Maybe
by Caitlin Heiligmann
If I do all the readings
carefully, diligently annotating
everything that could be important,
researching any words I don't know
for their definition, etymology, useful synonyms
and come to class pencils sharpened,
face washed, hair tamed,
smiling,
papers crisp, notebook open,
textbooks locked and loaded,
raising my hand at least twice
to please the professor,
but no more than four times,
so as not to annoy the other students,
then maybe, just maybe,
people won't realize I don't belong.
Gramarye
by Gregory Leadbetter
I want speech that makes my skin
more than the book I have made
of its membrane
silent as lips
at the mouth
that leans from the air
and this is how
that work in my flesh began:
the desire that drew me like sap
to its tip, where I hung by my voice
from the whispering ash
that grew in the garden
it made of my death
for runes cut by the tongue to touch
every beginning that is to come
to the egg from which I was born.
I learned to know love by the names that I made
and the names took bodies of their own
that glistered with the dust of their home:
unblinking at the strangeness of what I had done
in piercing their silence, sending my voice
to open as an iris under their sun:
they pluck it from the pulsing earth and come.
I have woken to moonlight leaking from the wound:
the skin that I speak with
fresh with the blood of its wish.
Brother in Flight
by Sadiqa de Meijer
Look at him, awaiting scrutiny. He's as foreign as you make him.
Already robotic lenses swivel. Perspiration's his constitution, was there
in the damp boy who surrendered in the laundry to a nap—
were you never sheltered where you fell?
I know his eyelashes. Minding his luggage enough to secure it but not
to seem armed. He was a cabbage in a grade school play. Boarding’s a perpetual
audition. Now he holds his papers out too early for their talismanic work.
I want you to know what he hasn't done. Hasn't asked for lamb biryani
once last night, his father pounding garlic to a tabla tune. Black cardamoms
smoked over flames. An agent smirked smell this one? in a prior queue,
another march through the gullet of his own nation.
Hasn’t asked his parents to be here. One goodbye holds all the others
like a Russian doll; opens his mother’s floodgates, Ouse, Tana, Jhelum, which river
to even miss? My boy, my boy—that prescience of an ending, unaffordable.
He doesn’t pray. Relinquishes coins, belt, shoes. Rivulet on his left temple. He
has been separated from his conversation with mercy. He may name
his future children Blake or Jill. The profile of his body scoured of relations,
which is all it takes to kill without killing.
Forget it. Looking at him belongs to me. I did it for love before you ever gave
a fuck. I asked his tormentors you and whose army, left a breadcrumb trail through
the briars. If he flies, look at the country forming below his relieved exhale.
Triptych
by Esther Ottaway
My daughter explains how it happened: Grandma is your mother.
The same sapphire eyes, set in the frames of our ages, from a line
of Irish genes: a series of sketches, as if the edges
of each of us are uncertain, our bodies
a triptych, attempts at the same idea. When
the idea of my daughter began sculpting my self-
image, I was as shocked as if I had been born with self
tattooed on my belly and now saw the letters ballooning: mother
in the making, wary of the crossing - less a borderline
than a no-man's land between selfhood and the mythic edge
of the world, over which women named mothers have fallen. Their bodies
tried to explain, in foreign tongues thick with milk, how it would be when
I split like a fruit and shivered at my baby's cry, or when,
a revenant, I would begin to remember myself.
When she opened her tiny sapphire eyes, I wanted my mother
to be the first to see her. I shone like a jewel, fulcrum in a line
of matriarchs, unaware that I'd been edged
out of the present. My mother held her, their bodies
slotting together, genes in a double helix, as the bodies
of my mother and myself did once, and I visioned her when
she sat in that hospital bed, her self
slipping away; as if from being a mother
we thought there was hope of return. Any line
separating us, any edge
between us burnt away, and freed from edges,
bearing every woman and their bodies,
I plunged into the selfless dream. Today, I am found out when
my small daughter rages: I will do it myself!
