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 […]
Brent Cassan | SHIFTS OF BEING
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 […]
E. Canine McJabber | TO MY MOTHER, ALOUD, 1ST Place Winner of the Vallum Award for Poetry
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. […]
Sue Reynolds | HER FIRST FIRST NATIONS BOYFRIEND, Vallum Award for Poetry Honourable Mention,
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 […]
Carolyne Wright | SYLLABIC ACROSTIC: HOODOOS (BRYCE CANYON)
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 […]
Jonathan Garfinkel | BOCIANY (STORKS): AFTER CHEŁMOŃSKI
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 […]
Maureen Korp | OAHU
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 […]
Tara Dourian | SAN GREGORIO
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 […]
Pamela Porter | RUPTURE
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 […]