Ai Wei Wei / Breathing Through Silk
by Linda Rogers
Trust the dissident artist; …
by Linda Rogers
Trust the dissident artist;
he knows heads crack as
easily as sunflower seeds
and schools built on sand,
where fragrant Sichuan spices almost
cover the stench of corruption and death.
He spreads out one hundred million
porcelain seeds, each one perfectly
painted. Will that be enough to feed
the souls released in the Great Leap
Forward and Chengdu Earthquake?
There are one hundred million
reasons to walk in his shoes,
footsteps of ghosts who went
before him, as carefully as ants
avoiding diatomaceous earth
and resolute heroes swimming in circles.
The mornings Ai Wei Wei,
arrested for truth, sipped thin
soup in prison, we broke bread
on the rocks where circling gulls
opened their beaks to drop and
smash their invertebrate food—
where every story’s a sacrament,
one thing becoming another.
Never Sorry, Ai Wei Wei,
breathing through silk, does
not apologize for the toxic
dust that rises from his hand
made breakfast of martyrs,
seeds fired in crematoria.
He knows the breath exhaled from
graveyards and mouths full of
broken teeth is the wind of change.
Linda Rogers, poet, songwriter, novelist and journalist, past Victoria Poet Laureate and Canada’s People’s Poet, is an advocate for human rights, particularly those of children. Rogers’ most recent award is The Gwendolyn MacEwen Prize from Exile Editions, 2013. Her most recent poetry title is Homing from Ekstasis Editions. A mother and grandmother, she is married to blues mandolinist Rick van Krugel.
Photo Credit: Darshan Photography
Amber
by Alison Luterman
Two long teardrops of it …
by Alison Luterman
Two long teardrops of it
graze my shoulders, coolly,
as my mother’s tucking-in touch was cool,
nights she and my father went out
in the glamour of their long-ago youth.
How I held my breath then
not wanting her to go. She went
anyway; gone for good, eleven years now.
These earrings I’ve inherited glow
mellow against skin,
reflecting, refracting. Light of late
August caught in their elegant oblongs,
dark honey of the inmost hive.
And now they swing
awkward, out-of-place against
my wrinkling neck,
this wind that’s always at my back.
Amber was her song,
her go-to color, wine at sunset,
peaches poached in fire.
How we live to rue.
How love refracted,
deflected, bounces back
catches me off-guard—how we missed
each other, she and I
even when she was alive,
so that now, all these years
later, I feel her as a coolness
brushing my collarbone
a tug at the lobe, though I wouldn’t
know what to begin to say.
Alison Luterman has written two books of poetry The Largest Possible Life (Cleveland State University Press) and See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions). In addition to poetry, she writes plays and personal essays. She has taught at The Writing Salon in Berkeley, at Esalen Institute and Rowe Camp and Conference center; at Omega institute, Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference and elsewhere. Check out her website for more information.
The Antenna
by Mia Anderson
The antenna is a growth not always …
by Mia Anderson
For Mike Endicott
The antenna is a growth not always
functional in all people.
Some can hoist their antenna with
remarkable ease—like greased lightning.
In some it is broken, stuck there in its old winged
fin socket way down under the shiny surface
never to issue forth.
Others make do with a little mobility,
a little reception, a sudden spurt of music
and joy, an aberrant hope.
And some—the crazies,
the fools of God—drive around
or sit or even sleep
with this great thin-as-a-thread
home-cobbled monkey-wrenched filament
teetering above their heads
and picking up the great I AM like
some hacker getting Patmos on his toaster.
And some, with WD40 or jig-a-loo
or repeated attempts to pry the thing up
or chisel at the socket
do not give up on this antenna
because they have heard of how it works
sometimes, how when the nights are clear
and the stars just so and the new moon has all but set,
the distant music of the spheres is transformative
and they believe in the transformation.
It is the antenna they have difficulty believing in.