I can't stop my practised hands, the hands of a mother,
from fastening shoes or brushing hair; she pushes them away, a line
drawn between us, firm as those furrowed lines
of determination on her forehead, primal as the edge
of consciousness. And I see she has to love and hate me, our bodies
driven to fight suffocation. I turn bitter when
she says from her car seat I don't need you any more, Mum - can't stop myself
trying to sully her clarity: sharp-tongued, I say I still need my mother
and I'm grown up. Everyone needs their mother. I weave through the line
of traffic, recall screaming at my mum, pushing her to the edge. Our bodies
speak truth: what I say to my daughter, I say to my mother, myself.
Things That Are Distant But Close
by Michael Prior
A sawmill. A seiner. War’s
rations and barbed wire. A garden’s
trellised green beans, plots of shiso.
We plotted the temerities between.
Summer’s dust blooming through
a sawmill’s rotary teeth. The jar of gold
lozenges you held out to me. Later,
a book full of paper cranes. Dusk,
summer: a field burnt to curb the fires.
Goldfinches sparking between the alders.
Somewhere, smoke still curls
through your fingers. Sometimes,
a shower radio hanging from your neck,
you recited names I couldn’t hear,
stooped to tend the green. Green beans.
Zucchini. The sun, a gold lighter
hung between two fingers. Shiso
embering my tongue. The smoke,
the dusty avenues, the egrets,
the ditches where the bullfrogs
swelled and murmured. Your paper
crane listing in a bowl of water
like a man-of-war aflame. The slurs
they called you then. The names
of those who left, those buried
in the interior, on a strawberry farm
across a coastal plane. No egress
for the temerities between. Your rations.
Your names. The one you stole
from a baseball player, won
from the sawmill’s slick
and spinning pain. A finger. Two lungs
swollen with particulate matter.
It’s fine, I never breathed it in. This,
in a tongue you only spoke indoors.
Outside, the field burns itself clean.
alive in the second world
by Lindsay Sears
the blackest of wool
weaves velvety smooth
in the darkness before twilight
that rounds the four corners
absolute as nothing
this many long walks from home
I am reminded word for word
how a crowd can garble closeness
and of a need to recompose the pines
step for step like a misty form
following the bounces of my turquoise torch
the fabric of the day whorls embryonic
still nursing jet black clouds
so the constancy of my little dome
proved in an astronomical glow
by shards of shell like streaks of milk spilt
this butte having weathered
storm cloud suffusion of ominous mood
or the blurring of edges by a winter’s gloom
stands as I in the skirt of its scree
losing its breath in the fall
the crystal of a civil dawn sparks
a clarifying wildfire across the sky
that the yip-howls of coyotes explain
pulls taut the warp of background
for those who muddle through frayed
and seeing me formed in that first world
and lost in the planning of passings
the red-shirted ants swirl in succession
searching for the secrets of strife
I pinch a sliver of coconut
into singular jaws
I follow behind
in a march toward my hill
with the waving of little white flags
and climb up from the darkness
and into a world of blue
I walk toward the squawking of jays
Boy with Thunderfoils
by Michael Lavers
He comes, straight from the stables every day,
over the bridge, joining the others walking
winter’s blue-mud lanes, slow trickles pooling
at the gates into a crowd. He crosses through
the yard toward the stage, then goes behind the stage.
A flourish, and a hush, and then he sits. He waits,
motionless, holding the steel tongue of the sky,
muting its cold sharp-edged soliloquy. Peeking,
he sees three thousand faces focused on one thing,
a single action, or a phrase, what’s on the stage,
but spilling off, over the whole vast scale of the seen.
He sees the grief of those whose lives are words.
He sees, sitting beside him on the ground, the playwright,
chin in hand, drawing in dirt, mouthing the lines.
Soon he can tell: his moment’s close, a charge
brooding the air. And there appears, small, like the slit
of a cracked door, glowing in the distance, in the far
crescendos of grief’s song, an opening, a call to shout,
to play, to somehow join the litany, so when the king
at last steps out, screaming and naked, and the boy’s
whole body shakes, the sound that comes comes from
within, some faint interior refrain, the pain of his ten years
refracted through these blended gutturals of fire and steel,
the shook-out sound of heaven, of his self, lamenting
his young life, foiling a king, whipping creation into doom.
