without speaking. The scholars here are hot— A woman with Tennyson hair wears […]
TAKING OFF Some people like to make a lot of noise when they arrive (screaming hollow hellos/bottles clanking/scrunching cellophane wrappers from food they pretend to have cooked) or when they leave (smacking kisses/rooting about for shoes & coats/shouting promises that they are okay to drive) /// These ones don’t come or go in V-formation/ they […]
FORBIDDEN Invisible, the mesh where each is held within our tiny square of breath and wire-sliced if flesh would press too far, too hard forgetting, in that moment deep within another’s eyes when darkness opens into a bright pool of air, and radiant, both surface trembling—do we dare? but reeling back stare at the glinting […]
THERE’S SUPERRADIANCE* in the motion of clouds — concepts spinning particles unseen ………….and falling, dark matter’s ……………………..steady hum — ………….………….………….……..she lives in memory ……………………..now, communes with cirrocumulus — today ……………………..less real than yesterday’s ……………………..still-stirring fires — ……………………..the gentling ……………………..strum of classical guitars, […]
AT HILLSIDE COFFEE AND TEA A woman orders angel-wing tea. While waiting she reads the daily horoscope a newspaper cutout taped to the counter beside the tip jar. I ask her what her fortune is for today. She’s quiet at first, then answers, paranoia. I, too, order angel-wing tea. While waiting I see a dark […]
A 1990’S PHENOMENON Four base pairs, seeds encoded for our superficial surfaces but where is the connection from phenome to phoneme, that gene of recessive thinking known to cause assumptions about what language should have been burned into my mouth from birth even though I have never set foot on the land of the mother […]
BROKEN WINGS The night sparkles in couplets, doodled in an ancient script. Rhymes and question marks sear the horizon rise and fall then disappear amongst the outlines of the trees. They’re trying to tell us something. I rush into the night. It’s so dark. Even my shadow doesn’t follow my overalls and bare feet racing […]
AFTER SCHOOL SPECIAL The work’s not bad; you’ve been here before, and you’re lucky the boss doesn’t care about the two-year crater in your resume. Just count change, smile, shelve biographies, A, B, C, tear into another midafternoon Oreo. Those kindergarten skills are coming in handy, kid. Count your blessings: the dust on your palms […]
GRASP have you forgotten the terms of this pact, the lines we once lifted from songs that remind me of bells and stems, a collection of waves, a kill, a cure, a whim made permanent, arcane did we ever lie close in the black of a room belonging to no-one, switched like breakers curved to […]
JUNIOR DICTIONARY Blog, broadband, voicemail, chatroom. How plugged-in the new dictionary is, how clean. No more need for words like beaver, boar, bullock, cheetah, colt, nor even gerbil, goldfish, guinea pig, hamster. Too much mess. When our children learn to cut and paste they do it cleanly with a mouse or better, a practised swipe […]
LA FONTAINE Leaves scud / sift / through parc at cross-posts, / like and dissimilar trying to come together. / Through incongruous sight, maybe. / I remembered you at the edge of the intersection, / remarking on passers-by: / a bare shoulder in November. / Wind in broken branches. / Clouds piercing the 90 degree […]
SAY HELLO TO CONNECTED LIVING They say it’s all connected. Departed. Departing. <Unborn> NB: your connection’s now the government. Rise, make connections with fellow bloggers, photographers, YouTubers and social influencers! #BREAKING: 51-year-old man charged with felony arson in connection with 9,600-acre #HolyFire A specific function for the zona incerta has not been determined but it […]
OTHERWORLD wish that I were a field, late summer wish that I were a woman picking up a fallen nest, carrying it home in the fold of her dress wish that I were the bird, outside her window the perfect ease of it, not held, not […]
DISCONNECT don’t adjoin me ……………………………………….no soupçon of infecting ………affection ……………..……………..……………..……no brush of a feather’s dust if it is the diffidence ………of a possible lie if it is the difference ……………..……………..of uncertainty ……………..……………..of unknowing ……………..……………..of unusualness ……………..……………..……………..……………..then a touch to test is good enough there can’t be ill ………..or illness …………………..in trying but don’t try to […]
CONVERSATIONAL CUL-DE-SAC You say discussion is a two-way street but the road is rough — my way is impeded — Halted Blocked …..by familiar signs STOP Wrong Way Yield No Passing Detour HERE […]
SEEKING BALANCE Locked in the psychiatric ward the patients may or may not see Christmas lights this year, or get to brush their hair, but one has seen stigmata on her toes. She says alien life forms drew wavy brown lines on broccoli stems in her lunch left on the floor of her room where […]
PITCHDOWN BAY the small sound of a falling snowflake, slow it down, low frequency rumble of a whale, both melting into the ocean in time, the water glowing as bright as lanterns, and sailors drowning as if they’d seen lighthouses, more lost men entering from the shore’s mouth, that emptiness between the stars, pupils compensating […]
UNITY AND DIVERSITY What’s time between us? Warp, wrinkle, the steady ticking of my kitchen clock. Electromagnetism runs to infinity a spectrum of paths, of highs and lows invisible, not without form and void. We are two souls, irreconcilable threads rising and falling in waves regular like the mindful breath. The lazy eye sees only […]
MY WIFE TEACHES ME TO DANCE When you teach me to dance I begin to notice fire dancing with wind, a fish with water, a car with colours in the traffic lights. When you teach me to dance I begin to see gravity dancing with a basketball, a comedian with a crowd’s laughter, the peanut […]
NOW Four months on a ship, 580 students, a famous poet, rough seas, rough seasons, assaults, the Amazon, that’s how the world is now, the vast world so small it breaks the heart that one could see it all. There remain in valleys or on hills possibly tribes as yet undiscovered, whatever that means. We […]
Black Pepper Poem Black pepper was my guide into the world of spice. ‘Siyah mirch’, you would call it. Irresistible when my sunny side up, half fried egg is peppered black. The dark thin membrane is layered off by the first dash of hot toast, exposing deep yellow. I pepper the egg once again. Making […]
