Lise Meitner Leaves Berlin
by Victor Tapner
I’m taking off my lab coat …
by Victor Tapner
Born into a Viennese Jewish family, physicist Lise Meitner helped to discover nuclear fission in Germany before fleeing the country in 1938.
I’m taking off my lab coat
for the last time.
Each piece of apparatus stands in place:
cloud chamber, electrometer,
a web of wires to trap lightning.
Today I’m saying goodbye
to Frau Professor,
the Jewess with the worthless brain.
Tomorrow I’ll leave my flat
with nothing but a jacket,
an address in Holland
I might never find.
For too long, Otto, I’ve worn the white
of this sanctuary for science,
possessed, like you, by the prize,
my head filled with atoms.
Do we know, even now,
what demons’ eyes we’ve lit?
One neutron and a chain reaction,
one word to turn a crowd
and shatter the world.
When I could take the tram home
I’d see young women in the Tiergarten
pushing prams,
boys chasing round trees
waving wooden guns,
girls with ropes,
men reading newspapers.
Even then I could guess the headlines.
They say Vienna waltzed after the Anschluss.
Everywhere people are dancing
to the music of broken glass.
I’m saying good night, Otto.
My lab coat hangs lifeless
behind the door,
notes on my workbench
a muddled epitaph,
the electrometer’s needle
back to zero.
Victor Tapner is a British poet living just outside London. He has won several poetry prizes, including the Academi Cardiff International Competition. His first full-length collection Flatlands (Salt Publishing 2010) has been shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry.
Morel-Floored Forest
by Carolyn Hoople Creed
O mushrooms …
by Carolyn Hoople Creed
Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks so longeth my soul after thee . . .
–Psalm 42, Coverdale Bible
O
mushrooms
so epicurean,
as knights their grail,
shepherdesses their lambs,
thus I
search
for you
morels,
grown up O
below oak— the paroxysms
fungi that jut from leaf-mulch of my disbelief greet
ground that fosters musty birth fist-fat conical hats (on
of such saintly/earthy fleshpots cream-bottomed stems) which
strive to achieve tower height
such that
my basket
black masses—
gargantuan drowsers to be plucked
from their beds: the mushroom sheep
take up plump and bulbous positions
Morels along the paths of forest floor, when one kneels to them, always
bestow an annunciation (sometimes seconded by sunbeam, dappled through
tree-crown) upon the seeker of their lift-of-sorrow essence/their lichen-
sprung luscious pungency/their undeniably desirable spongy glory.
Carolyn Hoople Creed teaches Creative Writing at Canada’s Brandon University. Her writing has been published coast-to-coast in Canada, from Prism on the west coast to Undertow in the east.
Mosaic
by Polyxeni Angelis
This is how you kiss me, …
by Polyxeni Angelis
This is how you kiss me,
hard, your hand on my throat.
Your tongue slides along my teeth.
It feels like the wing
of a small bird on my lips.
Your mouth moves over my skin,
and like a magnet
brings to the surface
the parts of me that are real.
My body in fragments, the pieces of me wet.
You put me back together,
a mosaic you design from my remains.
This is my offering.
I kneel before you, no longer broken.
Your body, the curve of your arm,
the tightness of your thigh,
is the altar where I learn to pray.
Take it, you say. All of me.
I take the part of you
that is unforgiving and hard,
the part of you that carries
the secrets and dreams
of the women you have loved.
I feel your chest rise and fall,
at first slowly, then fast and deep.
You become still,
the way lake water calms
before a windstorm.
My voice breaks, Come, I whisper.
I am baptized, a sinner cleansed in holy water.
You are the wafer on my tongue.
You taste like warm rain and salt,
something the spirits created
to tempt me and keep me thirsty.
I find redemption in the way
the taste of you lingers,
and in the outline of your mouth
when you smile.
Polyxeni Angelis was born in Athens, Greece. She emigrated from Greece to America with her family in 1967. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology from the University of Minnesota. Writing is her passion. She resides in Minnesota with her son.
The Need for These Things to Be Said
by Margaret McCarthy
The baby grand, its mouth gaping, is robbed of children’s practice books. …
by Margaret McCarthy
For Donald Woods
The baby grand, its mouth gaping, is robbed of children’s practice books.
The police retreat with pens, pencils, and sheet music.
Donald Woods, leaning his elbow beside the keys,
faces the one-way night window.