Mia Anderson is a writer, an Anglican priest, a gardener, an erstwhile shepherd and a long-time actress. Her one-woman show 10 Women, 2 Men and a Moose showcased then-contemporary Canadian writers. She has published four books of poetry: Appetite (Brick, 1988), Château Puits ’81 (Oolichan, 1992), Practising Death (St Thomas’ Poetry, 1997), and most recently The Sunrise Liturgy (Wipf & Stock, 2012). Her Long Poems “The Saugeen Sonata” and “from The Shambles” have won awards.
Aubade
by Bryan Walpert
Light brushes the white weatherboards …
by Bryan Walpert
Light brushes the white weatherboards
some unclaimed border of purple and pink,
strokes the windmills churning early air on the hills.
There are fifty-five turbines. In a bag, an apple
picked in an orchard seven kilometres from here,
placed on a shelf at a market garden. The woman who took the apple
from that shelf, who inspected it for bruises, found one, then bought it anyway,
would see the same light, standing in the same kitchen. Instead, she stares
at her hands, less like hers than her mother’s, the first time
she has thought of her mother today, though not the last, it’s early yet.
Early light, the earliest it can be and still be called light.
All the risks of the day stand between you and the next time you see this colour.
The light that slips through the glass of her window reveals a web
of lines in her hands, palm up before her as in supplication.
To whom? The kettle boils. 1.65 megawatts per windmill,
enough to power 700 homes. She was trying to tell you
something. Your wife. Though no turbine may exceed
forty decibels. It is that time of year, the whole of the working day
visible, leave with first light, return with the last, this time
will hardly last at all. Bigger close up, each seventy meters. It helps
she has things to do with her hands, that this moment
of self-reflection is circumscribed by the rattling she hears upstairs, children.
You see the day as a kind of wind. It will recede, leave you standing. One
of the weatherboards is rotten. Each has three blades. Nearly twelve
hours since you last spoke, half of that in difficult sleep,
the rest in the language only a stunned silence makes,
scrape of drawer, hard complaint of dishes, the refrigerator’s hum
forty-three decibels. Speech, if not absent, would be forty-five.
There are things information cannot tend.
There are things said that will take a long time to fade
as the colour fades now against the house, whitening, the clamped teeth
of the day. The sun rising. Someone will pick hundreds
of apples today. Rain will engorge the valley. Some neighbours
complain about the noise. Your wife was trying to say something to you.
Forty decibels. The windmills whip and whip. You haven’t heard a thing.
Bryan Walpert is the author of the poetry collections Etymology and A History of Glass, the short fiction collection Ephraim’s Eyes and the scholarly monograph Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry. A dual American and New Zealand citizen, he teaches Creative Writing at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand. “Aubade” is from his third collection of poetry Native Bird for which he is seeking a publisher.
A Bad Rap For Thetis
by Gary Geddes
What can I say that you don’t already …
by Gary Geddes
What can I say that you don’t already
know? My marriage to the mortal Peleus
was not a whim, or a moment of passion,
but something in the bones that told me
this union was important, foreordained
by the gods. I knew nothing of genetics,
or that the half-mortal issue of my loins
would create a deep, open wound, render
me vulnerable. Some claim I released
Zeus from his chains, took refuge
with Diomedes in a bed of seaweed,
and refused to save a boy from drowning
in a shipwreck. These are mostly lies.
I’ll admit to some shape-shifting to avoid
capture, the goddess of water testing
other elements, taking on fiery shapes,
winging it, using ground-breaking measures
to achieve my ends. These were the perks
of immortality that I wanted for my son
Achilles when I dipped him into the briny
waters of the Styx. Who would have thought
the thumb and forefinger that held him
by the heel underwater would have created
a weakness that led to his death and mine
and changed the course of history. Divine
intervention is no mere literary device,
my friends. If you should see me depicted
riding the sea nymph Hippokampos, Achilles’
shield in my right hand, or choose to believe
the lament of the kingfisher that I cut off
the fish supply as a result of petty displeasure,
don’t be too judgmental. Remember,
a mother is bound to mourn, the oysters
I bring to banquets are tastier than truffles
and the poet Apollo played at my wedding,
his honeyed lyrics blessing all creation.
