Thomas, Not Saying
by Pete Smith
The finger must have seen something …
by Pete Smith
Jesus said to his disciples, “Compare me to something and Tell me what I am like.” …
Thomas said to him, “Teacher, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like.”
- Gospel of Thomas 13.
The finger must have seen something.
Say. The skeptical finger
sees more than the eye of faith.
Nothing invasive or military. The hole
invites the finger. So. A probationary
touch, tentative in intention then electric
in performance. Say. Only Caravaggio
not Thomas, sees, through Thomas’
finger, red corpuscles flushing the white
capillary walls. An angioblast
performed by Caravaggio by means
of the finger of Thomas. Not so.
There is incredulity to reckon with.
Six eyes and one finger focus intently
on the thoracic fault that rhymes
with the folds of the man’s robes
(robes once folded straight and flat
and put away).
The man with the finger looks
away – to enhance, say, the finger’s encounter.
He seems intent on listening, though,
for a word the others have no need of.
Two of the three fix a clinical gaze
on the folly of flesh, so, as if
professing faith yet awaiting the full report.
The pierced one keeps gentle hold
of the wrist of the guided finger,
letting it draw, say, its own conclusions
(the Now of the whole matter);
and it is this touch, not the Braille wound
his finger cannot read, but the hand
on his wrist that tells, that knits breath back
to bone and says it is so and so and not so.
Pete Smith, born and raised in Coventry, immigrated to Canada in 1974. After a long detour, he returned to poetry in the late 1990s. He’s published poetry with Wild Honey Press, Poetical Histories, Great Works and Oystercatcher among others. His reviews and essays have appeared in Agenda, The Gig, The Paper, The Capilano Review, Crayon and elsewhere. Bindings with Discords, was published by Shearsman Books (UK) in February 2015.
Passage Grave
by Rosamund Taylor
I’m in the dry centre of the passage grave, …
by Rosamund Taylor
I’m in the dry centre of the passage grave,
looking at interlocking circles
carved by stone-age hands,
when the guide tells us life expectancy was twenty-five.
I'm dead, then. The guide adjusts the electric light
to create a gold glow
and asks us to imagine sunshine,
December sunshine striking silent stone.
I imagine I'm Neolithic
and pregnant, standing here,
knowing I may die soon from wounds
or childbirth. I'm taller
than the other women. When we celebrate I
chew berries and paint my face purple with their juice.
The women say
I'm a wicked goddess. We laugh
together in the dark, and a woman
kisses my stretched abdomen
where the baby's head
distorts the skin. She kisses my foot, too, all its firm callouses.
We laugh together in the dark
among dry stones and I'm
standing in Newgrange and I imagine I'm
already dead like all those who
didn't—who stepped into the sea and went under,
who never disgorged the pills. I have a year left, I have fifty, I watch
the electric light glow gold, imagine
stone-age sunshine striking stone,
and a December goddess laughing in the dark.
Rosamund Taylor was chosen for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series in 2015 and gave a reading as part of the Dublin International Literature Festival. This is her third time appearing on the Montreal International Poetry Prize website. She has been published in a number of magazines in the UK and Ireland, and is forthcoming in Agenda. She is currently working on a first poetry collection called Notes from an Alien.
Africa Today
by Joseph Ushie
She is the blind bowl-bearing beggar …
by Joseph Ushie
She is the blind bowl-bearing beggar
Sitting on a roadside mound of gold
Yawning all day, yawning all night
America arrives, cleaves a chunk of the gold,
Drops a coin and some affronts, and passes;
Asia arrives, cleaves a chunk of the gold,
Drops a coin and some contempt, and passes;
Australia arrives, cleaves a chunk of the gold,
Drops a coin and some chuckle, and passes;
Europe passes, cleaves a chunk of the gold,
Drops a coin and some insult, and retires;
Then hail her own one-eyed leader:
He clears the bowl of the dropped coins,
Blames her plight on her slothfulness, and passes,
Belching all the way as his beggar-land yawns.