Wendy, his wife, stands away from the glass, mimes
the daily inquest proceedings—fingers, leg irons, fists, police trucks.
Donald wipes a finger under his glasses,
nods.
For this editor, the Restricted Persons Act tapes his mouth shut,
fuses this writer’s fingers with law.
Upstairs, his children fall into sleep, his wife reads.
Across the keyboard, from a childhood Christmas, his uncle
draws on a postcard the three movements of a sonata.
Woods stalls at the keys, a writer with no pens learning
Chopin with no books.
The bullet that entered the living room window last night, that hush
bullet wrapped in the scowl of the neighbours,
made a hole the size of a rand.
Now the wind-filled smells of cooking come in, and go out, in breaths
—a strange asset for the house-bound—a glass tracheotomy.
Donald loosens his tie, heels to the ground,
right foot brushing the sustain pedal.
He centers himself on the stool, back to the window
while they dare not shoot him.
Ninhydrin!
For lifting prints at crime scenes is lifting the skin from his five-year-old.
His child is sedated, but he is awake.
Writing is lifting ninhydrin from his hands and pressing the keys violet. He types:
“No fear can outweigh the need for these things to be said.”
The poisoned t-shirt is in the bag, but
not the one they’re packing.
At New Year, the watchers go on the nod, the piano falls silent.
For this escape, each word is learned by heart.
The music has been called up and stored—
a deep breath for an underwater swim. A cassock, the editor’s mantle.
Fireworks spark from the watchtower into the night and fizz.
The international audience sits, legs politely crossed at the ankles, waiting for
Woods to play freely
for Biko
Margaret McCarthy’s poetry and fiction has been widely published. Her most recent work appears in the online journal Eureka Street. Her first poetry collection is Night Crossing (2010). Margaret teaches professional writing and editing at Victoria University. She lives with her daughter in Melbourne, Australia.
Night Thoughts from Somewhere Past High Noon
by Iain Higgins
Roadwork everywhere, jackhammers nattering on …
by Iain Higgins
Roadwork everywhere, jackhammers nattering on
like mosquitos escaped from a drive-in schlockflick.
Call it a day the late sun says but then lingers
lightly on the western porch like some bright-eyed guest
reluctant to depart and you can see why, having
been all day struck by its riveting midsummer
rise, the light insistent on its own absolute
rectitude, poised for hours against that slow plunge
towards the smoulder of old midwinter moonshine—
that the sky god will rise again—as yes it will,
unlike me, say, whose turn comes only once,
no matter what our phallic fables might pretend.
I solve the sphinx’s riddle merely by living
the answer, hoping to carve my initials scritch-
scratch-scritch in the thick-skinned world I happen through,
thinking hell they’ll last like eximious dinosaur
shit, but knowing the numbers tell a different tale.
Midsummer’s where I am and lingering on the porch—
downhill from here, the easiest leg, though hardest
on the knees; their bent gets awkwarder all the time,
but nothing that good shoes, aspirin, and surgery
can’t delay till Hamlet in hiking boots mutates
into this slow-mo Lear doing Tai Chi barefoot
on the heath beside that nipped and tucked and still (thanks
to pharmaco-chemistry) well fucked Tony and Cleo.
You go gently guys! the heckler in my brain yells,
teenaged even now, addled with its own juice.
I love my life like sunlight, oysters, and the dulled
pain of dental surgery, but know that the fat
hump of irony which adorns my hairless back
will not keep the coffin lid from closing down, down,
or stop the hearse’s jaunt the way roadwork just might.
Iain Higgins was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. His books include Then Again (poems), The Invention of Poetry (a translation of Polish poet Adam Czerniawski’s selected poems), The Book of John Mandeville (a translation of a fictional medieval travel book about the East), and Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville (an academic study).
The Old Man and the Beanstalk
by Alina Wilson
Three beans in the clay pot, …
by Alina Wilson
Three beans in the clay pot,
one for each hope left to the old man.
A week passes with soil still bare,
watered by thick hands,
until the morning a single stalk
bends its neck to the sun.
Noon. He waits for his son,
beef stew cooking in the pot,
rises, once, to check the slight, green stalk.
