NewPoetry

Linda Besner

I spent my time when it was normal days drawing smoke across the hole.

To blend a softer blackness in the abandoned paddock

they’ve rammed the highway through. I skipped a circle

in the tall brome, sat up on the octagonal fence

out of breath. The horses won’t be back.

Topsy-turvy posts tombstoned the unhayed hay.

We fall in love, you know, with places we don’t own.

It was fading out of the useful world for some years already,

even before a girl walked under the red canopy

of the covered bridge in milkweed anklets and army pants,

burr manacles and a peach-coloured camisole

to masturbate, but surprised a young Ursuline in the creek.

She smelled me, lifted her upper body. I ran,

though I could have put a candle wick to her black coat

and taken a flame. My inner voice says it is weak

to resist change. The stable topples, the horses are taken away,

your life is mostly something you encounter like a rock or a tree.

Weeds walk the ramparts of an overturned silo.

The line of crabapples gnashed by the bulldozer.

Weak, the voice says, almost like a drill sergeant inside.

No mourning the mouth of a cow on a daisy’s toothsome waist.

Or the dirt road where monarchs cast their orange to the dust.

Swallows ribboning the warm slats of the bridge rafters.

No doubt my inner voice poorly renders

your reasoning. The bombed-out houses and occupying soldiers,

the tilt away from a first language, a birth name.

To see myself through someone else’s eyes,

I make them cruel.

And for that, Mum, I am sorry.

Patti Lott

my god, it’s dismal
cold, I stumble through rimy
snow, one mittened hand
against my frost-burned face

above me, dark wings cut
through frozen sky. what keeps
that raven going. it gurgles
soft words of what I take
to be encouragement

the baby has died
she is washing the bones
they are tiny, unbearably
fragile, lined up in an order
they will not find again

maybe this is the same raven
who in spring and autumn
brings gifts to my garden—first
a skeletal fragment, provenance
unknown: filigreed, lacy as a doily

but it’s not the baby
who has died, it’s the mother
a half-remembered feeling
above the crib
the shape of an answer

later, a tooth
which, after some consideration
I recognize belongs to Sol
our horse who died here years ago
who we offered to the scavengers:
coyotes, ravens

the mother’s sister loves babies, but only
while they’re small. when the next one
arrives, she sets the first aside
its older brother likes it
too much

a year later
another Sol tooth, and today
always when I’m not looking
a small spine, spiky, slightly curved
a rabbit, maybe a wildcat

each finds its way
into my walled garden, teeth
appear inside the rusted wagon wheel
bones near the gate

she looks out a second story
window. the girls playing below
are magpies, bossy, overbearing
she knows they want
to break her
walking past them after school
she expects everything
and nothing

outside the garden, I feed
birds, which means I also feed
deer. it’s not wise, it habituates
my closest friends: the deer
the crows, the goldfinches

no one else is interested
the townspeople know
whose kids they are
who they don’t belong to
their hand-me-down clothes
uncombed hair
the way they run wild

my husband brings me birdseed,
gunnysacks
stacked against cases of chardonnay
and pinot noir, discontinued chocolate
bars, twenty-pound bags of rice
from his home country

he’ll give it all away—

[I have more diamond rings than fingers]

Joshua Trotter

I used to walk in a garden. I had a great many followers. I knew each one by name and if I could not remember, I made it up: There was Tigertail, Snow-on-the-mountain, All-about-love. There were Simon and Holofernes, there was Drummond-phlox, Turnagain Blossom, Thundergust.

There came a day when I began to feel myself again, walking outside, among all the bright followers which had made such an impression on me—on my inner selves and my outer self—that none of my myselves could now remember or even bother to imagine their names.

That day I caught a glimpse of what might have been a peacock, far off, against a green hedge, displaying the bright panopticon of its tail; all those purple eyes, yellow, orange, against a dark green hedge, unblinking in the noonday sun. All those eyes turned to look at me, for a long instant, then they were gone.

From that day, I began to spend less time in the garden, among my followers, more time at my mirror, within. I would posture and turn, displaying myselves to myself, holding my eyes wide as long as I could—until they began to tear. The once loyal garden beyond my mirror, if I remembered it at all, was emptier every day, emptier and emptier and further away.

