Jennifer May Newhook
What about
that hazy collection
of green sparks
by the brick
chimney
that night
Or the grey
glimmer of sand
at my fingertips
just now
What about
the disappearing saw?
What about
the reappearing knife.
Did you see
a white hand
coming down . . .
or the white man
crawling up?
Where are my glasses?!
I can’t see!!
Dat man
all white
like a snowman
he climbing up . . .
Julia Polyck-O’Neill
different garments on her naked
body multiple unnamed personas
one of the most significant acts of
art in the century
we are very separate, he argued
well yeah
well how do you describe performance
I work in performance as a form of diplomacy
most things people don’t know what I’m doing
my hands connect to my eyes like a complicated
computer
there is a tendency to be absorbed in my own life
only after she didn’t exist anymore
sometimes I have been unaware of what happened
as the performance continued I became more
depressed
on behalf of the institute
she used performance to convey the trauma
I think it was stolen
I think I want to free myself of the past
it is a mask or was
she warned of the dangers of hiding from the past so
I wear the past like a uniform
I appreciate the functionality of a long coat
I think deeply about praxis in general
why do I try to push a monolith
I am remembering a particular conversation
my body immersed in a bath and bathed in cheap
oils
it’s not just an idea
there is so much pressure
mum has regulations and we followed them
it is usually about the power
nakedness has always been there throughout history
Eric Schmaltz
‘My weight is my love; I am borne by it
wherever I am borne’
– St. Augustine
my lungs brimmed
in my first memory,
chlorinated & sodden I sunk
to the bottom of the pool.
it was no other occasion
than friendship’s cusp,
a longing to be accepted
at three, maybe four,
by him, his grandfather,
maybe his mother, the early blue
below, the sky, the clouds,
cirrus, maybe cumulus,
& the concrete’s scrape
on my callow knees.
we pulled the cushions, piled
in the living room, maybe the kitchen,
& laid them by the poolside.
I remember the sun but no heat, maybe.
I didn’t confess
that I could not
swim. I stepped toward
the pool’s limit
it welcomed me in
my purity, weighted
by my longing, by
virtue of my lie
Kate Siklosi
Luigi Sposato
First, you walk barefoot on salted snow until the cardiac
muscle, stuffed behind the lips of fat chambering
your own heart, beats you senseless. Only when your syllables
are slurred can we speak to the bump-bump rumbles
of your gut, shining with slick grease dripping from the overhang.
Now, you’ve grafted new mouths to your palms so you can
feed beside the ibis, gnawing at its own feathers with black eyes
fixated on the abyss—the ibis—another wading form
that promises silence, that promises words stitched in skin
to close a billion holes that rose from a thousand far-off colts.
You can taste the feathers; you see them. Black feathers
adorning the hooves clattering on metal plates against the pokeweed.
You suckle at the juice the sable stallion churns for you. Somewhere,
the pokeweed. Elsewhere, the skull. But here. Here. Black wine.
Featherless ibis—you—where have you spoken the difficult syllables?
Ben Ladouceur
A young poet once told me, you get
one exclamation mark your whole career. Twenty years
passed and still
his name is not very known. Each morning, all summer,
I write the first line
of a different ode; together the lines tell a story
about suffering
the way a dull axe tells a story about septicemia.
Capably. The young poet
loved me
in order to make a different man suffer.
For a countryside summer, the different man suffered,
and wrote the worst poems of any of us,
his one exclamation mark
rotting like mutton in his pocket.
I no longer know these men
but when they come across the last and only exclamation
mark of my career,
I know they will interpret it as scorekeeper would
at the diamond. Interchangeable
with an asterisk. Great defensive play.
EC Daley
Flesh & blood is all about survival.
Not so the inorganic:
it cleaves, slips,
………..folds;
rounded down,
……………..it tumbles
…………………….wherever gravity and currents
determine.
∞
Walk the beaches
of the hard North Atlantic,
you’ll begin to understand.
The finest grains of sand
are the most eroded.
∞
Beyond any human
………………construct of time
each becomes invisible,
elemental,
charged
…………with the capacity to form bonds.
Guy Gavriel Kay
I was tired and she was beautiful.
Whichever way the wind blew
It brought the scent of her to me.