LUST AND THE COSMOS — a heresy of lost seconds In the beginning, the genesis I fathom: two explosions, the two not quite coming at once; actually (except in Hollywood) more likely a big bang and seconds later another ignited by the first but needing twice the duration to, as it were, to come […]
JUMBO ELEGY “Paralysed force, gesture without motion;” —The Hollow Men The cement elephant plays chicken with a train, forever up ahead. With painted eyes he stares down the ghost of that locomotive. Makes it vanish. The town’s barren tracks like casket handles holding nothing’s ceaseless progress. Jumbo, the world’s most beloved behemoth, still as a […]
BREAST Over lunch we talk about the tumour. It has a name—invasive mucinous carcinoma— and a location, time-stamped on your breast: 4:30, in the lower left quadrant. A foreign language, but you’re a quick study, ready to navigate this strange land you never had it on your bucket list to visit. Everyone knows a few […]
LOGISTICS On a transport ship out of Chesapeake Bay bound for Sicily —the Big War— a box mislabeled “Projector Parts” contained 40,000 Purple Hearts. Author’s Bio Leland James is the author of Inside Apples, a full length book of poetry. His poems have been published in ten countries in many periodicals and anthologies, including, […]
ARROYO The dead do not come riding dark horses up out of the arroyo. They do not arrive in dust grey-shrouded singing the old songs. No, they arrive like turnips pulled winter-burned and cold from the soil. They lie at your feet, worm-riddled, creased with dirt in the furrows, fallen peasants left behind in the […]
POSTURE Good morning Good as in another Another as in plenty Plenty as in guilt Burden as in over-burdened The guilt of plenty Another morning’s “Good Morning!” It is still night with No sun to say “Rise!” No sun to say “Risen!” Still, a good morning A me to the right A me left in […]
* Side by side a planet that has no star you wander for years which means remorse has taken hold the way this dried love note never lets go its warmth though the afternoon becomes a place for constellations, is wobbling as silence and the end —where else can it hide is more forgiving than […]
HUNTER OF MOONBEAMS There was a time, When hunters, Threw nets into the sky, To catch small birds in flight. So I have flown, Into the net Of the hunter of moonbeams, Of the dream walker. Author’s Bio On January 7, 1950, at 14 years old, Byron Stratford Davis attempted to cross into the […]
HELD ME LIKE THE BABY I WAS we smell the forest fragrance red and the trees healthy or they are rotting the land is tilled to grow poison now we are not close enough to the water or the river or the lake and we go to sleep heavy in little houses or they are […]
ENOCH 1: 1-19 The end is Horror: Mountains melt in slides of lava and mud; The globe flares sheer fire. So much blood will flood the Earth, it’ll tilt back, wobbling on its axis. Monarchs, millionaires, military monsters, traders, traitors, will be penned in a valley brimmed— rimmed—with flame. They’ll be banded with iron fetters […]
Wiccan Craft in the Woods Taylor Creek Park Wooden staff in hand, purple cord and tunic, the caller summons us, “Oyay, Oyay!” Norse metal rounds his neck, his voice commanding and gentle. We follow, tread soft on grass, form a circle while a priest cuts the space with a sword. A witty one sweeps away […]
THE BURNING MAPLE This fall the Maples have said no To fear. Nothing can scare Them out their gold trappings. Others have quietly yielded: Judases, Sycamores, Tupelos— They’re done ghosting around The chicken fence, Between grass blades, inside brown bags. They are ready to zero down, again. The birds are gone. Naked Branches slither under […]
ah red lips red buttons eyelash well-trimmed. google myself once a blue afternoon. the cannon call foot to ball a black flock instead. woodpecker. nail. an eyelash shell. blue. 14 is the night version. you and me, bent. what do they call it, parsimony? the harmony, parsing? the harm in me, parsing? the harm in […]
WHO THE STRUMMER I am two women who live in parallel universes trying to break and re-create all bonds. She is aware of me and I, her but our communication a febrile ogdoad a nadir of loneliness. This blood-webbing capable of rescue yet every hour wraiths nicker scattershot across irradiated sand. I’m tidal. She’s trickling, […]
PUPA No, the dolls whisper. Patched monologues. Skip rope chants. Playing tag. Playing marbles. I came here one year ago. Bombed stone houses. Village of refugees. I only think about the dolls. I made one looking like my mother. Slipping under my skin. In the mirror I see her: she is there, in my body. […]
OBVIOUSLY A SHITTY DREAM We’re at your wedding to alcoholism the invitation features so many photos of your face framed by branches I think you are getting married to a tree I enter the banquet hall and Vincent the MC makes me change into a stretchy fuchsia dress gives me a lollipop I’m sexy and […]
ONE THING — THEN ANOTHER by Claire Kelly Review by Bill Neumire From poor to rich, small town to big city, East to West, Fredericton to Edmonton, Claire Kelly’s second full-length poetry collection, One Thing – Then Another, from ECW Press, travels Canada’s vast landmass in a restless search for settlement. Kelly, author of Maunder […]
MOTEL OF THE OPPOSABLE THUMBS by Stuart Ross Review by Bill Neumire A replete, grassroots career precedes Stuart Ross’ most recent book of poems, Motel of the Opposable Thumbs, out from Anvil Press. Ross, who first published at age sixteen, has been a player in the Canadian literary scene since the ‘70s. Set in five […]
A Conversation with Alexei Perry Cox Author of FINDING PLACES TO MAKE PLACES (Winner of 2019 Vallum Chapbook Award) Interview by Natalie Podaima Natalie Podaima (NP): Can you tell me a bit about the process of putting the book together—how did it come about? Alexei Perry Cox (APC): With skepticism and love. I mean broadly […]
A Conversation with Jason Camlot Author of CANLIT ACROSS MEDIA: UNARCHIVING THE LITERARY EVENT Interview by Rosie Long Decter Jason Camlot is a Montreal-based poet and an English professor at Concordia University. Over the course of his formidable career, he’s published four poetry collections and several academic texts. Camlot’s scholarly research ranges from Victorian literary […]