The night smells of burnt onion. The man
does not eat and the door handle
does not turn, too shy to bear
his steadfast gaze and bare
itself in turn. The morning sun
unrolls its slow heat a handsbreath
across the sill, limns the clay pot
and the table where the old man
sleeps, restless. The beanstalk
seems no bigger, lacks more stalks
for context. Dream bares
its throat to waking. The man
finds a brief message from his son,
who is sorry he forgot. A pot
of coffee later, the shaking in his hands
has faded. He soaks the soil in handfuls
of water, tender of the brown stalk.
He is sorry he let the pot
dry. A story then, low-voiced, of a bare
field that grew a sturdy beanstalk and a son
who climbed it and became a man,
or maybe a thief. Where is a man
who can reach that high, hands
giving instead of taking? Too much sun—
the old man is baked as dry as the stalk.
He spills out two dead beans, the stalk and the barren
earth, then walks away from the empty pot.
Alina Wilson will be graduating from Canada’s University of Victoria this year with a double major in both Writing and in Germanics. After that, she intends to spend some time in Germany, working as an English-teaching assistant.
Old Men on a Bench
by Adil Jussawalla
Of the ability we still have of walking on slippery ground …
by Adil Jussawalla
Of the ability we still have of walking on slippery ground
to where the boats are moored; of levitating,
not in cultivated gardens but, against all advice,
on the fishing dock itself, its smells more uplifting than yoga;
of imagining our children helpless in foreign cities—
our excuse, through subterfuges of anger, to ruffle
travel agents, hurry the issuing of visas—we speak,
carefully, pressing another’s hands should the need arise,
counselling patience, as though drawing up plans
for a new building we’re certain, one day, to share.
Our words may seem to you, eavesdropper, to skip over surfaces,
like today’s last dragonfly before it’s absorbed by shadow,
and some things may be clearer to you later,
much later, like, as every evening darkened, we imagined
we’d lift off the bench without effort
and sail home as steady as herons.
Adil Jussawalla was born in Bombay in 1940, and went to school there. He is the author of two books of poems, Land’s End (1962) and Missing Person (1976). His third book of poems, Trying to Say Goodbye, will be published by Almost Island Books this year.
For more information, visit Poetry International Web.
On Finding a Copy of “Pigeon” in the Hospital Bookstore
by Susan Glickman
I prowled up and down the rows of the hospital bookstore with a fevered intensity; …
by Susan Glickman
I prowled up and down the rows of the hospital bookstore with a fevered intensity;
“fevered” because it was a hospital, “intensity” because I was perplexed by
the mysteriously ruptured tendon in the middle finger of my right hand
in sympathy with which the whole hand had cramped
so that I could scarcely hold a pen or open a jar.
Even a five-month-old octopus in the Munich zoo can open a jar!
The octopus’s name is Frieda, which reminded me
of D.H. Lawrence, and thinking of him
brought me to the hospital bookstore. It was minimally stocked
with anything resembling literature, offering those in pain,
afraid, or just dully waiting for test results
a choice of pink-jacketed chick-lit, cookbooks, investment guides
or glossy thrillers spilling blood
as red as that pooling down the hall in the O.R.,
as though emulating some homeopathic principle
of curing a disease by a surfeit of that which caused it.
And perched as eccentrically as the sparrow who sings from the rafters
at Loblaws, and looking just as lost,
was the only volume of poetry in the store.
Reading it I recognized at once what I disliked
about the bulky bestsellers nudging it from the shelf
like bullies in the halls of high school, their meaty faces
full of self-regard, their minds absent of thought.
I hate the omni-present present tense, that fake cinematic contrivance
meant to create a sense of “being in the moment” with the hero
as though life were a constant rush of adrenaline
with no possible mood but surprise.
Whereas poetry offers the results of its meditation
tentatively; it is not embarrassed to show that thinking
—some of it slow, arduous, confused—has taken place.
And then poetry doesn’t rush ahead shouting, “Look at me! Look at me!”
Instead, it takes your hand, your poor mangled hand, like the good surgeon it is
and massages it joint by joint, feeling for the sore places.
And because it doesn’t speak without reflection
you trust it, and let it cut you open.
Photo credit: Nancy Shanoff
Susan Glickman has published five books of poetry with Véhicule Press, most recently Running in Prospect Cemetery: New & Selected Poems (2004); a sixth, The Smooth Yarrow, is due out in 2012, the same year as her second novel, The Tale-Teller (Cormorant Press). Her first novel, The Violin Lover (2006) won the Canadian Jewish Fiction Award.