Gary Geddes has written and edited more than 45 books and won a dozen literary awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), the Lt.-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence and the Gabriela Mistral Prize from the government of Chile. His most recent poetry books are Skaldance, Falsework and Swimming Ginger. He’s also the author of Drink the Bitter Root: A search for justice and healing in Africa. He lives on Thetis Island, British Columbia.
A Bathroom for Wallace Stevens
by Phil Davey
On the double-deep folds …
by Phil Davey
On the double-deep folds
of the emerald towel
on the white-lacquered seat
of the four-legged stool
at an easy reach
from the cool enamel
“Phenomenology of Spirit”
by Hegel
The room seems vacant
the mirror has been cleaned
Halos (halogens)
gleam from the ceiling
A bass-toned fan
hums wisps of steam
above the shower’s
translucent screening
What on earth
is this world’s meaning?
Hieratic mutters
swerve in their word-paths
off track by miles
Caught short by gravity
the cistern splutters
A leaf of two-ply
flutters to the tiles
Phil Davey has dual British and New Zealand citizenship. His poems have been published in a number of magazines, including Oxford Poetry Now, Poetry London/Apple Magazine and Illuminations. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of New Brunswick in Canada. After a number of years in Oxford, Trieste, London, Milan and Brussels, he now lives with his wife Chiara in Varese in the north of Italy.
Bicycle Arpeggios
by Kim Trainor
For almost a year now I have been trying to write this poem …
by Kim Trainor
For almost a year now I have been trying to write this poem
about the bicycles at dusk, a clattering gamelan’s
rhythm of give and take at the lake’s edge, those stripped
bikes converted into instruments—the bell and
tock of pedals, the clicking gears as one rider yielded
to the next, leg bones converting energy into
mechanical song. And some would ride their bicycle
as fast as they could go, and others drag out the broken
chords. You would have understood this music as I
could only listen. How beautiful and complicated humans are.
I mean to say that you are. I don’t know you at all
so how is it that I feel as if I’ve always known? Each time
I mean to study you, to learn everything about you
as I would learn a bicycle or a poem, but when I am
with you I am overcome, and can only
absorb you like water. I might recall a fragment—
the olive skin of your hands, your scuffed shoes.
But then I can’t even remember what clothes
you wore, your wrists, the colour of your eyes.
So I need to see you again, and again, although
I know you are not meant for me, to study
every beautiful and complicated part.
And as you were not there to see it (how could I not
have known that you existed on this earth?)
I would like to include in this poem for you, how,
when it became very dark, tiny hot air balloons
were released here and there around the lake. They floated up
over the bicycle gamelan and the black lake water
and the stilt walkers and the gypsy band, higher
and higher until they could no longer be seen anymore,
until they were extinguished by the beautiful night.
Kim Trainor’s poems have appeared most recently in Grain, Qwerty, and The Dalhousie Review. She won The Fiddlehead’s 2013 Ralph Gustafson Prize and was co-winner of the 2013 Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. She has recently completed a first collection of poetry, entitled Karyotype. With the exception of five rather cold years in Montreal, she has always lived in Vancouver.
A Bird and the River
by Jena Woodhouse
A tiny bird floats on its back …
by Jena Woodhouse
A tiny bird floats on its back
as if at home upon the stream
that bears it swiftly past the pontoon’s
piers and struts towards the sea.
The fledgeling’s rosebud feet
are furled, its eyes closed; keel
bone uppermost; serrated wings
a casket cradling the downy breast;
heart and silent throat at rest,
the body weightless, eluent
upon the tidal pulse and ebb,
offered to flight’s element.
How intricately made this frame,
how fine the tender arc of breast—
unblemished plumage dry,
the pinions curved symmetric as a lyre;
a natural canoe, the neat, beaked
crown a prow to brave the flux—
the river vast and treacherous;
the rite of passage effortless.
A human body cast into the spate
would not possess this grace:
only such a small, winged craft
can navigate the current’s haste—
composed amid turbidity, serene in death:
concrete on the brink of its abstractedness.
Born in Australia Jena Woodhouse has published two poetry collections (with a third in preparation), an award-winning children’s novella, a novel and a short-story collection. She holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing and spent a decade in Greece, where she wrote on books and writing for a subsidiary of the International Herald Tribune. In 2010 she was winner, Pacific region, in the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, and in 2011 received a Hawthornden Fellowship to Hawthornden Castle, Scotland.