EAU DE STRIPPER darkness overcoming but don’t use that cliché hand down on the left, signal a turn, park here, not over there your headlights turning on automatically or with a bit of help from the knob, the computer in the hood, the concrete walled parking garage put your hand here, don’t touch that […]
PARTICIPATION AND PASSIVE VIEWS (Twin Peaks in under two minutes) When we were unmade we were scrutinized to death. Maybe we were supposed to be Marilyn but arrived pre-abused instead star-crossed addicted and a little bit nympho we transformed into robins over circular-saws overlooking waterfalls Washed ashore by current-flow and lonely foghorns we were there […]
GROTTO Pain of release, is worth a thousand haters mothballs, humidity hang in heat fill; broken generator. Whizz-whirr of insects, at worst tilted by staccato pops. We scratch surface until wounds burst, her touch is cold against my socks. Sap weeps from tall serrated sheaths aromatherapy, in disguise; our hands, stained red with grease […]
AN EXPAT’S PLAINT of course such a thing no longer exists. move back? mais si, sans hesitation. with eyes shut, this gyroscope skull turns to where the mountain suckles a living blue and the fleuve moves to salt. “we’re all poets here.” was an ally in every quartier, nights of melody and Brador. nothing I […]
A LITTLE HOMELESS I look a little homeless, have stopped changing clothes, close-shaving, washing my hair. all that was important is understood now to be without substance, so much vanity, vanity, all is… and it all comes down to a small fire of sterno or elder twigs or birch bark— 12-word poems in charcoal […]
SAFETY CAGE DIARY sometimes horizontal is the only way to be —Kai Minosh Pyle I’m typing in the room where our tent is spread to dry after your cousin’s wedding in the river valley I first called home. There is air between its layers & a metaphor in the way thin metal fingers of support […]
THE PAINTING ………………(Salford) You never see the machines, only smoke, red brick chimney, Stockport viaduct, a stadium. Not strict landscape—no landscape precisely this in Lancashire but Lowry and Dad agree to it. The shape fits a winnowing, sallow pedestrians gather for a portrait then forget. Whose hat is this? Whose pipe? Is he a […]
SELFIE Today is a day. I did things. I guess. At any point, I could’ve written a poem or drank a blended beverage. Today is a day I can’t stop eating peanut butter from the jar. Performance presented itself to my body and my body listlessly declined. My body performed a listless decline. If […]
A GOOGLE MAPS VIEW OF THE HOUSE WHERE I GREW UP Why must I see it from above, the time Lapse trapped in some undated spring I can’t Account for, the crabapples flaunting Flesh-toned blossoms in the backyard climbing Branch after retouched branch above unmown Grass past the roof, ambition noted, beds Impatient with […]
READING “IT”* Dumb and obvious but for that —floating off to the side, maybe at the tight centre of a ball of yarn the it whatever it was was only to be understood in the reaching out to touch —at which point it would scatter, which is to say retreat, and we’d be left […]
RUE BARRÉE Our street is an open gash, old plumbing exposed. New city pipes, like ……..burlapped trees laid out on the curb to be planted. Pipes so wide I could climb into each one and build me a nest of hollow concrete. In there it would be quiet. A digger is idle, a mountain of […]
THE PAINTER ……..The painter asks what color to paint the house, and he expects the familiar response of brown, gray, or white. He knows the many shades ……..of brown intimately: tan, beige, and buff, for starters, chestnut, mahogany (shades from the forest), chocolate, coffee, cocoa, caramel ……..……..……..……..….(good food hues), fawn, beaver, camel, and bear (the […]
ESCAPE INSTRUCTIONS Take whatever your mother offers: piroghies, dented oranges, rye bread about to sprout some form of penicillin—once you get to Penn Station, you can give them to whomever looks in need—but draw the line at pictures, they’ll make a record you’ll use against yourself. Take the train, it’s cheaper. The conductor will say, […]
TREE TALK Enter into the life of the trees. Know your relationship and understand their language, unspoken, unwritten talk. Answer back to them . . . soul words, earth words. ……….— Emily Carr, 1932 Where can I find your living soul? Not photographs, where clothes and pose conceal. Not canvases, their oil darkened and cracked. […]
IN KEEPING Your stuff. Some call it junk. The bric-a-brac of ten decades, one hundred years of bobs and bits. On the windowsills—the rooster, whose changing colours foretold the weather, long since at a standstill; the clutch of porcelain roses in crystal vases that never require watering. In the glass cabinet, the prized bone-china teacups, […]
IMPERFECT VISION A secret at home is like rocks under tide ………..-Dinah Craik i. so you said everything that shouldn’t be said shouldn’t be and the house exhales the children stare eyes the stained-blue glass of heaven of angels ricocheting ceilings and corners and baseboards and doors even the foundations […]
DRIVING HOME The extractive machinery scrapes away a wide, wide swath, an industrial-yard welcome. Buildings poke out of curved horizon, appearing as one in the distance, a tasteful sci-fi of dread. After a feeling of bush and home, recalling the warmth as a child of lights in the dark in the distance, of the city […]
ÉMIGRÉ The language is still English; that much is familiar. Shifted in a moment from moss-bearded firs to birch and red pine, to sky threatened with thunder, I return like a lone horse to a fence I cannot cross. Once I walked the cracked pavements of this place, turned soil, planted, grew like aspen, […]
MEDITATION ON ENCLOSED SPACE A room is a refuge …………a reformatory ……………………a universe of thoughts a landfill of dreams A room …………keeps weather outside & others away A secret gives birth …………in a room, ……………………rearing its little rumours A border is a line …………on the floorboards ……………………in a room with two towns Two rooms […]
DIGITAL BATH* The city is a mechanical ocean. Its endless murmuring hum of electricity, its circuitry of flood and tide, is a digital bath disconnecting us from life’s more visceral storms. Lost at sea in boats of stone, assailed by wind and waves of hostile matrices lulling us to sleep with waves of black and […]