A noise of keen delirium, of faithless air, making
the older boys, dressed up as daughters, flinch.
He shakes, and grown men wail. He quivers,
and the whole globe swoons. Then he collapses,
sweating, hearing nothing, silence and its sweet threat
stopping up his ears. And then at last, slow baffled sobs.
He breathes. He stands. Exeunt, then home, over the bridge,
past dogs and men sleeping in mud, afraid of nothing
but himself now, of the thing inside of him no king commands,
some mad god buzzing in his bones, a still awed listening,
faint sobbing everywhere, for all time, without end,
poured out of air, landing on everything.
Love Notes from Island Lockdown
by Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné
To close an island, you must first thread the borders
with bits of sea glass, prayer beads, and rusted metal,
blur the map’s blue with your damp open palm.
The coast is half-blind and prone to drifting.
Your island doesn’t always come back when you call.
Still, you must forgive its sinking sand
and jagged fault lines. We all have wounds
from which we cannot heal.
But your small house is an island too,
the silver bowl of risen dough on the windowsill,
the sliver of amber in your son’s right eye
and sometimes the island surfaces in you,
high and seismic,
like in the middle of this dry month
when the first wave stills
and the mountain poui gasp in yellow adoration.
You want to worship at the peninsula’s throat again,
but the weeks and waves still loom
so grey and strange in the distance.
In the sealed container of home now,
Saharan dust clouds drift and settle.
You find airspaces in the secret hollows of trees,
mark time in the nesting cycles of cornbirds
and the fruiting season of mangoes.
Timore
by Sauda Salim
There is much to do when Terror strikes,
and peace to be found while the bombs ignite.
Time stops, and all your wet and welled eyes can see
are comets – frozen in space – on their tails, a dawning reality
and the impossibility of making a wish.
There is much to do when there is much to rather not.
Like poking holes on fabric as gray as your breathing is.
As still as your existence. As perforated as your vision.
Like letting fireflies glow in your abyss,
flying and glowing, glowing away.
Like making paint from agony and watching it trickle,
forming markings like the symbols of initiation upon your chest,
a painful, yet glorified rebirth.
Like taking in the pounding of the earth
and giving birth to it as your African nana's drums.
There are bright places, she used to say, all the bright places.
And her voice that called the war cry sings for you to not die...
There is much to do when Terror strikes,
and more to do when there is much to rather not.
Big droppings from the enemy's cattle suffocate you and
the tip-tapping of your fleeing feet threatens to break into dance.
It's true that the fires ceased to be places you were fondled.
Now they hold memories like Thich, burnt like the first dish
you made when you walked into our boma.
Now the fire has a smell, and your senses, long numbed
like a mutilated Southern flesh seem to work just well.
There's magic in the fire. The same fire that made you scream
let my people go gave you a voice. It scalded you
but look, heralded and tall you stand.
The voice that we demand.
There is much to feel when Terror strikes,
and senses to be awoken.
Rusty, red, rowdy blood from the blades of the foe's swords
we use to paint our sunsets.
And scared voices sing.