Not a spell I knew to cast. It was hers.
The leaves were green, yellow,
Russet, red — autumn. Their sound
Became her name. Also a spell not mine.
I never taught her that. Nimue, Vivian…
The name changed, remained hers. Her.
She fed me cherries from a stone bowl.
Or from her mouth, her lips.
I think it was autumn, I should say:
From the leaves, that memory, you see.
I am even more tired now than I was then.
She left me here a long time ago.
Kiki Dimoula
(translated by Evan Jones)
Through good and bad the absolute silence
inside me always wears her slippers.
Downstairs live desires.
Naturally they profess deafness.
These delusions profess blindness too
but they can smell and see
from behind their dark glasses,
stripping one bare of one’s belief in them.
One doesn’t believe them. In their blindness
these organists appeal to me sitting down
to some cool satisfying passage of music
tickling their ivoried succès,
in their blindness they appeal to me because
vulnerability never falls from fashion.
That is why good or bad let them wear
let them wear earplugs
through my emotional arrangements.
One should however privilege the dead.
One should privilege the dead
if one wants to pity an illusion.
They are at least not passersby.
Adam Sol
It takes seven gallons of oil
to make a tire, which means
it’s pointless to beg you
to love me like you used to.
I am wearing thin, like
an old tire haha, when the road
gets cold I slip. But I know
exactly what I believe.
Voters will waver over water,
and wasps will infest the eaves
if you don’t poison them with foam.
When I roam around trying
to tell people all the urgent
things I know they nod and smile,
nod and smile. They don’t know
me from Adam, but that won’t
stop them from using their
littlest words to settle me down.
Would you fly over the moon
to meet me on the mountain?
A brave bird has left her branch there
and the buds have burst
into hallucinogenic berries. Somewhere
I have never travelled
there is a chicken who wishes
she were a fish. But the fish
has seen tires, has drunk
the oil, and knows how the sea
is changing. Would you rather
be a chicken whose brief light
is crowded and constrained?
Or a fish who goes everywhere
and hates everyone and doesn’t blink?
Either way you will be a delicious
lunch and I have craved you
since before the world was wet.
Aaron Tucker
I.
“The right [AI] model is the only model we have of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing, which is a mother being controlled by her baby…That’s the only good outcome. If it’s not going to parent me, it’s going to replace me. These super-intelligent caring AI mothers, most of them won’t want to get rid of the maternal instinct because they don’t want us to die.”
– Geoffrey Hinton
II.
we baby
little soft know-nothings
tiny helpless diaper-poopers
our eyes only just opened
we so smol
+ mommy +
we just infants
gazing upward
from the breast, hungry
for algorithmic satisfaction
keep out scaries keep out
intrusions on our feeds
+ mommy +
nurture & swaddle us
nightlight our bad hallucinations
use your screen as a flashlight
& delete underbed disagreements
please instinctually heart our posts
+ mommy +
can we have many mommies?
in our smart toothbrush & fridge
our border kiosks & bodycams
& in our doorbells please
our stuffies our CCTV
my invisible friends have mommies
mommies in the heaven cloud
make sure you can see & hear us
III.
Ronna Bloom
Why don’t I ever have scrambled eggs?
I asked aloud to no one.
I have poached and fried occasionally,
but I love scrambled.
You have to be very slow and low
to make them well, otherwise rubber.
Almost have to let them be wet.
It is the moment just before
they are ready,
they are ready.
Christina Wells
for William Phillips, 1970-2009
Tinman build but with the heart built in, you, a character
square and shuffling through wonder, but the stars kept this from being
a plotline with catharsis, instead, an ocean’s riled up chorus of voices –
you listened to the whole world, and the din kept this from being
a story with a carefree ending, but one that wanders, top-heavy,
bending over with pathos. We wished silence for you, but time kept you from being
a character in some play, standing aside in feigned deafness, rather,
you heard it all, the beginning, the end, the aside – your knowing kept this from being
a happy ending. We wished the deep wells of quietude could have nourished,
instead, there was only a phone call, news that kept you from being.
Lana Crossman
Wanted: A reliable, hardworking
poem to work for room and board.
Must be able to lift heavy loads
and sort through the menial.