ANEMONE I devoted my life to her after I saw her sleep. When she sleeps, she still hears everything— the planes of her face shift as I speak to her, but her replies seem all rote or nonsense. When she sleeps she is like God and I am too simple for illumination. My words […]
WE KNEW We knew it already knew without being told felt the weight of the knowing as we ate our cereal in front of the television which wasn’t usually allowed. We knew that the world would never be the same again even while we argued over Razzle Dazzle and the Mickey Mouse Club (I […]
STILL HOME The rains will come …………………..(they were never here) The Himachali sun is covered by desert dust …………………..(the desert was never here) The dust is gone, the rains have come …………………..(the dust was never here) The rain is here …the first clear drop fell and now (it was never …here) here is another and […]
ANOTHER POEM ABOUT HOME these days it has been eight years since the sky of the mother above me the homeland should be moving into concept, i should no longer smell it, see the grey brick in all the corners of ‘here’ the homeland should be the yellow site of a wound half assimilated into […]
THIS LOVE LIKE A ROCK My dad hauled home a beautiful rock. It was three-feet tall and pocked like a wild sponge. When it rained, water pooled in the top pocks and cascaded down to fill the lower pocks. He told my mom, “Pele made em jus fo you, honey!” She said, “Fairy tales.” […]
WHAT IS IT about the voices of those we love that makes them …..song Is it our cells that sound beyond the child’s complaint or with the lilt of the toy’s story that meld the sister’s tone with the toast and jelly that carries and unfolds the caress that rings in the sound of […]
SPEAKING OF DEATH If I had my druthers I’d pick December under a sheepskin throw. In full view, attending to me, a constellation of earthly possessions: eyeglasses, ginger tea, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Logs flaming in the stone hearth. Hung from a nail, a winter scene framed in mahogany— horses trotting through […]
fMRI I go on the Internet. Walk through a house where I once lived into the blind spot where the optic nerve connects olefin runner down to the basement. I book a vacation in Wernicke’s area. We’re hung in the ash cloud. Arctic coniferous unexplored attic and seashore. Glass dust sopped in the grease […]
WHETHER OR NOT TRANSFERENCE OCCURS For as long as she could write her sorrows, she fought an allergy to light and a photographic memory to become impromptu, a devotee of roses glorious behind one farmhouse, touched by caring. Author’s Bio JC Sulzenko’s award-winning work appears in journals, anthologies, chapbooks, and online, in her […]
JET LAG It’s not the time zones. I eat at the right times. Suffer insomnia at the right times. Am depressed and lively in keeping with past patterns. It’s that, in the morning, I am alone in a different place. Haven’t re-habituated to the compromises yet. What needs to be given up to have […]
CUT YOUR LOSSES At some point, you have to cut your losses and accept defeat. Looking back on it, it’s the ones who jumped ship early that were the smart ones. Who put down their pencil crayons and picked up a calculator. We need them too, I guess. Probably, more so. Certainly, their money-filled lives […]
TOURTIÈRE For EM Ma Mare lived alone. Little house in Penetang. Built by her sons. Raised seven kids by herself; nurse at psychiatric hospital. Wouldn’t say what went on. Whispers of experiments, another time. She always tended to her garden— even while nearing a century. Went to church, church with bells. Not all […]
REMOVES SLEEP FROM THE EYELIDS … המעביר שנה מעני ותנומה מעפעפי A good soaking overnight and now the clouds hover spent, going nowhere. Already the yellowjackets are up looking for someone to mess with. Blue jays mock my prayer which would be fine if only they’d help clear last night’s plates and tissues. But […]
NAMES OF THE HARE After Seamus Heaney’s translation from the Middle English a man met his left leg all is not right a man met his right leg all is still not right unless he descend from the ground what he holds in his hands what he blesses with arms how he forgets peace but […]
SUMMER AFTER THE APOCALYPSE The sun blazes on, brilliant and unsympathetic as the last genius, while the birdsong is unwavering in its hopefulness. I occasionally turn to the empty chair beside me to comment on the glory of the weather before I remember. I measure hunger by the length of shadows crawling the silent […]
WHEN WATER BREAKS INSIDE I thought about pouring my death chills and cold sweats down the ……sink my stomach said well, I guess, you think? Because my worst memoirs defy the laws of physics They make my body contort, stretch, distort even against my greatest wishes knee-deep in the wreckage, covered in soot, the sky […]
ALLOCHTHON it’s the assurance of solidity without stasis; it’s the promise of plasticity without vulnerability it’s the buried memory of the Flood; it’s the eternal emergency of the present it’s a half-remembered face, anonymous yet universal; it’s a soundless signal that broadcasts pure intent it’s a genetic memory, vivid and unrelenting; it’s a sheltering current, […]
HOME IS THE FIRE by time you found our sanctuary for witches on the run your body was already half-burnt as you stepped into our circle clothes fresh from the rain your flesh was still sizzling your tongue was still aflame when you tried to speak the ritual greeting only the sound of crackling came […]
IS THE AFTERLIFE LONELY TOO? Outside of Kantian space and time, do you miss dancing in dusty basements where sex was once phenomenal? How sunlight threads in morning frost, breath pluming in knots between you and the snow-marbled fields? When depression knocks, do the dead hide inside poems, in the corridors between stanzas, curling fetal […]
MILE END From Mount Royal the dead watch over the city: perched on tombstones they hum vespers and chew …………………………………………on autumn leaves. Down St-Denis the rush hour cortège caravans past café patios where October beer foams from pitchers; on St-Laurent sprawls of vintage shops proffer fox fur, faded denim jackets, military boots sans eyelets. The […]
Author’s Bio Antoine Janot is a young artist living between Paris and Montreal, exploring different mediums such as photography, painting, cinema, and literature. After directing several experimental short films, he is now working on his first feature movie. He also published an essay, various novels and two poetry anthologies.