Blaze
by Rosanna Eva Licari
A finite chamber, the domed sky of the chapel …
by Rosanna Eva Licari
i.m. Giordano Bruno the Nolan, 1548 – 1600
A finite chamber, the domed sky of the chapel
shows God as Father, Son and the same Holy Spirit
that descended on the apostles as tongues of fire.
Filled with the ardour of faith,
they preached in language understood
by those who would believe.
Giordano, your knees ache from the immutable truths
that sit on your shoulders. Then you stand up.
From beneath your cowl, you watch the skies,
light-pricked, expanding as a dark ocean:
God’s domain, Heaven.
In the evening drizzle, the tails of stars burn the sky.
Their flames fall near Vesuvius and
as you watch, their light passes through you.
The thoughts of stars linger in walks and prayers
and speak of more complex notions.
You are encircled by earth, water, air and fire.
You are earth, water, air and fire.
This is spirit.
No skullcap will fetter ideas that break through
as branches born of Egyptian, Greek and Arabic plantings.
You teach, travel, but the hounds of dogma
inhabit the world, and Venice delivers you to Rome.
You say innumerable suns exist;
innumerable earths revolve around these suns—
in the city’s prison, the world is dark.
Here your thoughts are free to roam
with the chattering rodents.
Your cheek against the damp wall, empty chains and
names carved into stonework are all that is left of the others.
You look up, filthy and bloodied.
There are no stars in the spears of light from the window.
God must be completely infinite because he can be associated
with no boundary and his every attribute is one and infinite.
God is silent.
Winter, and there are no flowers on the Campo de’ Fiori.
Mouth vised, you are tied to the stake on a mound of branches.
Smoke rises to the cold sky.
And you
the fiery, living torch.
Rosanna Licari is an Australian poet. Her collection An Absence of Saints won the 2009 Thomas Shapcott Award, the 2010 Anne Elder Award, the 2011 Wesley Michel Wright Award and was shortlisted for the 2010/2011 Mary Gilmore Award. Her interests are varied and she has worked with different forms including haiku and haibun, text and audio as well as page poetry. In June 2013 she was a Fellow of the Hawthornden International Retreat in Scotland.
Breakup
by Kent Leatham
You feel most sorry for the tits, …
by Kent Leatham
“they are… creatures of ignorant suffering”
–Sharon Olds
You feel most sorry for the tits,
and the hidden spongecake of the cock,
the parts that do not understand
this dissolution, the sudden lack
of touch each night, the lips, the hand
now gone, deleted, out-of-stock
like milk or waffles. Flesh gets stained
by fellowship; it cannot fake
the loss as well as heart or brain.
It reaches out despite our talk,
a stubborn child, too-well-trained;
it craves the meat-key’s tongue that fits
the private tumblers of its lock.
The wrist recalls. The eye awaits.
Kent Leatham is a poet, translator, editor, and critic. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Fence, Zoland, Poetry Quarterly, Poets & Artists, InTranslation, Ezra, Softblow, and The Battered Suitcase. Kent serves as a poetry editor for Black Lawrence Press and lives in central California.
Carried Along on Great Wheels
by Alison Luterman
Dear ghosts long-vanished into ash and gray city wind …
by Name
Dear ghosts long-vanished into ash and gray city wind
I think of you
When someone bicycles by with a little seat on the back, and in that
seat, listing perilously
earthward, a two-year-old girl half-asleep
Sagging down towards the pavement, wearing a tiny helmet and
carried along on great
wheels
Sack of potatoes is what my father used to call me, joking, when he
hoisted me up on his
shoulders
And I loved it, loved seeing the world from that great height
Now bare black trees stretch over the lake glistening like a giant eye
at the center of our city
And from leafless branches an explosion of gulls, winging in unison
Their furious texts scribbled on sky and immediately erased
The lives we dreamed we’d live, and the lives we actually have
Dogs on twin leashes, pulling us eagerly toward everything that flies
Alison Luterman has written two books of poetry The Largest Possible Life (Cleveland State University Press) and See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions). In addition to poetry, she writes plays and personal essays. She has taught at The Writing Salon in Berkeley, at Esalen Institute and Rowe Camp and Conference center; at Omega institute, Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference and elsewhere. Check out her website for more information.