Don’t Look
by Sonia Farmer
We suspected the tomato thief was a rat but not a mother
of five newborns, now four, fetal and blind to their crushed
sibling inches away on the pavement, where
an evening jogger, thinking they were aborted puppies, picked
each one up and arranged them in the gentle hammock
of her shirt before asking us, “Is this your house?”, its tenor
ringing with accusation, as if aware that I had indeed considered, if only briefly,
somehow ridding my young dog of her litter halfway
into her unintended pregnancy,
or of the rat poison tucked into our kitchen cupboard,
and even though I could see those long, limp tails
for what they were, we took the helpless wrinkled and grey things
helplessly from her soft belly into a hard plastic box and then
into our house and placed them on top of the same kitchen cupboard
holding that poison while we decided what to do, out of sight
from their disarming squirms and yawns
reminding me why for years I had a plan in place, like many women do here,
in case of emergency, to head to New York City,
not because I can’t, with enough money, find a doctor here
to overlook the law, but because I can’t live with my own cruelty
in my field of vision—your ex-wife
knew that too when she took your unwanted strays to the other side
of the island to abandon them, ensuring they would not find their way
back of course, but also so that these ambiguous acts of murder
or mercy could remain within the hard boundary of a carefully-guarded
blind spot, a yawning black mouth of shame and horror
up close, from which your life forever
moves on a deliberate trajectory away, glancing back
in the rearview mirror only to confirm that it grows smaller and smaller until
it’s reduced to simply a full stop, a pebble in the road or maybe
something else that your tire silences without ceremony, and you take in
the kind of breath that you know you will hold,
as if your next could either expose or exonerate you, gulping down
the air and with it, the toothless thing that once threatened to swallow you whole—yes
it is always preferable to be in the seat of a car or plane
severing yourself from the unspeakable act, instead of here, in bed,
trying to sleep, while just outside of the gate, where we later returned
the newborns back to their suspected burrow, four heartbeats
grow more and more faint, like war drums retreating
and making their promise to return.
Ode to McCain’s Deep ’n Delicious Vanilla Cake
by Melanie Power
At 26 ingredients, it’s engineered as intricately
as a vehicle, with twice the alchemic intrigue.
From the ashes of yer youth, it rises up
plastic-domed, perfectly preserved, on sale
2 for 1. In saccharine worship, your mouth
still waters, that synthetic vanilla potent,
the way imitation of a thing in nature inevitably
becomes overdone, but the garnish—delicate
chocolate tendrils—epitomizes refinery. A marvel
of 20th century technology, the frozen cake defies
time. Stretching the life of foods like the Sorcerer’s Stone
for wizards would, freezers first entered Calvert kitchens
in 1950- something. If we began then to live less in
the moment, at least fewer of my cousins went to bed
hungry. The O’Tooles on The Point bought one of the earliest
fridges off analog Kijiji—just Steve Maddox, driving up
the shore, reselling goods from Fort Pepperrell out the back
of his trunk. Anyone who claims Canadian cuisine is non-existent
hasn’t heard of McCain, born & raised in New Brunswick, the world’s
largest retailer of frozen potatoes. Spuds for the Powers are like
a good Burgundy for the French: no meal was complete without
them, and dessert was best served from the freezer. On birthdays,
a Deep ’n Delicious was discharged from frigid storage, and leftover
candles shoved into it. You watched as yer childhood receded
like a coastline as the candles annually gave off more heat. We shifted
our faith in the 90’s to scientists from bakers, because we loved
the uniformity of stiff, factory-piped icing, because his mother’s
been gone so long my Dad almost forgets how her homemade bread
smeared with fresh cream & molasses tasted. Wouldn’t Mary-Essie
have loved something ready-made, something she could buy
to trade for time? Unlike fallible French pastry, which ages every
sixty seconds and by day two isn’t fit to bite into, one of these
bad boys maintains its integrity into infinity (or, for around six
months, which is as much of the future as is safe to bet on.)
Visit your local grocery store! This frozen cake, at its rim,
waits under fluorescents for you to carry it home. Do not
heat or bake. Just thaw, cut and serve. Nothing gold can
stay? Robert Frost never tried a Deep ’n Delicious cake.
Off-World Ghazal
by Stuart Barnes
… I could hear
the wild black cockatoos, tossed on the crest
of their high trees, crying the world’s unrest.
—Judith Wright, ‘Black Cockatoos’
with a nod to Kahlil Gibran & Robert Frost
Are you ready for the round-up, World?
Put your atlas down and feet up, World.
Give me the keys, the GPS. You
thrashed the hell out of the pick-up, World.
What’s your pleasure? Horse’s Neck, Monkey’s
Gland, Cobra’s Fang? The night’s a pup, World.
Once you were razor-sharp, a Global
knife. Like stainless steel nerve cracks up, World.