Jessica Bebenek

Leigh Kotsilidis

We wade at the edge
of what is beyond us

There is nothing more
than delusion

Men mistake porch bulbs
for moons

A body drifts indeterminately
unnoticed

Every body leaves
over time

We each belong to a search party
looking for ourselves

The signs are never the same
when we return

There is a different word
for sky here

The last breath
belongs to the resolute

If outer space were not soundproof
we would hear the sun as a chainsaw

Space appears empty
even when exploding with wind

We must learn to hold our instruments
without making a sound

What will convince you?

The stars are so distant,
nothing we do will ever affect them

Qurat Dar

I don’t write love poems.
Easier to sing to my suffering.
I am clenched-fist selfish with my tenderness.

But here we are, coaxing the moon down through the sunroof.
Cords of jasmine coiled on the dashboard. Soon to soak in the fridge.
Bleed sweetness into our hair.

Come glow in the car with us. The music is too loud
but asking to turn it down feels like a goodbye. The windshield
an impressionist painting. My eyelids are beginning their slow
shutter home but I don’t want to go to sleep. I want the
split-sky downpour of our laughter, the chorus that bathes
every bitterness from me. I keep losing my voice to our sunset spill.

For so long I am desk-bound and empty.
Everything good minnows silver through my fingers.
We stretch our dreams gauze-thin. Across timezones.
Across the road spikes of a dollar sign.
A thousand schemes for a chance at again, again, again.

But here we are: every mouth softening around my name.
A sugar cube surrendering every edge.
Easy, Qurat. Always gulping like a man
pulled from the desert. I am not beautiful,
but my friends think I am, and that is enough.

Robert Priest

The lie no longer needs the liar
The lie tells itself

War declares war
on so-called self-proclaiming ideologies

Last men flee unmanned tanks
Heat-seeking body bags in hot pursuit

Before platoons of autonomous shovels graves gape
Self-propagating bot-made bot-makers target

automatic listening machines
listening to automatic listening machines

Ben Kline

This is the last poem I’ll write about my dead mother
this year. Good gin isn’t cheap, and time is a construct, a mother

to space and myth. My mother insisted we be
on time, early if we had any respect for her. What mother

would encourage tardiness? Time doesn’t want that
mother-fucking nonsense or sour vermouth
I’d say to my mother

if she weren’t coffin rotted,
though never to her face
I can’t remember. Mom said

I got my face from her side. Never mind
Dad’s big nose and blue eyes in mine, his great-
grandpa’s curls and jawline the same. My mother

wouldn’t like the amount of martinis I shake,
wouldn’t like this being my last poem about her
this year or any year she was or wasn’t my mother

in life or ghost space, a mom outside time, a myth
in lemon twist and morning particulates.
My mother didn’t like me

saying fuck or mixing up
stories about her race medals

with poems about her last electrons ascending
the exosphere, the sun another mother

I respected more than her, the mother I didn’t
really know, despite having time and space to mother

a book of poems about both of us giving up
on resolving our matters while we were still matter,

not a myth lineated around the rim
of a black hole or a gimlet coupe, no twist.

Nash Lott

my Dutch uncle’s German wife died from cancer,
disease unloaded malignant non-sentimentality
—a change purse eager to spend its last pound.
it was a familiar tone, if not dialect, like the “ch”
at the end of Bach—a backhoe scuffing gravel.

a card of sympathy sent pianissimo,
the embouchure of a windmill, delicate—no lip
to feel or tongue to hear—much as he gentled
yearling foals to instill safety in presence.

for my equestrian uncle, the emeried face of emotion
awaited the planishing hammer of time
—the compounding polish of faith.

……………………..·   ·   ·

as my German-Canadian father aged, pride of agency
arrived for his downfall. my stepmother would say, “be careful,
Schatz”, “let’s get you some help, Schatz!”