Joseph Ushie teaches at the University of Uyo, Nigeria. He is a Fellow of the 2002 Fulbright Program and recipient of many honours and awards including his state government’s for his outstanding contributions to the growth of African Literature and Culture. He’s been a judge in national literary competitions and was Africa’s representative at the 2010 Philippine PEN 50th anniversary celebrations. His poetry has appeared in world-class literary anthologies and has earned global attention.
Slant of the Girl
by Jessica Van de Kemp
I cut my feet that autumn …
by Jessica Van de Kemp
I cut my feet that autumn
on all the bay-rocks.
The hill without end.
My tent was a net in the air.
I ran down the hill so my legs would give out.
Poison ivy everywhere.
The others reddened and boiled
into spider nests, any rough cloud
that could hang them
above the green.
I lived happily on the outcrop,
walking on mountaintops,
scarring my soles.
For once, I was blood and bone,
my feet like rhythm-bowls.
I thought I had what you had,
a strange mind. I thought I was
born to grow upward.
That autumn, the hill ran
down into darkness, and I slanted
with the trees toward the bottom.
I walked on ground forgotten
by humans. That’s how I learned
of the moon’s jaw, opening for virgins,
as if a temple could be made
from moss and foliage.
My mind is stranger every day,
it works by rock and moon-cut.
I sleep in tents of air.
The others have gone
to find help for their bodies.
They’ll find none.
I learned how to die as I lived,
like a photon, and weigh
the salt of my years
against the exoskeletons.
Jessica Van de Kemp (BA, B.Ed, MA) is a 2014 Best of the Net nominee and the author of the poetry chapbook, Spirit Light (The Steel Chisel, 2015). The recipient of a BlackBerry Scholarship in English Language and Literature and the winner of a TA Award for Excellence in Teaching, Jessica is currently pursuing a PhD in Rhetoric at the University of Waterloo.
Twitter: @jess_vdk.
Hunger
by Gilliam Wallace
These are …
by Gillian Wallace
These are
the empty lines of a home, these are
the black windows looking
for lamps. The cupboards are
the life raft you cling
to. You've fed
them cans and boxes for so
long, hoping to sate
them with twists
of dried pasta. You know the panic
of cutlery when a plate
is empty. You remember
it from your childhood, the years
of bologna carved
into fried sculptures. When you check
your pools of forgiveness have
dried up, only
faint rings of salt are left
in withered grass. It's a desert
where you step, the bones
of trees holding
a box labelled
rage that you can't
reach. This
is what Eden looked like after
hunger chose
the soft curve, sucked
flesh until juices
ran down its face.
Gillian Wallace’s poems have been published in various journals including Descant, The Antigonish Review, Room, and This Magazine. In 2009 she won Arc Poetry Magazine’s Diana Brebner Prize, and in 2010, she was named a “Hot Ottawa Voice” by Ottawa’s Tree Reading Series. Gillian has her PhD in the psychology of religion. Her thesis was on the origins of evil. She occasionally edits her poems online at http://gillianwallace.ca.
Shapes & Sizes
by Stephanie Warner
When couched in one of Man Ray’s glycerine tear drops …
by Stephanie Warner
When couched in one of Man Ray’s glycerine tear drops
at 30 clicks an hour, immediate danger is understood
abstractly. Like your tax return, or The Cloud—
& Rain has made an executive decision.
Your laowai tongue will make such a cockup
of the tones, you'll end up in a 2nd or 3rd tier Chinese city
in a very bad way. The word for foreigner being ghost—
& home, Jia 家: a roof, under which, a pig. Animal husbandry!
Shang Dynasty! says Rain. & so your insubstantiality bundled
in the back of the bubble car. Capacity: two humans, one cat, an amp.
Siouxsie & the Banshees, Big in Japan. Yes, fight & flight
have taken a staycation, & your hangover coiled in your buzz
like a scorpion in formaldehyde. It just seems wrong, a city
the size of Belgium: endless ring roads, bypasses, & tunnels
where taxis are sleeping it off, the lighting cranked
to Ibiza. Ribbons & ribbons of highway
playing cat’s cradle with each other. Not moving
so much as moved. A God, quite bored, tipping
a silver ball through a wooden box maze. & nothing
to yoke the eye, save fractals of neon. Or the promise
in chubby letters: Home Inn (the full English, black-out curtains),
crescent moon with a night cap spooning the wastes
of his dark twin. Rain is telling you about a club in Berlin
where people freeze their shits into dildos
and fuck each other to dream pop. You sort of get it.