Riled black cockatoos cried your unrest
(more than a storm in a teacup, World).
You unsealed records of days and nights
when earth’s giant oak was wrought-up, World.
Into fantastic garlands of white
-leaved willow you wove buttercup, World.
You provoked Arctic ice, synthetic
ice, ICE. Your pick never let up, World.
Your coal mind and mechanical eyes
turned the sea of light downside up, World.
Glued to a screen you approved line
-ages’, languages’, lands’ smash-up, World.
Do not move a muscle. I’ll freshen
your drink. You look like death warmed up, World.
You built tall walls with stone-boat-loaded
stars thrown from an arc interrup— [World]
You guzzled every radif but one.
Your takhallus you covered-up, World.
Peter Panesque you gurgled, thought your
-self clever, and never grew up, World.
Thunder, lightning didn’t meet again.
In smoke your ambition went up, World.
Umpteen charges valuable as
Mar-a-Lago. Each is trumped-up, World?
A defamation suit? Colourful,
flimsy. In court it won’t stand up, World.
No more tricks and abracadabra.
Your fascination is used up, World.
You wish to go the way of all flesh
imperially? A death cup, World.
You won’t feel a thing. So long. Farewell.
Arrivederci. Bottoms up, World.
What Gets Noticed (a Haibun)
by Yvonne Blomer
At the hospital a man praises an elderly woman, frail and in a gown, for noticing the star lilies out the window. He had not seen them, I heard him say as I hustled past with my son. My mom noticed plenty. My dad’s sadness. My sister’s struggles. My special son. She noticed dark shadows on my skin when I’d visit at her nursing home. Notice acne and lipstick. She said once, watching my old dog circle, “When Kirin dies, I’m going to go too. I’ll go with her.” Though she stayed on. Stayed long enough to meet the puppy, sometimes her hand stroking him or patting her blanket thinking it was him. These days, a year without her, my cup too full of grief, I forget to notice things. The trillium blooming in the garden. The softness of things. Forget the green of her eyes in mine. At the hospital my son’s specialist discusses weight gain, puberty, iron levels, scoliosis. Does every box in his diagnosis have to be checked? Can’t we skip a few side-effects, I think, having dropped him at school before heading to the dog park. The dog notices my mood, scratches at my hand for a cuddle even though I’m driving. He doesn’t seem to care. Maybe I’m writing an essay here. I run the puppy round the park, well, he runs me. His excitement makes other dog walkers laugh. One lap around takes my entire life or I’m surprised when I come to the fence that it’s only my first time around. The sky above is too bright. The hours in the day –
dog wet with dog scent,
my feet muddied
I carry yellow pollen home on my legs.
Cesár Vallejo Will Never See Winter Again (Paris in Two Voices)
by David Cruz
FIRST ACT:
Old Vallejo:
This city doesn’t know my name. I look at her and know it looks at me. Everyone walks nameless.
The buildings still remember the years of the black death.
Do I exist or am I a failed dream by Eiffel?
Young Vallejo:
I listen to the voices of my ancestors, some sound like my own,
others make me realize that every word I say was thrown away by hundreds, perhaps, thousands.
Everything is born from an internal emptiness that lets me be free like one:
man and artist
SECOND ACT:
Old Vallejo:
I don’t know how many times I’ve died. This body is failing me: mycough is dry,
the words are escaping me. Maria Rosa went into the jungle. My homeland was lost forever.
I try to write my memories. I suffer from exhaustion, I fight, I take the bait to tempt the words.
Everything is futile.
Young Vallejo:
It’s useless to write the same thing over and over,
I don’t know anymore when I give life and when I’m mutilating.
THIRD ACT:
Old Vallejo:
Am I alive? Did they save me at the charity hospital or is this the outcome of faith?
Am I in a nightmare? The news is announcing the Second Great War of this century.
I’m sure I won’t see it. My body is shutting down and soon the undertaker will bring me candy.
