NewPoetry

Nathaniel G. Moore

I remember now, instances ago

near the fabulous false decorative tree,

as she shredded the buttered toast

in a fit against her soft lips,

and when closed, these lips formed

a temporary pink rose

and her nipples slept well

under incandescent gown,

which by now phantoms

on a floor somewhere,

beneath all my derangement.

The outlaw garment, once removed,

revealed a suggestive corporeal estate

as if she was preparing to feed

in a maternal role pantomiming

a dirty balance of sustenance and eros

now my inadequacy rises

now my duress circulates

and the potion of hope vanishes

the vanity of defeat and predictive flaws

self-propel: I am the designer,

but cannot feel the plan

for all I feel is love.

Canisia Lubrin

for Bianca Spence

Let me see you
leave with your
posture of stones.
Or pray, if you must, to your lit
from both ends artillery
where the world is reduced
to the height of your nose.
Best yet: is grazed on the boundary of your toes.
Your local memory, your pause, cannot suddenly sag my syllables,
or whatever you trip upon outside
myself being invaded–but no–
who reduced you to the work
of a tilted head, and respite, pardon my flare, stretching the lips, polite?

But uncertain as what borrows now, as always, the dread mock of beauty fusing mindlessly, the morse-code to the hieroglyph, the telegraph to the Braille, the dying serif to the pixelated phrase,
throw the uproar the swallowed whole, the history as font.

Tell me how to be funny. Tell me how I haven’t tried.
Lend me your gaze.
Let me sign, stupidly, your name:

Lisa Young Kutsukake

Finally, something humiliating.
Below the cut steel stare of fluorescents
Lit in the commotion of the present:
I am a cobweb that caught an aging
Fingernail in the dining room cupboard,
Bland paint chip fallen off the bed’s frail leg,
Iron-stained panty clung to a clothes peg.
Neglect—to disavow, turn from, abhor.

Stubbornly posed before men’s scrutiny,
Our palimpsest-inked pages glow, one makes
Another. “Tabula rasa. The lot.”
Words fail to write actions; shrewd entropy
Blots Reason, favours twittering Rapture—
Who claims to say who is real and who’s not?

Gregory Betts

From nothing, a bird watches a man walk into a room. From nothing, a woman is telling a story. There is a murder. She stops speaking. He sits down. A woman walks into the room. A bird flies into the room. The bird is black. The man is black. The woman sits down. The crow is telling a story. It walks into the centre of the circle. Everybody stops talking. The wings of the woman fold behind her back. She is wearing jeans with holes that resemble black holes or night. Two crows fly out in the shape of a butterfly or a depressed penis or a man picking up a stone. Nothing is said. The man throws the stone and it kills him. The crow hovers over the body. The woman stands up and walks out of the room. Her wings unfold and she begins telling a story. Outside of the room is the room full of men and women and birds listening to her story. A woman knocks over a glass of black ink. It is now nighttime. Nobody continues to talk about the murder. Crows fly through the sky above you. They are women. Black women. They plot themselves. The man advances to inspect the hole where the crows fly into the room. He reaches his hand into the night and is bitten. The woman pushes him and together they fall. A stone flies past them, knocking two birds out of the sky. As they fall, their feathers peel from their wings. The feathers are black. You can only imagine how they float in the open space of night, beside the black hole from which they came, falling onto the stone face of Silence. The man sits down and stops talking. A woman walks into the room like a hole in a conversation. Silence breaks.

There is a wire that loops around the room. It is listening for any sign of Silence. Imperceptibly, it connects everything in the room to everything else in the room. The wire is black and casts a long shadow over everything it touches in the room, which is everything. Nothing stirs in the shadows. It might be the source of blackness. It might have caused the hole, or it connects one hole to another hole. The holes are lonely, long for another moment in the perfect quiet. From nothing, the birds that perch on this dark wire tell stories to the people, each word another thread that ties them to the room. The room itself is reeling from the murder.

Stephanie Bolster

It was practical, the elevated rails to bring the goods right
to the factories, the freight of meat, the turkeys packed and hacked
free of their heads. A few feathers stuck. It stayed
until the last train ran and after. Birds on their way
from roof to roof sat a while and shat
a small meadow up there, seeds, blooms, cast-off
stuff. Trash some wandered under and others looked
down on and a few scaled for trysts or views
of fireworks. Seedier and seedier, best done
away with. But a couple of guys saw
it made space where space was lacking, imagined
summer backs flat against a patch of grass, up at gull-
level. Did what it took (committees, etcetera) and there
it is still, planted with much of the stuff
that set up shop itself, but done with vistas
where someone wanted: 10^th Avenue a scene
through glass (an amphitheatre to sit and watch
the traffic pass) or a wall of coloured glass
against which dancers dance or a stall sells
lattes and biscotti. At the end, it ends. There used to be more
but the eyesore side said no so that part had to go. Who says
they can’t go back, ship in bits of defunct track
(who takes Amtrak?) and set them up and roll out lawn. Imagine
all Manhattan bound by that ribbon? In a century or two
it’ll have gone the way of whatever else, the ostrich
say or cell phones, the hotel that straddled it parting
its legs over a void where rusted metal was. The decent scrap
long since turned to toys or parts of houses propped by brick
walls of what were factories. The Hudson still at it.