Right now. The combined gigantism and lack
of detail: simulation of a city and graphics
on a shoe-string, where the video game limit drops
its particulate soft-focus somewhere between
a stone’s throw & middle distance. The pollution’s worse
at night, but you take off your mask & breath
the invisible PM 2.5’s. Embracing the intimacy
of carcinogens small enough to take a hair-pin turn
into your bloodstream, the one-off alleys of capillaries,
to darken the doorsteps of your cells.
Tower block after tower block, (some still being poured),
Home Inn after Home Inn—
& that trick of a lone lit window
glowing more human life through synecdoche
than anything wrought of hair & blood.
Stephanie Warner completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her poetry has appeared in Event, Arc, Descant, This Magazine and Prairie Fire. Her first collection of poetry is forthcoming with Fitzhenry & Whiteside, and she has been accepted to undertake a creative-critical PhD in poetry at UEA. She has taught English in Prague and Literature in Beijing. She now resides in Barcelona with an Englishman and a demanding cat.
Firebird
by Jessica Wilkinson
You cannot find it in a book— …
by Jessica Wilkinson
“Our body has to free itself
from the drug of earthly gravity”
- George Balanchine
“Take some more—let’s be drunk.”
- Igor Stravinsky
You cannot find it in a book—
the heat of a taut, lean muscle—glowing;
the piccolo flutter of a wing;
blinding vibrations at take off.
The bird must be free to be understood,
a burst of tulle, skittering on and off
the stage; ember-quick, with the burning
grace of a vodka wavelet down the throat.
Allegro rapace: woodwind and strings refracted
through movement, the body rhythm
rampant—wild bourrées, sissone, sissone
arabesque unfurling. This creation is
substantially sincere, a blessing
and a bringer of doom: you see, a rose
is a rose is a rose is not true—
each body becomes its own distinct poetry
in a logical plastic sequence.
The message is: intense pleasure—
and then it is gone.
Jessica L. Wilkinson’s first book Marionette: a biography of Miss Marion Davies was published by Vagabond in 2012 and shortlisted for the 2014 Kenneth Slessor Award. Her second, Suite for Percy Grainger: a biography was published in 2014. She is currently working on her third poetic biography, Music Made Visible: a biography of George Balanchine. Jessica is the founding editor of Rabbit: a journal for non-fiction poetry.
Siege
by Shoshanna Wingate
The light flashed red. The stretcher sprouted metal feet, criss cross legs. …
by Shoshanna Wingate
The light flashed red. The stretcher sprouted metal feet, criss cross legs.
On cue, men filed out of bars, shops, restaurants, a ritual
of grief like dreamtime, a remembering of life lived here.
They swarmed our door until I could see the black bag no more.
The leather boys in chaps and vests, aging queens with kohl-ringed eyes
and silver rings, the shop keeps, bartenders in steel-toed boots,
and boys pausing mid-step, flash of red their doppelganger.
Out the gate, on Castro Street, a sore thumb of a girl,
an impostor in a man’s man world, smelling of sleep and stale beer.
Here men married their lovers through adoption papers,
while other fathers, late at night, opened their wallets
to show photos of portrait smiles and freckled faces, pigtails.
War changes you. It changes how you see the world, how bright
the subway cars and grocery aisles, vertigo at the clinic;
the white chaulk lines of separation like a hopscotch grid.
You have this little box. Move freely here here nowhere else.
Oh, and words become weaponized. We’re onto other wars,
but I remember. T cell count. KS. Thrush. Cocktail drugs.
AZT. Gay plague. Nature’s retribution. God’s revenge.
Wars of neglect are hard on families. Who were quarantined,
whose friends closed their doors, who knew help was insular.