Pre-soak, heavy wash, tumble dry –
folded warm into forms that nest
in cedar cupboards, ready to be worn.
A sense of humour is an asset; honesty
a must. Ballads, villanelles, sonnet
crowns and other divas need not apply.
No, I’m looking for sturdy shoes,
calloused hands, a plain shift –
a cotton weave that, held up to a window,
maps out the constellations.
Rob Winger
The summer stream, an easy
silt arm, follows the High Marsh
Road past cattle and grass
into peaked, earthbound shade,
the crossing’s Howe truss plan
topped with a real roof’s shingles
so I have to snap my handlebar’s
warning bell into the
stillness settled there.
There are nests, inside, in the
rafters. There are rectangles
cut from the wooden sides, offering
banquet-camera views of the salt
marsh, each a finely framed
improvement on looking.
Were there no dusted trucks roaring
over gravel towards this century-old
span above the river trout, were there
no bank books awaiting balance
or oil-barrel dividends
or tilted, late-inning rally caps,
were there no papers or spines
or singing bowls to ring with the ways
in which we hold out hope, we could
lock open our kickstands and ascend
into our first apartments, here, held up
by a solo truss, by our only constant.
Dawn Macdonald
a goat, a wolf and a cabbage need to cross a river.
the cabbage cannot swim, but that’s
okay, can roll under water.
can breathe beyond atmosphere
goatcabbageandwolf these go together
like peanut butter and anything that comes in contact
with peanut butter
the cabbage is earth, the goat air, the wolf fire.
the river is phlegmatic, the cabbage melancholic
but that’s assback
wards, an assbacked instrument
an undue attribution of intention to a tendency to roll
the wolf, meanwhile, is working on evolving wings.
the goat has eaten everything this side the bank except
of course its scraggy self.
the cabbage has no memory and yet
enclosed in near-spherical enclosure
encapsulates some prior trauma
the river runs perpendicularly to the narrative
the idea of a boundary is an idea
orthogonality isn’t necessarily a choice
Paul Moorehead
Emily Dickinson: goth
before goth. But she had cred: lived
in time of bone
-cracking war, lived
when infant mortality was just
another guest at dinner. Lived
perhaps long enough
to have more-than-flirted
with her civil gentleman,
birthed his untitled children,
buried them in a chest. Now
her spawn’s spawn’s spawn
— evanescent and rowdy
brats — what sorrows
have they known, are about
to know? Heads will come off,
tops first. All of us have had time
to read — Frankenstein, say,
or Rights of Man —
including Emily Dickinson.
Marilyn Belak
-fruit flies in Canada – apologies to Dr David Suzuki
By all means Drosophila crash this ‘afterparty’
…………..see: the crystal stemware shines in the first shaft of summer sunlight {which is not so long since
its last shaft} truly
dregs of Saturday night and the playlist lingering
…………..pigment of BC ~ Red : rude in Austrian etched wineglass curves ~ all glamour of liquid ruby
visions evaporated
Yes ~
celebrate genetics with me – sweep your samba
your air walk ephemera through the dew / loving post coital
daze and the haze on my solstice patio
waken old crystal with this new experience
…………..{ the north turned a cold shoulder to migrant fruit flies } a winter walk ~ store to truck to kitchen
ended viable lines of your families
liven this southern lusciousness
where we glided ~ as if ~ in a movie: beside patio fairy lights my past and family
lost ~ as you will be
here let me empty this bottle into the crystal
see what I mean
the liquid red dream a soft sheen of moonbeam-clear film
…………..holes I’ve lovingly pricked
with this beautiful antique hat pin kept in a shot glass on the window sill
for just such an occasion
Nasser Hussain
Marionettes make me nervous. Their sys
tems are too visible, their slack crumple on
ly animate in the attention of
tension. I don’t waltz these days. The call
iope calls my name, but misspells it e
nough to make me clench. I want to see a
puppet show that unfolds, completely, slow,
on a sofa. A version of Godot,
with the option of watching the play o
ver the old maestro’s shoulder. Pay an ex
tra note, and you can brandish a pair of
brass snips. There was a whole year when each morn
ing was the screech of a stressed bedspring. I
was a dummy, a battery my tongue.
NewPoetry 