“be careful, Schatz” punctuated all tasks: putting up
Christmas lights, carrying goods to the basement,
shovelling snow—anything ladder-related. as time collapsed,
no more workshop. the final time—an ambulance.

dad never attended church in Canada or Germany.
i weaponized his inconsistency when, as he aged,
he used terms like “god willing” or “if the man upstairs…”

those final days in hospital, i sat with him.
his throat rough, his frame failing, unable to speak.
i pondered our differences. how he and i never found
comfort in the overlap of generations—miscreant
linkages of DNA incapable, or unwilling, to speak
the same language. why waste time in frayed history
when my father was nearing the past tense.

……………………..·   ·   ·

a ship having crossed its final body of water
under power of earth’s lung, unassured by the sextant’s
lead, unassured by the bow of aging masts bent to the howl
of mongrel winds—do life’s whipped and embrittled sails fall
prey, crucified by an end-salted swell of faith?

a distressed safety net
……a virgin hail Mary

……………………………for stepping off the end of life
not wanting to fall, flail, fail to make the supplicant
choice. someone, something, will inhale our body’s
sublimation—a conversion from metrical life
to an imperialism of immeasurable dark.

Hollay Ghadery
For Baby Beluga (with Roo)

go

mama is

deep blue   home

the dive           heaven

the spout     a waking night

warm    moon splash      and

…..wave    song

……………mama is

star spout      waking blue

moon dive and wave      dive and

sing blue     sing warm sing

and go         mama is

this heaven

Dillon Browne

James Richardson

Laurie D. Graham

What does it mean when the crows are quiet, the wind blowing the wrong way
Apron or flag with green emblem or ripped sheet flailing in the tree
What does it mean when the roost is this sparse
One crow calling to the others from above the factory
Cheeks stinging as more weather barges in

I have been living in their roost without knowing it
I live in their carpet, milkweed seeds whirling into the eavestroughs
I like thinking of this as the start of a new year
The sun shining down at such an optimistic angle

To human eyes the flag is flying with intent
The crows bounce their calls off the walls of the houses
They twirl together, offer greetings or news as they pass
Is roost the right human English word for them together in the trees

Should the word be family instead, should the word be society
In storm they become more and they become louder
Today I walk through blizzard to hear them in full
To my ears it’s deadly serious what they’re saying
The snow piles up against the windows, the wind brings more calamity

I will add two small beds in the back of the yard and a larger one in the middle
I will grow squash, beans, sunflowers once the snow is gone and the ground warms
I will make a new design for the crows to examine
And try to be ready for what weather comes next

Danielle Carter

i never wanted to be white;

i only wanted a good haircut.

when does magenta grass     BLENDED     into a liquid violet?

when are you going to stop masturbating?

who are you, whiff of calendula,

which otherwise is     such clear honey:

property and commodity, the scopic drive,

you and your wet little blouses     “STICKING OUT OF MY HEART DRAWER”

like a light broth.

Sandra Huber
for and in memory of Hillary Keel

i sat down to write about robin
blaser’s sophia nichols, a woman i never met and how could i
bound as she is between leaves 99 to 100 on the floor
of his holy forest

i wanted to unfasten her, summon her as she’s summoned me but i got
distracted
i saw some dandelions outside the window of the library
and it wasn’t their beauty

but the way they crouched
fertile, bunched
into a crowd among the grass like whispering
girls, heads blonded to sun
and meaning
to hold the pen
in my hand but
chewing
it between my teeth i realized

it’s the movement of the dandelions that distracts me, it’s this
movement
that sophia nichols, a character in a poem
a poem frozen onto a page
cannot compete with
and when, i asked
did words become so still

i lidded my pen, left the library, descended into the metro, and standing on the train (the heat of late afternoon, the jilt of the tracks), i remembered vienna: rushing into café europa, clutching his poem in my hand and saying to hillary as i sat down across from her, the language must  / sting    the flesh turn to a dew (but that is blaser talking). her eyes crinkled. probably, she couldn’t hear a word over the din of conversation or cutlery. but it wasn’t that. it wasn’t the hearing that mattered and we knew

the train jilted past bourdonette, malley, provence, montelly as i said to myself — i will call her when i get home, i will say, hillary the words froze somehow and the dandelions, now a memory, have frozen too

and she will say
as if this freezing
were a motion
of writing

alone,
robin blaser, white hair, cane, took the stage and recited his poem
pronouncing to my delight not soph – ee – a but soph – ay – a

alone, his own rendition
stood across from him (the other mouth)
waving her hand
with the power of disease
locked in to
her own homing story
one stanza closer to death