THE SIX HOURS IT TAKES TO GET ANYWHERE are never divided by anything else, so relax for a moment and settle into this one formative fact. Think about the weeding in the garden you promised you would do, the summer someone you love dies, how to watch a documentary and not talk about it later. […]
THE WANDERER If it’s the sort of house makes you wonder who lives there, and you stop as if it might be you, are you that poet passing by who dreams he’s lived there, forever fixed in one afternoon’s light? And if there’s a wife at a window, her mind her own but her mother’s […]
HOME AT LAST Watching the dance of leaves Tree on horizon bends to wind flow Moment in tune with life Beyond the plan of intellect So good to sit here By this window Sun goes down Soft pastel colors of the evening Undulating scarf of crows fly home above I’m not sure where that […]
RUNNING AWAY FROM OURSELVES You and I direct our search for a destination that breaks us free from our confinement, a celestial wanderer that is comme il faut to make our own. In this place, you and I make our home à la une; are enjoined to cry out, summon attention to chemical combinations […]
SHELTER In the cramp of the city-circle tunnel, ……….a commuter backs up against a closed door, ……….one arm crooked, hand splayed against the carriage roof, ……….hunched within his winter coat, ……….chin tucked, eyes closed. Across the rooftops from the kitchen window, ……….homebound traffic drones to mealtime clatter, ……….and shunted out of weariness he blinks, […]
STRUCTURAL UNCERTAINTY You wrote the promissory note a year ago That he would not be improved on. Perhaps the day could magically be re-opened To a place where it would not collapse entirely. Perhaps your heart could be treated with robustness And lemon drops before you fall asleep. Not that you want an extension. […]
TOKYO CINEMA tonight i want to hear no sound that is not your heart or your sated sigh as i hold you in the dark surrounded by strangers and kiss the skin that holds your sadness why have we never been so tender and so quiet? even once-fine machines will break their gears murmur […]
VISITATIONS Three o’clock, but our clock strikes one; to us, it’s our son Steve roaming the house. I slip outside to read on the porch – he probably glides out too, all gangbusters, but in a ghostly fashion. He talks to me outdoors more than in: sudden visits, message by snake, lizard, dragonfly, or cardinal. […]
MAGPIES Last night I had a dream. We were standing inside the entrance of a grocery store, pumpkins surrounded us you kept saying something but only magpies came from the dark stretch of your mouth. I’ll blame the concussion ever since that ladder fell on my head I’ve been dreaming of a life that […]
YOU WILL MISS THE ARBITRARY collisions of random exchanges they shuffle along sidewalks glazed in ice a car rolls circles moves too fast to avoid the billboard new high price hotel once last night we rolled over and out of bed turning our phone off smooth pits and curves an apple picked earlier in […]
AS UNNOTICED AS POSSIBLE for Lucy, our original mother There’s almost always two of them: mother and (or mother with) her child up against a tilting shoulder, a breast about to tire and four separate ………………..hands ………….each gathering …………….its own task …………….each finger …………an annunciation ……………….of trust. Care. And this particular pair, an […]
LINGER FACTOR The Department of Transportation sidewalk study ranked my neighborhood 15 points above average. A 24% linger factor. My neighborhood would score even higher if the DOT surveyed at night when youth appear in clinamen lines. The study found this: People who linger are ……….talking to other people, or buying sandwiches, …………….…………….…………….…………….…………….using […]
WE LOST AHMAUD we lost ahmaud i cried to my momma the night we lost ahmaud it’s unfair unjust uncivil it’s a modern day genocide the victims are my people why can’t we run in peace? we lost juice i cried to my daddy the night we lost juice when they made us feel lesser […]
VIRGA There is a kind of rain that never hits the ground never collects in fat pools to reveal your flaws wriggling like worms: the ex-wife, misplaced money, lost friendships strung like shark teeth on a thread. Do not confuse this rain with the kind pelting the hosta patch, deck chairs & bike chains, the […]
MID-ATLANTIC On hearing Sylvia Plath’s recorded reading of Daddy— her voice, vowels stretched in opposing directions, threatening to snap—you find yourself fluid in her Mid-Atlantic tones, gasping. When she confesses she has killed him, though dead already, you believe her, and almost yearn for the imagined murders of your own childhood, the ache of not […]
WHAT IT IS It’s the sky in your mouth a Saskatchewan summer s t r e t c h e d pulled taut across infinity back to some faceless city where you hear voices in the walls more than one victim in hiding down the hall, an injured bird squawking helpless then held […]
DREAM JOURNAL AND INTERPRETATION FROM A SOBER, HUNGRY ADDICT 1. The golden arches fall. A barred owl lays eggs inside the “o” in “McDonalds.” I ate Big Macs so I can stop using drugs. I used drugs because I could not stomach shame. 2. My Facebook feed, free of fast-food ads, teaches me to make […]
A SERIES OF OPPOSING REFLECTIONS IN A HOUSE OF MIRRORS Presumably, when something breaks you fix it. Garage door opens—the grinding of metal wheels on metal rails rattles the bedroom floor. All the records of our conduct: lost fortunes and shattered glass, the hole you put in the laundry room door. Tonight you’re back so […]
TOWARDS A DECLENSION OF “UNPRECEDENTED” The virus’s unnoticeable, studded, burr-like form is not unprecedented Terror, when one recalls medieval tortures, also not unprecedented— if we check Roman imperial customs— like crucifixion. Nor is it unprecedented that blanching corpses land in that ancient fridge, the grave. Unprecedented, but not really, is the disruption of plump rats’ […]
WHITEWASH White is waves bright as crinkled sunlight—or sunrise, done up in foam White is Grevens Paerecider, Ironworks Pear Eau-de-Vie, Lunenburg County Winery Montbeliard Pear Wine, and Belle-de-Brillet Poire-et-Cognac White is the missing link1 between Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor White is a spic-and-span E.R. with a scatalogical surgeon wielding a shit-smeared scalpel White is […]
PETITE SPHINXES ERMITE …….At the Tate, (Modern not Britain), Leonor Fini’s Petite sphinx ermite answers all …….my unborn riddles: broken eggshells, bird’s skull, “a pretty pink” human lung …….swings “at the entrance of its dilapidated lair” as though through years she viewed …….me, remotely, lying here stillborn, slugging masticated slurry through a silicone straw. …….One […]
Waking to WAKING TO SNOW by Robert MacLean Review by Jami Macarty In mid-December, 2020, Eleni Zisimatos, the poetry editor and factotum at Vallum, asked me if I would be interested in reviewing Robert MacLean’s Waking to Snow (Isobar Press, 2020). Based on my experience that writing a reader’s response to a book I’m not […]
THE FOOL by Jessie Jones Review by Bill Neumire The fool’s manifestation in Jessie Jones’s debut full-length poetry collection comes as the speaker centers herself as an isolated sovereign, as an I fortifying itself against the world, which comes out at times as lonely, and at times as powerfully self-confident. According to the book cover, […]