Paradiso
by Maria Borys
In a garden they had named their Paradiso …
by Maria Borys
In a garden they had named their Paradiso
The garage stands with the door always ajar
An old man in the evening waters roses
Plastic flowers grow amid some Pampas grass.
In a garden—and its name is Paradiso
an old woman sets the table for some tea
A veil of lilac blue perfume dances around her
for an instant she’s become his young new wife.
In this garden—and its name is Paradiso
Flags of laundry fly their colours in the wind
A picnic table, plastic chairs, mismatched companions
the man whistles for the stray cats to come back.
There’s a garden whose name is Paradiso
An old barbecue leans rusting by the vine
Smells of rhubarb, dandelions and wild garlic
Water barrels stand forgotten in the rain.
In the garden whose name is Paradiso
she finds solace as she sits there in the shade
she remembers the good times when they gathered for a feast
Sunday afternoons with friends long gone away.
In her dreams she named this garden Paradiso
In wrought iron its name written on the gate
It doesn’t matter—just a dream—the garden lives still within
And she loves him among the stray cats and the rain.
In this garden whose name is Paradiso
There’s a teapot on the table, and two cups.
So I miss you but you don’t know that you’re not here.
We have tea in conversation with stray cats.
Maria Borys was born in Poland and spent her formative years in Mexico. She writes and translates business, academic and literary texts in English, Spanish and Polish. Her work has recently been published in Chilean Poets: A New Anthology (Marick Press, 2010); and Borealis: Antologia Literaria de El Dorado (Verbum Veritas/La cita trunca, 2010).
The Pardon
by Ellen Wehle
Slavish to the letter of the law or perhaps just plain …
by Ellen Wehle
Tyburn Gallows, 1447
Slavish to the letter of the law or perhaps just plain
Malefic, the hangman refuses to return his due
And the gallowbirds—babe-naked, marked for
Quartering from Adam’s apple to navel—scarcely
Dare meet each other’s eye as the messenger
Spurs his nag back to town. Should they kick
Up a fuss? Demand their earthly goods, wood-soled
Shoes and shirts, the woolen hose holding each
Wearer’s shape like a ghost? Thwarted, the mob
Rumbles, a faint thunder on the horizon…one felon
Takes his cue and strides off, rubbing at the roadmap
Inked upon his chest with an idle thumb. One sits
Poleaxed at the platform’s edge; the Wheel has spun
Too fast to catch his breath. Laughing madly, two leap
Down to join their drunken friends while the last
Looks blinking around him, shaken awake to this
Shadow-dream—the rain-dark fields, glinting leaves,
Kingfisher and reeds of a high summer day—then
Stiffly, like an old man, begins his journey back.
Ellen Wehle‘s poems have appeared in Canada, Europe, the U.S. and Australia. Her first collection of poems is called The Ocean Liner’s Wake (Shearsman, 2009). Wehle writes poetry book reviews, “a labor of love,” she says, “to help bring exciting new poets to a larger audience.”
The Silence
by C.K. Stead
The dead we know are gone except …
by C.K. Stead
The dead we know are gone except
when dreams return them. So it was
Frank Sargeson took me aside
in Hell and said, ‘You know, my friend,
how well the wind among the reeds
is used by shaman and guru,
rabbi and priest.’ He had the face
of Dante’s much-loved preceptor
Brunetto Latini among
the sodomites, as we ambled
down the avenues of the damned;
and he, brushing ash from his sleeve
went on, ‘Those with a patch of earth
and running water lack vision,
preferring to leave such mysteries
‘to desert-and mountain-dwellers
and the poor of Varanasi.
Where little is lacking listen
‘always to the silence until
you hear it whisper its name.’ So
he faded into fire, and I,
half-waking, wrote to remember
all that he’d said—and listened for
the silence, and could not hear it.
C.K. Stead is a writer from New Zealand. He has published a number of novels and books of literary criticism, as well as poetry and short story collections. He was awarded a CBE in 1985 for services to New Zealand literature, and elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1995. His Collected Poems 1951-2006 was published in 2008 by Auckland University Press in New Zealand, and by Carcanet in the UK.