Young Vallejo:
Yesterday I walked around an unknown city. I got to a grave. I felt ghosts that forgot their names:
refugees, migrants and gypsies. I walked to a stone that said:
J'ai tant neigé pour que tu dormes
-I’ve snowed so much so you can sleep-
View the PDF version of “Cesár Vallejo Will Never See Winter Again”
We Are One
by Hilary Walker
My sister turns in the moonlight
And brushes her hand through rainbow droplets
From the falls thundering past her face.
Her hair whips wet in strands that slew over her eyes,
And snails that wait in the dark come out to slide
And twist in mossy holes amongst the rocks,
Damp with cold bells of crystal water.
My mother turns in the moonlight
Her soft silver feet treading silently,
Barely touching the fractured Earth.
Rich summer lust turns to winter memories
Cold despair creeps beneath the cool milky river,
Flooding her dreams with silence.
Standing alone she can hear
A thousand sweet voices flutter and cry
Carrying their slow bird sound far and high.
My daughter turns in the moonlight
And walks until dawn to the place
Where shells flower on the shore
And the grass on the dunes whip and bend to the squall.
Cold season gannets ragged fly,
Dip steep, fold, and plunge like arrows
Released from an empty sky.
A Father Shouldn’t Cry
by Marsha Barber
He shouldn’t take your hand …
by Marsha Barber
He shouldn’t take your hand
on the red couch
the night before you have to leave
and as he talks
his large hand shouldn’t
grasp your small hand
with the bitten nails
tighter and tighter
until it hurts
and you turn to look at him
his face clenched
his eyes filled with tears
even though grown-up men
don’t cry
and you’ve never seen
a daddy cry before
because you have to leave him
to go three thousand miles
away, to a cold land
and now you’ve made him cry
and this is wrong
because everything is
upside down
and your father
who should be telling you
that everything will be all right
is telling you with his tears
that nothing will be all right
ever again.
Marsha Barber’s two recent poetry books, What is the Sound of Someone Unravelling and All the Lovely Broken People were published by Ottawa’s Borealis Press. She’s won many awards for her work and been long listed for the national ReLit award and short listed for the international Bridport Poetry Prize. Marsha has published in such periodicals as the Literary Review of Canada, The Walrus, Free Fall and The Antigonish Review. She’s on faculty at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Blanksicle
by Dominique Bernier-Cormier
I count how many bedrooms ago …
by Dominique Bernier-Cormier
I count how many bedrooms ago
we ate fudgsicles after sex
on your balcony in Brooklyn. Four. Ferns
like the black fossilized wings
of dinosaurs. Your dad across the Hudson
inventing better and better
lightbulbs to flood ski hills at night. Fudgsicles
dripping into the street. Futuresicles. Pastsicles.
Nothing like presentsicles. Your fluorescent bra.
Your skin the colour of lemons
floating in a hotel pool at night. A truck full
of blood-vials crossing a bridge
to get analyzed. That’s what I told your dad.
I didn’t cross a bridge to get analyzed,
sir. Outside, a bird was making the sound
of a fax machine printing bad test results. I told
your mom she should get raptor
silhouettes to stop the bad news from slamming
into her windows. It started to rain
while you were in the shower. Tennis matches
were getting cancelled all over
the observable universe. I stood in the window
trying on the shape of an umbrella,
a popsicle stick, a fern.
Dominique Bernier-Cormier’s poetry won The Fiddlehead’s 26th Ralph Gustafson Prize, and was shortlisted in Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year Contest in 2017. His first chapbook, Englishing, was recently published by Frog Hollow Press, and his first full-length book of poetry, Correspondent, is forthcoming from icehouse (Goose Lane Editions). He is a poetry editor for Rahila’s Ghost Press.
Boa Gravida
By Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné
When we were new, …
by Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné
When we were new,
our love still minnow-soft
and silver, you set their names
like nets along the water’s edge.
Now the first, a son
surfaces, a great fish writhing
in the basket of my hips.
These last gravid days of rain
we digest the remains of years.
You speak of everything to come,
how you long to cradle the lotus-bud
of his skull in the broad leaf of your hand,
to swim in with him from the other side.