PHILLIS by Alison Clarke Review by Bill Neumire In 1773 with her book Poems on Various Subjects, Phillis Wheatley became the first African American to publish a book of poetry. Hailed from New England to England as “the African Genius,” Wheatley, who was a slave, led a complex spiritual, aesthetic, and intellectual life, inspiring generations […]
ROBERT LAX: HOLLYWOOD’S CONTEMPLATIVE POET What kind of a mystic was Robert Lax? One who could make the dictionary sound otherworldly. He was once asked what advice he could give young writers. He advised studying the dictionary occasionally: “Inside are the seeds you’re going to plant in your field.” Lax was also the kind of […]
A Conversation with Canisia Lubrin Author of THE DYZGRAPHXST Interview by Rosie Long Decter Canisia Lubrin’s debut book of poetry, Voodoo Hypothesis, was longlisted for the Gerald Lambert Award and the Pat Lowther Award. Last year, she released her follow-up collection, The Dyzgraphxst, a lyrical and cyclical exploration of the self as collective. Structured in […]
BORDER CROSSINGS Crossing the border used to be fun, sort of, hide & seek, little white lies, us trying not to laugh, Mum swatting us from the front seat, crossing from rural Maine back to rural New Brunswick, the Presque Isle River barely a creek alongside the one-hut customs office: it was all small-potatoes. […]
WALKING INTO AUGUST IN EAST-END TORONTO 2020 Is it how spruce don’t think, just do—arrange their boughs for things withwings to dip andglide on through? Or how the yellowcrane looms—strange arabesque-sur-bleu, distraction-dance, wide arcs boom-swung and slow—dwarfing all thatgrows nearby? Stow yourthrone in a box on high look down waydown to read what’s spelled below […]
MR SCHLESINGER A Jewish refugee, he probably came just before the war to our North London suburb, and stayed in our house for a while till the authorities took him away to an internment camp, maybe the Isle of Man, as an ‘enemy alien’ alongside captured Nazis, We never heard of him again. […]
PLEASE TELL ME THIS WILL NOT LAST FOREVER chapel street shifts pitch deep winter; its edges, sharper its scents brighter, brittle like peppermint or bone where fever bush frozen berry holly reaches its thorns to bristle my fingers with its bitter tang […]
LUSTROUS FUGITIVE O my Goddess come and see ………..how I will the long now how memory’s return device guest-hosts my one ………..………………….featherweight life on a median island Goddess will you will the time of will I to end ………..………………….my infinite future empty of children end my disgrace of form ………..…………………expectant […]
THE ODESSA SHOW Libretto. Afterlife. Odessa, in flannel, baffles in the morning storm, lull of her dark hair, the killing of an alarm clock. She is somber in the kitchen, picking the gem-fruits from the iron basket, and turning them to appraise their worth. Yesterday, you bought her roses that lie rejected on […]
CRACKS Someone has fallen through the cracks To lie on the sidewalk. Right in front of you. Do you wonder why they are on the sidewalk? Do you call the media to say someone is on the sidewalk? Do you look at statistics to see how many people are on sidewalks? Do you […]
ENTREATY: INVITE FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR Round, it swells, bells, cling, clangs the vibration; clink, clank. We pray here. Resonant vessels vacillate. If each dancer vibrates the ocean of the other’s body, locate, for me, the shore. Is there a rudder? Sequence my star chart. Navigate our nearness. Astrolabe the archipelago. Kelp, bubbling, bends; wavering, […]
DREAMS OF THE DEAD my grandmother is a hydrangea petals pressed close ………………………….she opens in blue splendour my grandfather a bulltrout slowmoving …………………………waters murky and what of Alex? ……………………………in one dream the ficus benjaminus turns …………………………………………to butterflies his lopsided smile ……………………………his bangs ……flipped to one side / thoughts …………………………………………..deep / wings […]
RAIN PORTAL Awash in rain. Transfixed. Amorphous absorption Of time and place. A scent only. Fleeting. Pine? Hemlock? But not here. Not now. Not this foreign place. The pool. The hotel. Markers only, In a trail of mist That takes one Where it will. Author’s Bio Francis Flavin draws upon his experience as an educator, […]
THIS IS AN EMERGENCY: I ONLY REMEMBER THE GIRL as close to me as skin laughs uncomfortably what does that mean just stuff about what happened on that street she was there sleeping we had a house full of rugs we had everything what a stupid decision patience is in the living room, an […]
BEING SEEN A foil of the stock magician, there is a man, who, with a needle pierces clean through the full thick of his arm without ever drawing blood. In that moment, the audience refuses to see him for who he really is— a man sticking a needle through his arm. There is […]
A GHOST STORY Last night we walked down the old country road, new to us. The full moon hung too low, and out in the fields a thick mist clung to the immediate sky above the freshly harvested soy crops. This part was true presuming what we could see during the day remained once […]
NO CERTIFICATE CAN EXPLAIN ME I arrived on a Monday, from one canal to a cold, smooth grey world, light bending to a particulate blue. In time, I became a wound, too many colours for one woman. Painted into a corner, not passing through anything without your approval, all chromatic wheels at my disposal […]
LAMENT FROM THE EIGHTH CIRCLE OF HELL “To lead you to an overwhelming question … Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit. — T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” * A place between the first sip of coffee and a bite of buttered toast, I […]
HOUSE It was a house plummeting through the night. At last I had a home. A place to stay, my own, a different place from the hideous roofless pesterings, the appearances and disappearings that never let me alone. It was a house collapsing into itself. When I’d swept all the floors, caulked the cracks, dusted […]
THE GIRL The girl from high school—not my high school—had long straight hair and a foxy face and her body, a cylinder, with slightly wider hips, was perfect for the sheath dresses she wore. Vee was a Circassian, famous beauties in their day, well-prized as slaves, her mother a refugee from Turkey, never marry a […]
THE WEEPING TENSE — for the listeners There’s too little light in this room, I have something to tell you— Lean closer, I’ll write more quickly, I promise, I love you— don’t cry— over the kitchen counter today, clearing scraps, I started ………………………………………… weeping— Out the sliding door, I could see the unkempt grass bullied […]
SOTTO VOCE When we’re in the den, they’re in the boidem. We hear the strains of opera, intermittently, from above; slippers shuffling near the ceiling, swish of a housecoat hem through a doorway: burgundy velour. I keep the fancy soaps in the upstairs bathroom, just in case. Your mother—I called her Ēma too— never […]
MUSCOGEE PEARLS thin strand ………… loose end waving from the magnolia leaf, clear water droplets ………… in beaded ………… succession line up on the spider’s strand as dew retreats from first light; Muscogee pearls invisible to ………… COVID-nineteen Author’s Bio Dr. Deidra Suwanee Dees/family descend from Hotvlkvlke (Wind Clan), following Muscogee stompdance traditions. She […]
ENVY how the stars each day become again invisible, while going nowhere. — Carl Philips I wanted a line like that, just one. A jaw-dropper. An outward gasp. I tried to imitate, but faux poems never work. I stared up at the stars, watched them blink, waited for morning, the moment of departure. […]