Spring in Cow Bay, Nova Scotia
by Barbara Myers
Sad coasts that even these weeks of unrelenting rain …
by Barbara Myers
After A.F. Moritz
Sad coasts that even these weeks of unrelenting rain
from clouds assuming squatters’ rights cannot make
sadder. They drench silver picnic sands long denuded,
scraped to build docks for container ships, landing strips
for naval aircraft to muster local jobs, beach rendered
defenseless in Atlantic hurricanes; the coast receding
ever further, nothing to look at. For whoever has not
from him shall be taken away even that he has. The old
family cemetery is held in check between commuters’
new-builts where tides and ties exert their pull, and surf‘s
adventuring gliders on their circuit. Abraded stones
soft among rain-green patches blanketing unknowns
and long-forgottens, the swollen yard’s one small scar
takes the rain as though to nourish new ashes, this
closing-out-of-sequence, youngest sister. Our practice
of containment. We too as wraiths—unrecognizable,
scraped-away grains inhabiting new ports and runways, receding
ever further, coasts of mind removed to another place.
Barbara Myers was born and bred in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and now lives in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She is a contributing editor to Arc Poetry Magazine. Her first full collection, Slide (Signature Editions) came out in 2009. Whistle For Jellyfish (Bookland Press), of which she is one of the co-authors, has just been released.
The Stiltwalkers
by John Wall Barger
We arrived on horseback. Villagers pooled …
by John Wall Barger
We arrived on horseback. Villagers pooled
around us, faces kind & open. We drugged the water.
We constructed their poverty from scratch.
Poured wine on each other’s heads, laughing,
dubbing ourselves kings. Introduced a new law:
each foot of each villager would be severed
& upon each stump a tall wooden stilt be sewn,
so they could not escape the woods. They turned
on us. My comrades fled. I heard the stilts on
cobblestones at midnight like a thunder.
I escaped my palace to the brink of a deep barranca
singing my death chant & hurled myself in.
I survived. Now I walk among them, disguised
as an old woman, feet strapped to stilts,
ankles blistered, toes smashed. They eye me
at market, but I do not break. I hobble to my room
under the stairs. Peel off the mask & wool dress.
O, freedom becomes them. They have grown eloquent
in walking. Running faster than we ever could.
Tall as birches. Their young born that way:
attached. I hear their voices, drowning phonemes,
through the floors. I do not make a sound.
I am afraid to look, but each night I peek out
at their street dances. They lope like puppets &
never fall. Women gyrate in a ring around the bonfire.
Behind, the men jump, ever higher, calling for love.
Women catch them. Everyone begins to spin,
these giants, arms upraised, slowly, then blurring—
impossibly—& sing in a collective low
moan the joy of their dark hearts like gods.
John Wall Barger has lived in Halifax, Vancouver, Ottawa, Rome, Prague, Dublin, and Tampere. His first book of poems, Pain-proof Men, came out in 2009 with Palimpsest Press. His next book, Hummingbird, is forthcoming with Palimpsest in spring 2012.
Sun Flower Sutra
by Stuart Jay Silverman
Was this, indeed, what it was supposed to be like, …
by Stuart Jay Silverman
Was this, indeed, what it was supposed to be like,
New York, in summer, this sumac-leaved stammer,
the landscape of ineradicable grit, and towers built
as though to escape the ground they bedded in?
She walked south on Canal past City Hall choked
with an ingress of the smallest cogs of governance.
It was 8:43, and the morning light felt like coarse
linen on the fine lines of her face, her arms exposed.
A dog was peeing, a gusher washing dust from
a front tire, an Escalade’s, braced against the curb.
Now, the water came up to lap at its rocky bank.
A derelict tried for a quarter and shambled away.
“And what street compares with Mott Street,” she
thought, and thought of Nathan Road where she’d
bought red silk panties whose color bled, staining
the inside of her thighs the first time she wore them.
Somehow, the signs had become confused. One
whispered “79th” and another “3rd Ave.” A kiosk
guarded the corner. Doughy pretzels hung looped
from a wooden cart, its owner off taking a leak.
Then, the city turned over, its concrete radiating
heat into the suffocating air. The sky fell open.
A bloom like a dust of pollen overlay the dead cars.
She became the ash the sun scattered everywhere.
Stuart Jay Silverman taught college in Alabama and Illinois before retiring to homes in Chicago, IL, and Hot Springs, AR. His The Complete Lost Poems: A Selection is published by Hawk Publishing Group. Some 400 of his poems and translations appear in journals in Canada, the U.S.A., England, and France.