Cashmere
by Alison Luterman
says its own softness …
by Alison Luterman
says its own softness
in the sound of its name, the cajzh
sliding over the tongue
like a pansy’s petal, only warmer,
the mere like the whisper of your first love’s name
something half-forgotten,
tucked away in the drawer lined with tissue paper,
redolent with grandmother,
she who stuffed nylons with dried rose-petals
and hung them from light bulbs to release their scent.
And why does this memory
drift back to me now? Because I want
that hundred dollar sweater, marked down
from a hundred and forty
but still way too much,
still out of reach as the touch
of my grandmother’s cheek,
gone for decades now, her powder and woe.
Because I have never seen the cashmere goat,
bred in the hard-fought Kashmir valley,
goat who is neither Muslim nor Hindu,
she of the cherished silky, double-layered coat
deliberately picking her way
down the rocky path of the Himalayas.
Because I have not met the herdsmen
or seen the place where the wool is carded,
washed and spun, nor sat with the women, weaving,
or heard their stories and songs. Because I have not sipped
their smoky tea in the dimness of the hut,
or lifted my eyes to the ring of mountains ranging me
wondering why the work of my hands may fly
where I cannot, I crave the expensive sweater.
Or perhaps
it’s the ancient cleft between worlds I want,
the agility of the goat’s quick step,
the way she lives at the edge of a cliff
without falling off. Or then again it could be
the strength and softness of those unknown women.
Alison Luterman has written two books of poetry The Largest Possible Life (Cleveland State University Press) and See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions). In addition to poetry, she writes plays and personal essays. She has taught at The Writing Salon in Berkeley, at Esalen Institute and Rowe Camp and Conference center; at Omega institute, Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference and elsewhere. Check out her website for more information.
Dante in Ravenna
by Lucy Beckett
She who has been my love of all the world, …
by Lucy Beckett
She who has been my love of all the world,
dying long ago, left me alone to learn
out of my loss of her something of God.
I had no other teacher of the heart
but books; Augustine, Virgil, Bernard drew
maps for my journey from a nowhere place
of darkness to the patient light of truth.
And now, an old man in these foggy streets
of a flat city steep as purgatory,
I stumble towards the gold of San Vitale,
towards the candlelight, the prophets, marble
waves of the sea transfixed, mosaic walls
of green, white, scarlet, men alone with God,
Melchisedech and Abel, in their hands
offerings of the earth, and in the priest’s
bread become God, the wine we never shared
become his blood for us, the life we share.
A matter of belief the gift of her
has been always, who took my soul through death
in love for which you have only my word,
my many thousand words. As so do I.
Out in the Adriatic the waves move
grey with the slowness of the winter sea,
their chill to fetch me soon to her, to God.
No more to do but kneel on the cold floor,
watching the emperor who stayed away,
the God who came, holding us in his grace.
Lucy Beckett is British and was born in 1942. She was educated at Cambridge University and worked for thirty years as a schoolteacher (Latin, English, History). She has published eight books, including a collection of poems, a major study of Western writing read in a Christian context, and two novels. A third novel will be published by Ignatius Press in 2014. She is married, has four children and lives in rural Yorkshire.
Dog
by Robert Carter
My feeder light me to run, the tail me waggers …
by Robert Carter
My feeder light me to run, the tail me waggers
he here! he here!
The wait me all out and the lone me
lift like the loose wind—he here,
he here, he here.
Over the ground grass the pup me
nose up the sweet piss of the not me.
Throw high the yard stick for the teeth me,
and test me feeder—test me the follow you—
we here, we here, we here.
Lend me this world of the make you,
the empty me fill, and the body me
into the waters leap
at the finger point you—
this here, this here, this here
Lead, feeder lead—across your feet lay me,
the fool me, greed me, the want me—
wake the dream me, feeder beyond
the see me and nose me—beyond the you me
all here, all here, all here.