George Murray

I woke up sweating in the new
year’s darkness, worried
about Trump’s organs.
I realize it’s unlikely he signed
his card, but if he did,
perhaps accidentally
autographing on autopilot,
How impoverished would a body
have to be to not reject them?
Imagine driving around
with Trump’s liver in you,
his spleen, his kidney, his marrow,
grafts of his skin like orange
bandages over your old burns.
His tendons creaking in your legs,
his lungs sucking up air, slack
face stapled to your skull
like a Halloween mask,
a stubby-fingered hand dangling
gratefully from your stump, needing
years of physio to grab again.
How could you ever be sure
of what you see with his eyes
sending light to your brain,
or why your pulse keeps rising
with his heart bumping
against your ribs? How could you
sit at a red light, running
your fingers through that hair?
I get it, you’re desperate.
You signed on your own line
and bought the best lemon you could
afford at the time.
And if his pink Cadillac parts fit
your chugging Dodge,
who cares? So long as you get
one more chance to arrive home,
hold your kids, kiss your wife.
Maybe with his hands or open mouth.

Emily Sanford

Mark Laliberte

Gary Barwin

Kyle Flemmer

Derek Beaulieu

catherine owen

For us it’s fine the forests are empty
And the seas are merely picturesque residue.

We have been taught appearance is everything
And cannot resign our mirrors now.

The train is five minutes away from Oshawa
And on the first Metro of the morning

A man called Raymond ate a sandwich, crumbs
Constellating his overalls.

We are thanked for depositing our garbage
In the bin but have no idea where it goes

And enjoy our beautiful ignorance.
Why not write a Frank O’Hara poem?

Sometimes life is just a series of events
With filaments less than more connecting.

Like now when I am served my soup
In a random Scottish pub and ask for only

A small amount of pepper while it starts
To snow thin as litter and a woman pronounces

Certain as Li Po: “It’s the intelligent people
That are truly dangerous when they’re stupid.”

Katie Fewster-Yan

Good god, your hat is amazing.
Please hold onto it. Please secure
the woollen strings with the baubles
tight beneath your chin. Not too tight.
I know this is a world in which it’s easy
to forget your sneakers at the door
and wander barefoot, maybe naked,
to the corner store to exclaim
that there’s a man inside your neck
licking his one long fingernail, honing
it like a scythe along your spine.
But he won’t barter for a round blue
lollipop, for a two-pack of batteries,
a cigarette, or a small yellow pail.
I know that Wednesday
is as good a day as any to gather
all your underpants and toss them out
the third story window, or the eighth,
the nineteenth, twenty-second, forty-sixth!
What heights these cities will allow.
Please do not hie after them. Please keep
your arms and legs inside the vehicle
so I can seal you in. You and I,
we’re going to take a drive together north
until we’re shadowed by sharp walls
of the glacier-carved valley, until the moon
glows above us like the ancient stone it is.
We will allow the perfect flakes
of snow to asterisk our arms like markings
gesturing to notes we cannot write
or think or say. It is cold. I don’t need
to see your hair to trust that it is there
curling out of you like a sombre animal.
You’ll confess you took your name
for granted, never questioned
the significance of capital letters.
And I will lay upon your shoulder
like a field of emerald grass.

Klara du Plessis

/

Through my tears
I understand more clearly
tinkering membranes
isn’t it strange
how the eyes are objects
that one can’t see while seeing through
them, then tears, being another
transparent substance,
but supposedly blurring
vision, it’s a lie because right now
tears close off nearsightedness so
I can look into my skull, in reverse
that’s their purpose.

//

The idea that one eye always
cries shorter than the other
shorter in duration, shorter in the
distance it runs down cheek, shorter
in the gesture of wiping away
with the right hand
in a single swipe from left to right.

Claire Kelly

Tanja Bartel

Another shooting. Flocks of neighbours turning away.

Plants can grow up without fighting. Listen. Roots of the West Coast rainforest communicate with one another.

Salmon start working a new job after death when grizzlies carry their carcasses into the woods as fertilizer.

My timid father was chased, caught, and hauled in by the U.S Coast Guard for cross-border fishing. Disoriented, he gunned his commercial salmon vessel when ordered to stop.

All the way to the dementia phase of his life. Tangled lines, a torn net. Jailor didn’t care who he was before. He was flight.

Order and precision of fish scales arranged in a pattern. Never caught, never seen. Hundreds of pounds of art rotted in the boat’s hold during the two-week impound. We’d have eaten only the dull inside part anyway, discarded the shining armour. Flash then trash.

Fights can grow long tails.

A memory I carry into the woods to fertilize my prejudice: I never met
the deck hand, but apparently he threw down his gear, jumped off my dad’s shaky wood boat, and made the whirly finger gesture at his temple.

A single act creates your entire character.

Birds move together in unison like schools of fish do. They mime
all the fish we cannot see.