Tamarind Tree
by Patricia Young
Talk to me beneath the tamarind tree. Before it’s too late, …
by Patricia Young
There are just two people left who can speak [Ayapaneco] . . .
but they refuse to talk to each other. –The Guardian
Talk to me beneath the tamarind tree. Before it’s too late,
let us bury our quarrel in Tabasco’s lowlands. I am old and my heart stutters.
Let us talk beneath the feathery foliage and wide pinnate leaves.
Only we remember the hum and click of our grandmothers’ tongues.
Let us bury our quarrel in Tabasco’s lowlands. We are old and our hearts stutter.
Why do you avoid me on the street, at the market, in the Zocalo?
Only we remember the hum and click of our grandmothers’ tongues.
Before our blood runs dry, speak to me of kolo-golo-nay
on the street, at the market, in the Zocalo. Why do you avoid me?
Rest on this bench awhile. Above us pods bulge white flesh.
Before our blood runs dry, speak to me of kolo-golo-nay
and skins that grow brittle, pulp that turns to a sticky paste.
The pods above us bulge white flesh. Rest on this bench awhile.
Or shake the drooping branches and watch the fruit fall.
The skins grow brittle; the pulp turns to a sticky paste.
Last week another anthropologist washed up on our linguistic island.
She shook the drooping branches just to watch the fruit fall.
What lies between us but three sleeping dogs and a litter of cracked shells?
Another anthropologist has washed up on our linguistic island.
O to be reborn, a flat brown bean along a tree’s young shoot.
Lying between us: three sleeping dogs, a litter of cracked shells.
Brother, we speak two different versions of the same stubborn truth.
O to be reborn, a flat brown bean along a tree’s young shoot,
but the rain falling on Ayapa sounds a death knell clatter.
Two different versions of the same stubborn truth? Speak to me, brother,
beneath the feathery foliage and wide pinnate leaves.
Listen: the rain falling on Ayapa sounds a death knell clatter.
Before it’s too late, talk to me beneath the tamarind tree.
Patricia Young has published ten collections of poetry. She has won many prizes including two B.C. Book Prizes for Poetry, the Pat Lowther Award for poetry, two National Magazine Awards, the League of Canadian Poets National Poetry Prize, the CBC Literary Award for Poetry, and the Arc Poem of the Year Prize. Her poems have been included in Best Canadian Poetry in English (Tightrope Books) in 2009, 2010 and 2011.
Themba is Dead
by Emeka Okereke
Themba is dead …
by Emeka Okereke
Themba is dead
He lies in a coffin of wood
Garment of cotton
Stockings of wool
stiff as stone
Themba is dead
Taking his grief to grave
Hoping never again to be black
Themba is dead
Fifteen years ago
when he crossed the sea alive
Hopes decorated with fantasies of a white life
He lived in the shadows of others
No chance in the light
He struggled in the dark
Themba is a fool
wise only yesterday
Today he is in a coffin of wood
Garment of cotton
Stockings of wool
Stiff as stone
Now...
The municipality is taking samples
consulting the law
Making phone calls
checking cost
To decide which land owns Themba
Emeka Okereke is a poet from Nigeria. He is the Artistic Director of Invisible Borders Trans African Photography Initiative.
There You Are
by Mitchell Albert
Even once aboard, I feel the stinging cold …
by Mitchell Albert
Even once aboard, I feel the stinging cold
and as the train begins to heave
away from the old country station,
away from the spiny, alabaster mountains,
I see you,
crossing your arms in midair,
again and again,
your face alit.
At my seat, I prepare to collapse;
in my head I am already in the city.
Ten hours into the future, I sink into my bed,
next to the woman waiting in it,
and tell her of your joyous farewell.
Now, I drop my bags and watch you through the window.
You recede in slowest motion,
your eyes singing,
your whole-bodied smile gently mocking
my exhaustion.
The morning is illumined by your gesture,
not by the stingy sun.
The scarf wrapped round your head
sounds a note of vivid colour,
defying the gravelly sky.
For the last time, you wave your arms,
and I make a noise like a laugh,
astonished by the contrast between us:
you are so young,
I am so old.
Not ten years afterward I dip a shovel
into a mound of earth,
and hear the dirt smack dryly on polished wood,
and begin to describe you
to different women, in different cities.
There’s the train, there’s the distance;
no more station, no more mountains.