And old me, the hurt me and used me,
still in me the need me—this breath
all here for the you me, wherever you go
take me, take me and run me, feeder
this last now.
Robert Carter has published award-winning poetry, short stories and novels internationally. His work has been translated into several languages. He wrote and directed a feature film of his first novel, which won awards at festivals around the world. More information, including his latest work can be seen here.
Dorset
by Mark Kirkbride
Birds perch on telegraph wires …
by Mark Kirkbride
Birds perch on telegraph wires
like music notes on staves. They shift
in stop-go cinematography
as cattle with black and white maps
on their backs lumber across fields
under curving shadowy hillsides,
sunlight-slashed. Two horses, one white
with white lashes, the other sorrel
with a blonde mane, stand flank to shoulder,
static from poll to croup but facing
opposite ways, like a couple
not talking. Hook-headed, a hawk
hovers. In woods, all elbows, knees
and contorted spindly limbs vaguely
gesturing, that tap of Morse means
woodpecker. Nerves in soil inch
a foot, and clumsy butterflies,
flimsy as the earliest planes,
brush a chrysalis on a shrub
that hangs like a parachutist
caught in a tree. Kite-like, the soul
tugs. A heartbeat of hooves, the flicker
of birds against coastlines of cloud
and all the sweeps and dips and folds
of countryside invite one to
follow dreamy rivers out to
where the sea broadcasts to the world.
Mark Kirkbride lives in London, England. He writes fiction and poetry. His novel Satan’s Fan Club will be out with Omnium Gatherum in 2013. His poetry has appeared in the Big Issue, Morning Star, Mirror and anthologies.
Drum
by Preston Mark Stone
The ones I miss the most I rolled by hand, …
by Preston Mark Stone
The ones I miss the most I rolled by hand,
packed with moss and damp earth. The paper
crackled quietly between my fingers
as I packed down all those fields, the leaves
of Kentucky and Virginia. The moment
it turned to chocolate gravel in the floor
of my throat, everything became
easy: lying in bed with our twin coils
of smoke rising in the streetlight,
or standing in the shower with one
dry hand, or driving on a winter morning,
one hand on the wheel, the other tipping
the cigarette out the window. I remember
being fifteen, and holding one out a window
as the car charged down the freeway,
and marveling at the rain of sparks
as if this were some sort of bona fide magic,
a true slice of the mysterious held between my fingers
and drawn into my body, where it might grow.
The last one was on a bench in early spring,
forgettable except for being the last, its smell
on my hands rich as the scent of a woman’s hair.
In bed that night, I mourned it, fingers to my face
as it faded away. Goodbye my slightly deadly,
goodbye my nearly precious—
Preston Mark Stone holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and was a winter fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He lives and works in Philadelphia.
Earth Girls Are Easy
by Lisa Brockwell
That old song has it wrong, I don’t find them …
by Lisa Brockwell
That old song has it wrong, I don’t find them
easy. When I bring them back to my place
they won’t relax and let go. I offer
them a holiday, a chance to shrug
their spirits free from all that bile and bone,
that ribcage, lock and key. But they
are as heavy as a riverbed, a seam
of oil too deep to reach. I see their spark,
their potential—at the ski fields or when they’re dancing
they show me they want to be airborne. So I
try to help, to loosen the root so they can wiggle
their spirits like milk teeth, ignore the gore,
the dull tear and dive through that moment
of pulling free. But they never do, they get stuck
at the wiggling, endlessly. They prefer to sit
in the saddle of pain. I see their thoughts.
What if there’s no coming back? I can’t leave
my children, my friends, my cat. I could switch
to earth boys, some swear by them. But they
are just as clenched, and more into the spaceship
than me. Also ungrateful: when I drop
them home they complain about a stopped watch.
After spending a large chunk of her adult life in England, Lisa Brockwell now lives near Mullumbimby on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, with her husband and son. Her poems have been shortlisted for the Bridport and Magma prizes, and this year she won second place in the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival poetry prize. She is working towards a first collection.