When the police did show up, they declared everyone
illegally assembled, including in their own homes.
My father’s body gone, I left my place, encircled by bloated aunties
who ushered me into the bar. Have this. Another.
They cradled my shoulders. My drunken mothers. Danced me
from stool to table, breath of ashes and fire starter.
The bar a night time crowd by lunch, an impromptu wake. I drank.
And danced my mothers, and we were making history with our tallies, here, here.
My aunties whirled me, their lesions kissed my ear, and they said,
for today, tonight, you are one of us, you dance. We dance through this.
We celebrate. Not one of us is left out in darkness.
Shoshanna Wingate is the author of Radio Weather, a poetry collection (Fall 2014, Vehicule Press) and a poetry chapbook, Homing Instinct (Frog Hollow Press, 2011). She is also a textile artist who works with natural dyes and foraged dye plants (Shoshi Designs). Born in New York City, she moved to Canada in 2004 and lives in Sackville, New Brunswick.
Evening Stroll by the Canal
by Jena Wooodhouse
Late today I turned east by the arched bridge at the village edge …
by Jena Woodhouse
Late today I turned east by the arched bridge at the village edge
to follow the canal’s trajectory, between tall trees and low levee—
a strange wind blowing fitfully, rattling the sabres of a ghost cohort.
A swan is nesting on the bank, a queen upon her makeshift throne—
her consort tacking back and forth, anxious and alone.
A chill breath lifts the trailing ivy tendrils from the trunks of trees,
sings an eerie serenade in balls of mistletoe, ruffles the canal's
meniscus, sets it lapping like a cat.
I glance over my shoulder: it’s deserted here, I should turn back,
but can't resist the stubborn invitation of the thread of track.
The channel is an enigmatic green, unwinding like a charm.
The more I walk, the more it lures me on.
The chateau and the village that I reach have strayed out of a tale.
I'll blink, and there’ll be nothing there at all. I blink, but they are real:
“The Three Emperors,” where three armies in turn set up
their headquarters, is solid as a rock. I am the revenant,
or so it seems, roaming stony streets like one possessed.
Walking back, I see the swan has tucked her head beneath her wing;
the male swan paddles fretfully, to guard her as she rests.
The northern European light drains swiftly to the west—
its running fire on the canal is doused.
The woods are listening, as if alert for signs of hobgoblins,
and there is something edgy in the wind...
Jena Woodhouse (Australia) has spent a decade in Greece and was recently (2015) granted a writer’s residency in France, at CAMAC Centre d’Art, Marnay-sur-Seine, the setting of the present poem. In addition to two published poetry collections, her poems have been shortlisted and have sometimes received prizes in national and international competitions. She has also translated poetry from the Russian and the Modern Greek. A third poetry collection is nearing completion.
Reindeer Herders
by Anjali Yardi
We move with the herd …
by Anjali Yardi
We move with the herd,
owning nothing we cannot carry,
stop with them by wood and water,
watch for wolves.
Our lives have merged.
Their flesh is our food, their milk our drink,
their skins keep us clothed, shod and sheltered,
their backs bear our burdens.
The reindeer follow ancient route maps
embossed on the brain’s soft topography,
pass sure-footed along river valleys,
swamps, forests, plateaus, rocky ridges.
Hooves can be cleats on slippery ice
or spread flat to skim snowfields.
Practise has made us nimble in their wake.
Where the herd halts we set up camp.
Across the white distance, ravening
shapes slink over snow, melt
into tree shadows. Under an opal sky,
water flashes molten grey and silver.
By morning dark paw-holes
will pockmark the trampled snow
where moss and lichens
were nosed out and grazed.
All night their warm breaths make
restless lacework on the freezing air,
their antlers bristle like forests of bare branches.
They know our voices and are not afraid.
Anjali Yardi was born in India and moved to Australia in 1989. She has an MA in English Literature and has written poetry all her adult life. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies in India, Britain and Australia. In 2004 she was joint runner-up for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. Her poem, “Venus’s Flower Basket,” appears pseudonymously in The Best Australian Poems 2012. She is married and has two adult daughters.