There you are,
slowly windmilling your arms,
and smiling.
Mitchell Albert is a London-based book and magazine editor born and raised in Montreal. He is also the editorial director of PEN International. Although he has fielded countless submissions of poetry, essays, short stories, articles and novels, his entry for the Montreal Prize represents the first time he has submitted his own work for a publication or prize.
They Disappeared in the Night
by Rafi Aaron
They disappeared in the night as the white ash of …
by Rafi Aaron
They disappeared in the night as the white ash of
the fire went cold. They disappeared with the tales
the almond tree had overheard. Only the stray
mountain goat and the restless stones that
wandered with our people for years knew their
story.
You must understand they left us the way a leper
leaves you living in the weak house of your skin.
It was late in the life of spring how could this
happen?
We searched for signs; a feather from a striped
bird, or the fruit of the peach tree wearing the skin
of the elders. Who would lead us now? The voice
of reason was dead and still dying as we argued
into the next day.
Then the old woman spoke: A nightingale is only a
nightingale when it confesses its brightest colours
are hidden in its throat and a dog becomes the
animal we know when it pulls love out of the cruel
master’s hand.
And as the mangled tree straightened a branch our
tongues curled and no one spoke. And the silence
fell, and it fell like a man falling off a cliff without
having one moment to shout out his name, only the
silence filling his body, then the gorge, then the
lives of all who knew him. This was the traveling
silence, the twin of sorrow that knocks on every
door and never tires.
Photo credit: Ruth Kaplan
Rafi Aaron‘s book Surviving the Censor—The Unspoken Words of Osip Mandelstam (Seraphim Editions, 2006) won the Jewish Book Award for poetry in 2007. A documentary on Rafi’s poetic works entitled The Sound Traveller, produced by Endless Films, has aired on Bravo TV and Book Television.
Tsunami
by Bronwyn Lovell
Grief comes in waves. …
by Bronwyn Lovell
Grief comes in waves.
I didn’t see you coming.
I’d kept guard for three years
then packed away the sandbags.
My desert island,
so far from the epicenter of you,
I didn’t think you’d ever
shake me again.
Your shifting
should have gone unnoticed,
your movements
unannounced,
never again to ripple
my safe harbour.
But the news crashed
through me
like a tsunami,
tore up my shallow roots,
shredded the new growth,
left me like driftwood.
Grief comes in waves,
hits without warning.
You can’t fight the ocean,
only try not to drown.
So I will lie here
till my sodden splinters dry
and the sand beneath me is solid.
Even now, I can feel the tsunami receding,
trickling back
to the rocks tears puddle under,
to hide in the hollows of me,
seeping away in streams
to wherever grief goes,
to be still,
lap quietly,
and wait.
Bronwyn Lovell is a poet and spoken word performer in Melbourne, Australia, where her poetry has been featured at several events, arts and writing festivals, as well as on local television and radio. She has a writing residency at Kinfolk Cafe, and she is a workshop facilitator for the Centre for Poetics and Justice.
Three Monkeys on a Dusty Bureau
by Shelagh McNally
On his dusty bureau, …
by Shelagh McNally
On his dusty bureau,
beside the mint lifesavers
my grandfather had a carving of three dark monkeys.
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
“Which one are you?” he would ask.
“I don’t have enough hands to decide,” I replied.
“Eventually, everyone must choose,” he said dropping
another ice cube into his drink.
I left home without ever knowing which he had settled on.
My astute arrogance buffered by courageous ignorance,
convinced my life would be free of such passive despair.
I would never face the same decisions.
Now as I settle into this age of glorious imperfections
with its wrinkles and various indignities,
before the promised wisdom had settled upon these tired shoulders,
and the fierceness of youth is whittled down into memory as thin as hair,
I wait in the mornings with my neighbours
at the train station.
Their faces clutched in concentration,
lips filled with woes they don’t consider petty.
An unfocussed restlessness
disturbs the finely ordered
rhythm of my day.
More than ever I need the tenderness of understanding.
Now, I wish those monkeys rested on my bureau.
But they are gone.
Sold in some anonymous yard sale.
And still, I have not chosen.
Shelagh McNally grew up in Ottawa, escaped Ottawa to live in Toronto, escaped Toronto to live in Mexico on a beach and now lives on a tiny island outside of Montreal. She has worked as a journalist and travel writer for the last 23 years.