Five Songs for Petra
by Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné
They say my great-grandmother was mad, …
by Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné
i
They say my great-grandmother was mad,
but I like to think she flew into herself,
got trapped in the wool of her feline heart
and decided to stay there.
ii
He was already married when he met her.
Her name juts from the borders of his own,
half-Carib woman with a forest in her bones,
mother of his mad children, she who would dare,
with her sharp white teeth, to try and eat him alive.
iii
They say my great-grandmother lived alone in the leaning house.
I slept there once, long after her death,
my body rocked between the walls by
a slow August earthquake.
I smelled her in the damp floorboards.
The syllables of her name
rolled through the broken windows like
swollen fruit and grating metal.
That was how I found her.
iv
He was already married when he met her,
but there was something about her
that caught him, pierced his skin.
Her love was an unsheathed claw.
He waited, tunnelled around in the flute
of her hip to find the sound
of himself.
But soon, the beasts around the bed
would not let him in. The house bulged
with books and bared teeth.
When she began to sing to the trees,
he decided it would be best
to remain whole.
v
There is a door that leads
down a broken hill. Trees grow there,
but are dark, burdened with moss
and too much hunger.
If she walked here, with her dogs
barefoot and half-blind, then
I might still find her.
If I go mad, like she did,
I wonder if he will stay.
Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a poet and artist from Trinidad. Her work has been featured in several local and international journals. She was awarded The Charlotte and Isidor Paeiwonsky Prize by The Caribbean Writer’s editorial board in 2009, nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2010, and awarded the Small Axe Poetry Prize in 2012.
Grade Seven Social Studies Unit
by Patricia Young
The merry-go-round in the back yard …
by Patricia Young
The merry-go-round in the back yard
was once a bedstead my father took apart
then welded back together into a whirring
contraption I rode through a season.
On long afternoons it spun like a pinwheel
among blossoming trees, apple and pear.
He built it as he built everything else
in those years, out of scrap metal and bits
of plywood—swing set, picnic table, tree fort.
When I think of that merry-go-round I think of
Mesopotamia’s golden sands and lunar calendar.
I think: plow, sailboat, waterclock, stylus.
When I was twelve I lay on my back looking up
at the turning world and imagined I was rocking
in the cradle of civilization. It must have grown
dark, I must have gone in for dinner, but when
I think of that spring I think of my father
who died too young. I think of an iron bedstead
spinning between two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates,
the fertile delta running between.
Patricia Young’s eleventh collection of poetry Night-Eater was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Award in 2013.
The Guard
by Stevie Howell
King Tut, five-foot-six, lies supine on mould-flecked cotton, …
by Stevie Howell
King Tut, five-foot-six, lies supine on mould-flecked cotton,
ceiling-transfixed. Body broken
like he’d been struck by lightning.
Dead at nineteen, before the purpose,
before the remark. My avatar. In my last teen year,
my man tried to kill me with a Volkswagen. Rammed
my spine with grille, reversed to gain momentum.
I leapt from light, body split from spirit—
ba left ha. Fractures don’t kill, but heal with an echo
wedged in the chasm. The Valley of the Kings,
I imagine, is located in the foreground of a photograph
wall mural from Sears, beneath the mountain
at its lowest ridge. You can tear the world off
by its corner and ball it up in your arms;
that’s all it is. I lied for a decade. The universe
got hitched, had quints, got divorced, pitched over, while
I ruminated in my bed about hot knives. I described
my crypt to a doctor who put a
gun-trigger hand sign at his temple: “You feel ‘pow pow’
sometime?” No…the opposite. For self to reenter,
reanimate my shell, like the blockbuster CGI
storm cloud can reset the hero’s bone back in line.
Instead, my ex-love became security guard, a bored
protector of goods against longing. Who wouldn’t
rather camouflage than change? But grief has an unknown half-life,
and I’ve been resin’d in a vault
of magical thinking—that I can
spell-cast superstition into art.
Stevie Howell’s poetry and literary criticism have appeared in numerous journals and periodicals throughout Canada, the US, and Ireland. She works as an editor for a quarterly magazine and at a mental health hospital. Stevie is currently completing her first volume of poetry, slated to be published in fall 2014 by Ice House Press (an imprint of Goose Lane Editions).