Until then, let us wait here in the restless earth,
whisper to each other in mangrove tongues.
Tell me I am beautiful and cold.
I will tell you how thirsty I am
for a mouthful of light.
At night I ache. Veins purple and rise
with this sudden season of blood.
Pelvic plates shift, bones shudder.
I am the great mother boa
turning the soft egg of the world
beneath my ribs. I will tear myself in two
and heal before morning.
Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a Trinidadian poet and visual artist. Her work has been featured in the Small Axe Journal, Room Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, The Literary Review and Poetry London, as well as in the anthology Coming Up Hot: Eight New Poets from the Caribbean. She is the 2012 winner of the Small Axe Poetry Prize, 2015 winner of the Hollick-Arvon Caribbean Writers’ Prize and the 2016 winner of the Wasafari New Writing Prize.
Here in White Swan
by Allen Braden
Tecumseh, Simcoe, Mission Roads. …
by Allen Braden
For Peter Ludwin
Tecumseh, Simcoe, Mission Roads.
Sad thing is I’m in my element.
A headcount would tally
more strays than locals
if you’d bother to keep track.
Pinkeye. Cleft palates. Head lice.
Now’s the dog whipping hour,
for not coming when called,
for barking or not barking.
Nothing’s better than nothing.
No taverns, no stoplights for 20 miles.
Our laundromat sells Pepsi, gas and Bud.
Malt liquor speeds up the intersection
of distemper with disbelief.
There’s a log cabin church on the way
to Hoptowit’s logging camp.
Its pews full only once
when the town was on fire.
Smoke shacks. Hop kilns. Wheel lines.
No cash or missiles in these silos.
No babes in our corncribs.
If you stay, you will taste silage
and failure. Per capita checks
land in the tribe’s new casino.
Everybody’s cousins. Sort of.
No natives dancing in the grange hall.
No Whites in Shaker Church.
Home of the PowWow Rodeo.
Home of the Grange Xmas Bazaar.
Home of—well—home.
Mint oil. Flat beds. Cattle guards.
Grazing rights all depend
on brace posts and barbed wire.
Bumper crops of buffalo grass
and sagebrush foretell
foreclosure. Stubble fields.
Alkali flats. DDT.
When our lumberyard gave in,
the white swans left the millpond,
never to return.
Allen Braden is the author of A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood and Elegy in the Passive Voice. He was the last generation to grow alfalfa, wheat, barley and cattle on his family’s farm of two hundred plus acres outside White Swan, Washington, on the Yakama Indian Reservation. Assistant Poetry Editor of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built + Natural Environment, he lives in Lakewood, Washington.
The Art Gallery
by Chad Campbell
Something brighter lives here …
by Chad Campbell
Something brighter lives here
than the granite light
sparrowing in the arches—
a cathedralled order like a mind’s
envisioning of itself.
The air in the vaulted cobalt walls
hangs sterilely, as if
a gurney were always just
disappearing around the corners
of the sloped causeways
aqueduct to dust to blue to how
solid the silence of winter
sky lathes down the halls’
white mortar of stone.
For every open door
another forty are closed,
sealed panels starch
as archivist’s gloves
where you’re certain
The Bureau Against Imagination
is busy with tin tools scratching
illuminations of night
into vials to be locked away
in drawers. Imagination grows
oranges bright as these lights
entreating us to grow
or else fall into a place like this
cloister at the gallery’s end
where a gnarled tree wardens
a single gaunt plum.
It looks like the bronze spider
on the terrace crawled
sunk its fangs in the walls
torn as we are between
a painting of a sun in waves
and a drill-faced torso drilling
frantically at the blue dusted
dark until the moon slows
and the trees walk their seeds
through the broken windows.
Chad Campbell’s first collection of poetry Laws & Locks (Signal Editions 2015) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. His poetry has appeared in Brick, The Walrus, and Best Canadian Poetry, among others, and a chapbook of recent work Euphonia was published earlier this year by Anstruther Press. Chad is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing.