NewPoetry

George Murray

Cut away all other
flowers from the vine,
let one fruit take on
mass at the cost of colour,
shape, taste, and all else
besides. A slow spill,
it flattens, whatever
pretense of pumpkin
it was begun with
left behind in favour of size,
every seed and visceral
string within held
back from splitting
the pale flesh by
simply adding more skin.
It waits in its field,
a shut-in anticipating
the beep-beep of crane
reversing in the garden
with enormous litter
telescoping through
the window’s mouth.
Ambulance straps wrap it,
cradle it, elevate,
evacuate, make it public.
This monumental shapeless
shape is what the blue
ribbon citation
calls pumpkin, and so
once defined, it is set
into a flatbed and sent
to take its place at the fair.

Jeff Latosik

Is crooked math that keeps us from a perch;

juked sum flowing always after tax, surviving all of our efforts

to reduce it to a cell or set, an integer of what has come…

Not additive: more like gearwork gone berserk,

the macroscopic shaking free of recompense,

anthill of a hurricane of common sense.

Could it be what the classic films are said to have,

something in the chemistry, or is it strictly viz.,

a liner note we can’t yet see?

Whatever explains the totality of what you are is something

nobody can own. In Leslieville, a boy lets loose five bullets

into someone he doesn’t know and then bikes home,

sleeps in his room, and when asked he won’t say anything.

His hands are tied in a double bind of plastic

to perform his one magic trick and disappear.

Be sure tonight that laws blink on and industries metabolize

somebody’s share of oil or a forest;

iron pours out as piano wire on flatbed trucks.

Under a bridge, a voice pings back against itself

but look over the guardrail and there’s no one there.

Something went another way, decided that,

or went by blind habit, guided by sonar, radar,

or the thought that that was louder than it should have been,

it wasn’t me or there is something that wakes me from myself.

Shelagh Rowan-Legg

I will provide the knife
if you will set outside the chalice
and the ciborium

How much blood, exactly?
It will coagulate,
so perhaps an hour at most
to fill the decanter
if I keep cutting

Flesh is easier to obtain in excess
I will cut it away from my breast

And this will all be blessed?
And I can pray again?

Dear god, please bring me
a pony and a bb gun
firecrackers for the night sky
And the alluring unavailable soul

Spencer Gordon

I was not nice. I was not nice enough. I was not nice enough to the right people. My niceness was too casual; my niceness was designed for acquaintances and so had no lasting impact. I carried out acts of niceness too long ago for people to remember today. I expressed niceness too long ago for those distributing acts of niceness now. I grew weary of niceness in all its forms. I forgot the intention behind my niceness. I was not nice consistently, or deliberately, in public, and so withdrew my general, fit-for-acquaintance-style niceness, a quality ready for all-comers, to a shrinking circle of people I really did care about, for whom I could maintain the energy required of niceness, and for whom my niceness changed character, becoming intimate, or something not quite nice at all. My acts of niceness were spotty, irregular. When I attempted acts of niceness in public I felt strange and inauthentic in growing intensity. My acts of niceness cowed me. I felt hot and ashamed for my expressions of niceness, especially when these expressions were not acknowledged by their recipients. I felt expressing niceness made the objects of my niceness uncomfortable, occasionally, or made these people for whom I was expressing niceness turn against me and categorize me as ‘not nice.’ The people for whom I performed niceness were the wrong people, insofar as they are, today, no longer in positions to perform public acts of reciprocal niceness; or they are not accustomed to expressing private acts of niceness; or they do not possess long memories; or they feel no need to reciprocate niceness, or at least not to me, or to those like me: to people in my predicament. I failed to understand that I was and am not deserving of niceness, per se, or period. I failed to account for all the terrible things I said out loud and in private, usually while intoxicated and happy, thinking I was sharing niceness—for the wasted months and years of my life when being nice was of fundamental importance to me. My acts of niceness, not being public or consistent, made others believe I did not wish to receive acts of niceness myself: that I was somehow above or uninterested in public acts of niceness, when in truth I craved them desperately. I was furthermore not nice in sufficient public and private degrees to people who interpreted my niceness to certain distasteful people as problematic. I was nice to people who are today irrelevant to public consideration; I was also nice to people who are not fit recipients for public niceness, for whom extending niceness was an ethical breach, or a sign that my niceness was too fluid or generous, despite my niceness being of a casual, passing nature, as mentioned. I was not nice enough to people who believe niceness must be parceled out judiciously, selectively, to others who, by fact of their relationship or discipline or social standing, are deserving of public or private acts of niceness more than others, regardless of the overall volume of niceness being expressed. I was not nice enough to those who, through some history of being hurt or abused or drained, considered their own niceness a limited resource. I failed to be eligible for niceness from those who feel acts of niceness are made primarily for public consumption, on momentous occasions, and for a select group only. I was, paradoxically, too nice to make a fuss about those who were not nice, specifically to me, or to others with whom I held acquaintance or even friendship; I failed to reveal my private sense of injustice or hypocrisy, cruelty or betrayal in a public setting, and thus was categorized as someone who was ‘not nice’ (though less ‘not nice’ than if I had expressed the full storm of my emotional life, as then I would be ‘not nice’ to a much more damaging, severe, irreparable degree). I failed to grasp how others could be nice in public to people they deemed problematic or ‘not nice’ or insufficiently deserving in private, and thus I refrained from expressing niceness to those I was hurt or betrayed by systematically, to my detriment. I failed to grasp that acts of niceness made in person are of lesser quality or importance to public acts of niceness made from a great distance, and with far less intimacy. My niceness had limitations fit to my disposition and imaginary sense of self-worth. I failed to sustain the energy necessary for daily, weekly, consistent acts of niceness due to my body’s aging, that stated sense of inauthenticity, a general weariness borne out of failed applications and unnumbered rejections, the demands of dull and pitiless work, and a sense of injustice sprinkled throughout all public gestures. Resigning myself to not being nice, or being deemed ‘not nice,’ or not especially deserving of niceness, felt nice, bizarrely, but only for a few months, after which I again felt it would be nice to feel included in the worldly, public exchange of niceness, but by then it was too late to re-enter with the same enthusiasm or trust as I felt when younger and less experienced with the vagaries of being nice. To measure my lack of suitability for niceness from others I compiled a voluminous list of every person with whom I’d shared an acquaintance, correspondence, and/or friendship, then wrote 3 to 7 reasons beside each, in sharp bullet points, explaining why each person might not be nice to me, why they would not extend niceness to me, and why I deserved this withholding of niceness. This list included those who were closest to me; those who had extended niceness to me in the past, and why they had stopped doing so; and those who had never expressed niceness to me in the first place, and why that was the case and would continue to be so. The work of this list was decidedly ‘not nice,’ and was intensely private and shameful, loaded with painful revelations and remembrances, though it felt nice in the same way a spanking feels nice, or a candle-lit confession, or chores or a punishment or a sentence; the way a failing grade feels nice, or a reprimand at work; the way a traffic ticket or a dressing down by a superior feels nice, but it did not stop me from trying to think of newer, nicer things I could do for people to vindicate myself in their eyes and be the subject, or object, of nice expressions once again, or ever. Where I was headed with this list was an unliftable feeling of ‘not niceness’ in my chest and a ‘not nice’ urge to sob. This list became my vocation, my sole hobby, which replaced my older hobbies and vocational activities that were, to my chagrin, bound up in dense, complex feelings of niceness, equilibrium, fairness, and withheld niceness, and so charged my nights after my ‘not nice’ work was finished with a sense of purpose and clarity, a lack of generalized guilt and a new sterling specificity regarding the shame I felt for myself and my failure to express niceness in adequate degree, quality, and amount. Using my list, and knowing deeply that this was folly, I went on long campaigns of niceness, whereby: regardless of how it made me feel hollow or aggrieved, confused or impotent, I wrote relentless nice messages to people and performed niceness in public spaces, hoping these unrequested and unmitigated acts would cleanse my spleen and guilt, but they did not, for they burnt up like smoke, so to speak, cycling skyward to form billows that were, rather than recognizable in shape, as if emanating from any conscious mind, instead incomprehensible, chaotic; neither nice nor ‘not nice,’ but merely drifting wisps of vapour, empty of content or memory; clear and lovely as a glass held up to clouds filled with rain.

Guy Gavriel Kay

You spent the morning together
at the kitchen table comparing
rucksack, backpack, knapsack
in online dictionaries.

Displacement activity.
He was ready for you to run him
to the airport and away.

You don’t send a child into the world:
that presumes too much,
makes it about yourself.

He’s doing this. Choosing to travel
a long way for a long time.
And yes, you did the same years ago.

That’s part of the feeling today,
memories overlapping the moment.
The way time runs but is always circling.

His pack weighs less than yours did.
Back then travel books and a sleeping bag
and a metal frame…

and you can still remember
how your parents looked
when you said good-bye:

welcome to that.
Live on the other side now.
Images of your own first time
abroad are shockingly vivid,
so easily summoned back.

You know he’s confident
(don’t be too much so),
alert, open to experience,
unafraid to be alone.

He knows he has limitations
in what he’s seen and done
and wants to push those back,
and you want this for him, fiercely.

Your heart is wide open
this morning to the wish
that good things
come to him out there:

people, places, days and nights
being built towards a life
to look back upon
(stay safe).

But that same heart
you feel to be opening now
will miss him the way
a person misses air

when they hold their breath,
watching someone
crossing a high wire,
far above the ground.

Godspeed my child, the world
is wild and wide, but not
to be feared because of this.
Know you’re loved. Know it as you go.

Lauren Turner

Reapply my lipstick with a prayer to keep me heart shaped.
……..My dearly beloved is a red red cherry.

My cherry never popped. A boy’s hand plucked out its stone
……..behind Babylon. I was 19 then grew

slick with pussy blood, whirling into a knock kneed scramble
……..for any taxi’s plush derrière.

From another’s open mouth, his greedy hand would beckon
……..to Mike. My modern day amoureux

is named Michael. It’s a trash bin coincidence, a lil O-faced gasp
……..leaving red on the globular fruit

I teethe, lovingly. My soft naïve bits were harvested like organs
……..and later went stalked

by tumors, suiciding what’s left. Still, born love is red and exists
……..in menstrual blood, every time

we seed to create nothing. Sway my blanched hips underneath
……..scuzzy satin, I’m effervescent at burst.

That’s how we know it was special. My red red lipstick takes a gun
……..of cigarillo, letting you into the secret

alley where Mike bleeds me out of me, on repeat, with every man.
……..I never could flesh myself anew.

David O’Meara

The future is needy.

All that hope.

Last week
it desperately wanted what this week’s
only background,

patchy developments yet to come.
Carry me around, I said

fetal in the duvet.

Outside, I pause below
clouds playing shadow-puppets on radar,
the air dark with radiance
like the nave in Sainte-Chapelle.

_______

A short climb to domestic views.
The sky jams the tree in its scrapbook.
One branch, like a witch’s finger,
scrapes the metal siding,

knotted knuckle keening in wind.
I push tumbled twigs about,
the hibernated slurry,
leaves, dust
and litter’s dregs, disassembled
fractions

of something whole we used
up and threw away.

New stalks breach rolls of soil
like a burst couch.

_______

My porch. My staff and straw.
My six treads down.
My peninsula amid compost bins,
sidewalk, chrysanthemum and linden, this
provisional mount to my works
and days, each plan
a false trail
where I play a poor man’s Hesiod

left to wait
in this shoe-gazer’s almanac
remade by the age
of Big Oil and plastic.

_______

Panic seems to live in my ear,
plus the radio

and a revving at the stop-signs.

I shift the piles, spray the lids,
curse drudgery,

but out here, free at least
from click-bait.
A squirrel’s eye
radars over movement’s
could-be predators, if only to outlive
the imminent, heavy rain.

The past, with its exhausted magic,
needs us too.

All façade, the gutters drip
and a Google search shows nothing.

I step toward the porch
and hold the storm between shattered
blades of light.
A predicted front
will pass this way, still completely startle,

and this day will have me for its dinner, or let me go.

Paola Ferrante

When they report about abandoned car seats used
to lure female motorists to a location next to
a wooded or grassy field
I know the way the story’s going like

little girls will go
through bloody mary
in the bathroom
mirror. Every time she looks
she sees scratches from

what the man looking in the window would pull out
of his pockets, not being sure if he wanted her
blood all over
him.

Later on it’s the man upstairs
where they say a woman’s place is
in the home calling to say

have you checked
the children why haven’t you
aren’t you
glad you didn’t turn on
the light

from the t.v. See what’s happening in America.
There’s a man with a hook hand
ready to tear off her roof
same shape as a coat hanger
used down a back alley;

the man will always say he’s concerned with the state
of the children. Doesn’t he know she’s heard it
before, way back from the babysitter around
a campfire where little girls are always told
the killer is right
inside the house.

Matthew Tierney

Hat brims, lapel pins, taupe vests.
The class of portrait photographers
with vintage cameras
hops around me, my pint, the patio.
A single robin settles on a point of view.

Idealists ask grandiose questions.
Realists spring a pop quiz.
Like, when stranded on a desert island,
with what material and how large
should one spell out HELP?

Seconds, days, years,
we feel them pass psychologically.
Brain scientists can now use
reverse psychology
to transport you to the Roaring Twenties,
the Left Bank, Boulevard Saint-Germain—

Probably not your idea of a good time.
Forget I said anything.

Applause.
(One hand encounters the other.)

A ladybug plays dead on
the coast of my dampened coaster.
A plane burbles above my big wobbly head.

James Lindsay

We want more brightness than money can imagine.
— Timothy Donnelly, “Dream of Poetry Defense”

This poem is an attempt at learning
how to wear flip-flops with confidence

around the oddball hub where acceptance
has begun to slowly settle in. Acceptance

in the understanding that this is home now
and will remain home for as long as it takes

the hazmat team to retard and tame the bed
head of fibrous crystals, promising cancer,

lurking in the nooks only contractors know.
Where privet money and imagination begin

to dim—childless as this space is—noon
is when first classes will start settling in.

Lesson One: exposed toes are much more
vulnerable to bloody stubs. Care for them

like a litter of hatchlings, otherwise, seeing
as there are no children here, watch out

for them with the vigilance of the young
money, who leave lights on in the hundred

rooms of this mega-mansion, ignoring
hydro bills higher than devout iowaska

decibels or burnouts hidden in the shadows
of dark parks, who’ve saved their allowance

to seek a new sound source, a heavy twang
with a tendril on the dimmer switch, an eye

out for subtle changes in the light, the same
old disagreement between dawn and dusk.