CONSPIRACY THEORY a circle of reason / a proof that cannot be proved or disproved / a mad mixture / a template for order / cast, shaped, readymade and launched / requires immediate response (response must have no minor errors) / a distrust, a witch hunt, an elaborate dance / behind the scenes / eyewitness […]
FAMILIAL (An approximation of “Familiale” by Jacques Prévert, 1945) Mother is knitting a sweater The son’s away at war It’s all good, she thinks, whatever And the father, what about the father What’s he up to (Business) The mother with her knitting The son away at war And Daddy at his business It’s all good, […]
SINGING IN THE GRAVE In the dream, the brother I do not have says something about singing in the grave. I understand him to mean singing in the graveyard but don’t correct him — I’m astonished that he exists at all, though I may in fact have had a brother, briefly, who can say; when […]
SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT ………. You were taught it’s cruel to keep a sick pet …. suffering but people, …. O people should …. pull themselves up, …. always up, …. by their bootstraps. Who can afford boots? Who has feet? What straps ………. hold up the steeples, skyscrapers, supermarkets, schools? “It’s not far, […]
THE SECOND PERSON HAS DEPARTED A gold sequin dress isn’t any use in a fire. I scribble down every cypher I gathered about you. There is no kindness in letting you know when the world unclasps, emptying its prayer palms of us, our preordained survival. Did you expect me to carry a gun? […]
1986, THE FIELDS COMPANY OF CHICAGO In 1986 the Fields Company of Chicago purchased the rights to Muzak, a brand of song to be played— invisible—in background. ……. Specificity, I used to think, ……. was a hand trained to thread any needle; ……. there were constellations of muscles ……. waiting in the sky to […]
WASTED memory slips through crooked fingers, reaching for seventeen and its promises we were skinny things cocaine eyes and cracked lips sharing cherry gloss between classes “Thinner is the winner” we sipped Diet Coke at lunch a sky-blue cafeteria melting grease and thick laughter plates of poutine and pizza a game: how long to eat […]
NOT MY FAULT subway trains screeching Homer’s sirens shrieking can’t stop obsessive thoughts tackling other thoughts someone pushing random buttons brain glitches chemicals reconfiguring flashes cosmic insight memory lapses onslaught of sensory input thoughts of arson self-annihilation masochist streaks of fasting, insomnia sustaining oneself absurd dressing carefully to cover up strangeness […]
LATE OCTOBER, MORNING, EARLY, FACING SOUTH a moment ago a wind blew through the workshop of an icon-maker in a dry village at the edge of the world pure powdered gold in thin sheets furling through time just now catch on a flaring bush at […]
………………………………………….I walk beside
………………………………………………a river
………………………………………………….which cracks
………………………………………………with insufficient cold
………………………………………….as ice breaks away
………………………………………………returning to itself
………………………………………………………..I cannot help
…………………………………………………….feeling
………………………………………………….there is something more
………………………………………………beneath that fragile surface
……………………………………………maybe that
He finished. Peeled the lemon away. The music from the spun the evaporation of sound the music incongruent to this place. He finished. The slatted window view. A woman on the street walked with a man she held. She held an umbrella against the sun. We are of the colorless dust the rages. He kept […]
IN SINGAPORE I WAS SERBIAN for Marcel Clearly my face changes when I leave this country. In Singapore my hair is matted to my head. A white man asks if I am Serbian. I am out in the open, unaware of air-conditioned tunnels below the city, chugging water at every crosswalk, I see a brown […]
THE UNTOUCHABLES they’re at the outskirts that smudged edge of our village life tethered to a shanty of flies, filth and folksong lives and huts near collapse for generations, they bloom beside the lotus pond my father doesn’t see them his eyes no longer register their shapes, their bodies he steps around them sometimes […]
ZERO + ONE No thing, a zero in the amber of time, then one. At the edge of the mind a soft rime: then one. The brook was running clear. Now it’s gone. I’m here, cried the killdeer, I’m here. Now it’s gone. Jewels of rain like We’ll grow rich with water, Like every number […]
OTHER SIDE There they are, edging the aquarium. An accompaniment of blue creatures and orange captures their concentration. Glass walls seize and refract protruding light while bodies vanish and emerge amidst ascending pockets of life. A smallish one, old with age and boredom, cultivates their gaze, luring their attention to where other beings, capsules of […]
The Outer Wards by Sadiqa de Meijer (Montreal, QC: Signal Editions, 2020, $17.95, 88 pages) Review by Bill Neumire A hospital room, a distance from a city center, a defended outer enclosure—a ward is a removal. But then, of course, a ward is also a person in your care and charge. The Outer Wards, Sadiqa […]
THE RUINS The town Had changed The barns and sheds Were gone Replaced with New wilted-looking Monuments To the old days. They kept driving On and on and on Until the sun Had reduced Their homes To dust Author’s Bio Greg Santos is a poet, editor, and educator. He is the author […]
FOUR ON THE FLOOR You tell me you like house music— how the synthesized thumps traverse your veins, hippocampus, so you are twenty again, the exotic American, dancing with strangers and pint glasses at Le Beat Route. Then there is the music of house— the fridge’s decade-old respirations; unsettled, foundation cracks; the a/c’s throbbings, constant, […]
HOW I’LL KNOW In winter I’ll know by the harsh call of raven and in spring, by blossom. In summer, a warm wind will wash like a bath sweetening and in autumn the squelch of wet garden as it rests. Always, this knowing, body-deep of a particular earth beneath my feet solid silence of […]
SPACE ISSUES (best case) Each of the two of us, bounded in our immediate spheres, will touch along their edges and then the struck keys of our words propel semblances of a meaning through membranous curves. One side, inside, echoes back (heard or not); the other vibrates the other’s tympanum, on, into anything permeable behind. […]
HYDROGEN AND HELIUM from the window of a taxicab gazing heavenwards i wonder at spectral hydrogen clouds collapsing and condensing exploding into violent starlight and i ask as i look at the darkest night when was it ever a human right to burst forth foolishly seizing the night, with pathetic displays of these passing street […]
— Video Credit: Bushra Saleem UNHAPPINESS I am Mama’s eyes grey-black, glassy, distant eyes that belong somewhere else in someone else’s face walking places I can never learn the names of, places I will never visit, freedoms that could have been mine in another lifetime She is scattered; always anywhere but here Her life […]
The Minuses by Jami Macarty (Fort Collins, CO: The Center for Literary Publishing, 2020, $16.95, 92 pages) Review by Bill Neumire According to Jami Macarty, “Even when there’s a minus—a dear one dies—life keeps living itself. This is the ethos informing the poems of The Minuses.” Macarty’s debut full-length poetry collection hovers through a prepositional […]