(i have written into the night again taken his poem those dandelions my foreignness three talismans of hotel lyric to a home where i cannot rest without them)

the dawn

looks riddled from where i can read it
but nobody reads any more

“come now,” she’d say,
“know when enough is enough”

Todd Dillard

I call my dead mom.
“Mom,” I say. “You won’t believe this shit.”
And I tell her about my neighbor
putting his wife’s shoes on
the curb beside a sign that reads: NEVER
WORN. I say he likes to joke:
“She loved buying shoes
more than wearing them,”
and my mom shouts “THAT’S STILL TRUE!”
They ran into each other at Fallmart
last week, my neighbor’s wife was holding
six pairs of dominatrix boots
and two Pepto Bismol-colored wedges.
I say my friend can’t get over
how she no longer hears her husband
singing, and Mom says these days
he digs holes in the ground,
sticks his head in, and belts
Puccini, Rossini, Leoncavallo into the earth and
an apple tree springs out of the soil.
He repeats this until the rows and rows
form an orchard, Mom says.
If you eat an apple his voice wings out its flesh
and dribbles down your chin. It’s sweet:
I call my dead mom, and she is never
too busy to answer. I say
something about my life
and her laugh arrives like a carrier pigeon
on my head, the message
not a scroll, but a hand mirror.
I look into it, and she waves
from the window of my eye.

Nicole Raziya Fong

Anna Veprinska

Stuart Ross

Ever heard of Delmore Schwartz?
I used to read him but I’ve
never actually typed his name before.
Has anyone else in life
ever been named Delmore?
Sometimes I confuse him
with Weldon Kees. One of them
had a recurring character in their poems
named Robinson. Or was that
Robert Lowell? I mean, John
Berryman. No, John Berryman
had a character named Mr. Bones.
Maybe. Delmore’s car
was found on a bridge
on the day I was born
in 1959. Or else I just invented
that. Facts are funny things.
You can look them up or
make them up. For instance,
it was Weldon Kees whose car
was found on some famous
bridge in San Francisco on
my birthday, but four years
earlier than I was born. Did
the world exist before I was born?
Or am I just a character
in your imagination, you whose
birthday marks the beginning
of the world? Happy birthday,
dear reader.

Tolu Oloruntoba

Labourers begin each day
with a humble morning prayer of aspirin
to the algias that will come quickly.

As their doctor I tell them chronic,
I tell them renal and they laugh. Toxins are for
the living to worry about.

Your engine will not survive
but you’ll have fuel awhile, like motorcycling
Charons, who go where cars cannot,

have their sachets of gin. We, all of us need
something to survive our sentiences.
Concerned parties want a ban

on the anality of their suffering.
I—prefect of the 18-to-lifers in these min-security
burbs—urge them to shut their clangor.

I tell them many, when their hungers
are grown enough, happen upon religion,
or abomination, or the desolations between.

I say why exercise when we’ll all die
of cancer anyway. My doctor tells me cynic,
calls me nihlistic as I laugh.

But what’s the point of any of it?
I’ve needed hand cranks against catatonia.
I need my, our behaviour activated.

I need Lake Kivu’s pediatric coltans,
and blinker hoods so I do not see
the cleansing I depend upon.

Look, they are making poets again
by the megaton in the special hardship
it takes to grow them. West of there,

other innocents are on the sinking ship
of America. I do not enjoy their despair,
their disbelieving descent.

One pill makes you larger
than anxiety, another smaller
than shame can find.

And what do people
on the cusp of revolution need?
Public executions.

Or else ceramic automata
to unfold in the gut.
To push the gears by hand.

To find micro screws with little fingers.
To fit their tiny bodies in crawl spaces.
And scrape the rusty hinges.

I am expandable, or so the theory goes.
They can blow on the saxophone spouts
that move my arms.

Then they can recess
from my abyssal economy.
To use their own medicine.