CAESURA windowless the rain mourns black cabs on the highway speed by empty buses passengers thinned like weeds no one stops speaking into tunnels of phones searching voices for faces wind gleans the alleyways recycling joggers jog in place gloves discarded fall like broken geese […]
COLD WAR WASH DAY When we integrated under the curve and the fuel ignited, when push came to rubber glove, and in all the kitchens food fell from plates, …….. we leapt into our holes and made tracks, one small, one just right. …….. One side makes you human. …….. One side wakes you. …….. […]
CANDLESTICKS Candlesticks growling in tallow. How did they get in? Their edges find you. You let yourself bleed. You don’t move. Nothing on the table moves. You are like everything on the table. Even that herring pretending to be asleep. Author’s Bio Robert Hirschfield is a New York-based poet and freelance writer. His […]
Ghost Face by Greg Santos (Montreal, QC: DC Books, 2020, $15.45 CDN, 84 pages.) Review by Eleni Zisimatos Greg Santos is a poet of intense sensibility, who writes between the spaces of the concrete and the unseen. His book, Ghost Face, indeed embarks on the journeys of ghosts: the feelings or awareness that something is […]
A DAY OF NOTHING IN THE MULTIVERSE What comes next doesn’t really matter. A stripe of light, watered down, the television a parliament of owls to wind me up, set the tension on an internal spring. Considering this: definitions are softening. What is the world if not an arctic of sound, a bowl of seeds, […]
SWEETLY am i wrong to miss it sometimes wrong to miss the midnight ovens glowing hot with bread narrow cobblestone would tight towers cut from other towers wandering through pastel hills just past seven being taken out and ordered for crying on the bed every other week can’t say i’ve ever been a head turner […]
A Conversation with Paul Muldoon Author of The Bannisters (Vallum Chapbook Series No. 29) Interview by Rosie Long Decter Paul Muldoon is one of the most acclaimed English-language poets of the last century. He brings his trademark mastery of language and poetic form to his new chapbook, The Bannisters, published in the Vallum Chapbook Series. […]
THE BONES The maze of bones sutured by the dark Call of the glass frame—currents shock The wish, the fluorescence. Pour a glass Of God, drown eternity in your throat. Then feel as it disappears. As it rushes Through you, into the brittle of your Fingernail. Then dream of moonrise. Of the pool lit by […]
ABANDONED SPACE: THE POLICE STATION There is a riot beyond the chain-link fence bedding is scattered wildly about and the Sting, planned carefully by Nettle is out of control. Lassoing summer’s cold blue moon a Climber has gained the perimeter— wraps the barred windows about with trumpeting billows. They catch on hidden barbs like mouths, […]
INTO THE PARK Into the park in late summer on your bike, the sudden cool of trees and shade, the breeze down the front of your shirt cool against your chest, linen billowing, a frisson tingling your nipples, as the afternoon heat lingering on the grass starts to retreat, the bike whirrs and into the […]
PREDICTIVE MESSAGING: CONCUSSION 22 or “hidden disability” — for K. injured, i became inured — silent replies to you seem fine text unpunctuated blank space at the end Author’s Bio Michael Quilty derives nascence along the traditional land and treaty territory of Beausoleil First Nation (part of the Chippewa Tri-Council). The work of this poet […]
Excerpt from The Bannisters MAYDAY 1 The desert would be an ocean were it able to withhold its judgment on wavelet after sand-wavelet and suspend itself over its own floor. 2 It’s not only death’s a Great Leveller. 3 The desert has its own version of spume, its own version of spindrift— that flurry of […]
END REPLICATION PROBLEM Thin caps bandage our DNA, this morning’s science news explains. Chromosomes only replicate in the middle. With each division, telomeres shrivel until the unclothed genome dies. It’s before seven, and I’m unsettled by the end replication problem. At the molecular level, stress shortens lifespan. A tough job claws at our nucleotide’s fine […]
BLEACH Soak cloths in the sink and scrub down the steps, avoiding mouth and skin. Keep it out of reach under a child-proof lid. Twist, push, lift and share. Use it wisely, making the semi-circle glow in the cement, a force-field, a cordon sanitaire, because all that elbow grease is an open invitation to those […]
LOOKING INWARD FROM MARGARET RIVER Driving from Perth south to Margaret River, late in the velvet night my friend pulled off the road onto a dirt track where we bumped and swayed. A fenced-off field on one side, rows of vines on the other. I turned to ask where we were going. ‘Wait,’ he said. […]
TRANSPLANT OF MARROW Your cruel April begins in the dark where there is still dark to these ends of days. Still a blue evening, somewhere lilacs still roosting with creatures nesting and dishes resting in racks to dry. Your dead-to-life April will last for the duration of spring burgeoning. Am I up to this task? […]
from A Tilt in the Wondering 15 je dois decider du nombre de fois si le mot nuit peut se reproduire seul et immense on vit avec des yeux on vit avec de la nuit mathématique sentiment de vertige je dois me rapprocher au figuré de l’intime 16 la dernière page est pleine de douceur […]
AUBADE, AN AIRPORT & THE SEAS — For Kaori I reach for you as though for the mugicha we drank at a seashore teahouse in Kamakura while you sit on a metal bench losing your voice in separate spaces with a brown hand a border agent tugs the pen […]
WASHED IN THE BLOOD I would call you a wing, but you might disappear into thin air, when I am not ready, or cannot say anything down to earth. Already you are twirling long dark hair behind your ear around your right index finger, looking outdoors at nothing in particular. Thinking too much where it […]
LISTENING TO THE “MOON MEN” The message is varied our s/salve soul solve solution boosters are clear send / sent a message or emissary a line an isle rocks on the path late facing meant or meet or manufactured for Cable & Wireless Ltd. probably find some more fucking fern under (or) on a rock […]
A DOZEN MORNING TRANSLATIONS When I talk, again, about Voyager 1 out there beyond the heliosphere, what I really mean is that none of us recalls the birth canal. And when I show you this photo of my favourite painting, made in Paris with palette knives in 1954, I’m giving you my boyhood’s village […]
from It Was Treaty/It Was Me PÊHONÂN I will ask the interpreter to read to you what has been written, and before I go away I will have a copy made to leave with the principal Chiefs. —Alexander Morris, Commissioner, Treaty No. 6 did you know where the river would take you when you first […]
RESIDENCE She grew up in a city seven hundred years old, carillon bells in the basilica tower, reliquary beneath the altar; but a school girl at the lyceum when the invading tanks rolled into the centre of town, trailing daffodils. But she embroidered the signatures of liberating soldiers on a green silk scarf one of […]
Congratulations to Heather White for winning this year’s Vallum Chapbook Award! Her chapbook DES MONSTERAS will be published in the fall. Maurya Kerr’s chapbook tommy noun. was an honourable mention for this year’s award. Read excerpts from both chapbooks in issue 18:2, available to read online for free!