Unity means moving as a single spirit. Knowing when to randomly change direction, a test to keep us in tune. There is no other reason for turning away, again and again.

I ignored my father as much as possible when he was alive. Went out of my way to stay out of his way. Strain to remember his stance, ring of hair around his balding head. Babyish texture, so transitory.

The second childhood, they call it. I say we’re big fat babies in the middle years when we get what we bawl for, if we can pay.

My father shuffled off bewildered into death. When you can’t swallow water, that’s it. Eventually, he dried up in a hospital bed. A fish out of water, invisible under the sheets.

Being thirsty means you want to live on.

Roman soldier held a vinegar-soaked sponge up to Jesus when he said, “I thirst.” After everything he’d been through.

A single act of cruelty becomes history.

Someone made a note of it. Now he’s in the Bible, as an example. The Bible is like social media that way, but social media is not like the Bible.

Dark-faced Jesus would be shot today while walking on water carrying loaves and fish for all. Fishing out of bounds. Mistaken as looter, insurgent.

In the end, my father flew away in search of less hostile waters.

Tessa Liem

I want to leave the house in the clothing I sleep in
& not need to go home again.

But I am not well enough to leave,
not well enough to sleep

& so when I stay home
everything I do is political

because I’ve been reading about the ethics of space
& because

sometimes I lie on the floor
until you text me asking me why I’m not out.

& because sometimes we have to have sex
with most of our clothes on.

Sometimes we lie
on the floor naked & text everybody who is out asking:

……………“why aren’t you home
…………… .being political?”

because sometimes we have to stay in,
keep our bodies ethical

so to speak. If we go out,
we will have to dress for the street.

Lorna Crozier

The dead wear bracelets; their wrists want some weight
now that everything is weightless and watches don’t make sense.
It’s no surprise they’ve learned to walk soundlessly, without
jangling, the way a cat graces his muscles
so the bell around his neck won’t ring.

…………*
My father drives his first car, a Model T, into the sky,
black clouds thick with gumbo. People, stuck, hitch a ride,
thumbs out, faces blurred, valises gaping open.
The four directions here are only up and down. My father knows
where to take them, and though he’s never heard of Charon and his coins,
he demands a price. Sixteen years till my mother arrives but even she
has to pay from the tips she smuggled in her pocket.
Nothing meant by it, he’s just that way.

…………*
I won’t be long, she says, when she dons her teacher’s clothes
and enters what is over, what she calls a second chance.
She rehearses the words she’ll say to the problem student who liked
to tell his fellows he’d camped at night in Shakespeare & Company’s
in Paris beside the shelf that held Rimbaud, his Illuminations,
his Une Saison d’Enfer, as if merely sleeping there had made him
bad and brilliant. The floor of the classroom gleams
with hard new wax, the blackboard’s clean. Hours merely pass.
She puts check marks by all the blanks on the attendance sheet,
then stands at the front of an emptiness she can’t see past.
It’s never what you think it’s going to be.

…………*
The girls who work in the factories in The History of Time
lick the ends of their brushes, paint the watches’ hands and numbers
so they can be read in the dark. The paint laced with uranium.
That place where lost words gather—the tip of the tongue—
turns radiant. Even after
they stop breathing, their breath
inside the dark caves of their mouths
glows a ghostly green.

…………*
By the side of the gravel road
the dust’s so fine
though the frog is light as a leaf
you can see his tracks.
That’s what’s missing in heaven.
Don’t play dead until you die.

Curtis LeBlanc

Where is he when his son’s dog hangs?
Not close enough to hear the scratches
echo from the tunnel slide, see the leash
tied up at the top of the jungle gym,
the dog at the other end, kneading
smooth hard plastic. The cops bag it
like dirty laundry and it takes two men
to haul it and heave it into the cruiser.
The father holds a felt blanket over
his son, smooths the creases down his back,
guides his shoulders with firm hands,
lifts his chin with one finger to the men
in uniform. The boy describes the ones
who did it and it’s then a manhunt. Neighbours
accusing each other’s children. Police
interrogations in the schools. Sympathizers
go in bunches with flowers for his family,
bake them apple rhubarb pies, whisper
in convenience stores and parking lots
about the boy who had to watch
his poor dog die.

…………………..They receive, the father
estimates, one hundred calls and messages.
Steady mail, even a letter from Scandinavia
from a couple that breeds Finnish dogs,
reindeer herders. Lapphunds, they call them.
His family can have one if they’d like.
The story is out and the world has chosen
to stand by. The father wants nothing more
to do with it. But he still keeps that letter close,
thumbs the corners of it, holds it like a prize.
He considers writing the Scandinavians
but hasn’t settled on what to type.
He wants to tell them: We’re coming,
we’re just about to board the plane,
and by the time that you receive this
we will have come and gone already.
He spends a week thinking of how to put it
in exactly the right words, how grateful
he was to receive their letter, how
he has read it over a dozen times. He wants
to tell them how he folds it into quarters,
always along the same creases,
through words like acreage, obedient,
suffering, sincerely.

…………………..Then his son admits it
was an accident. Tied the leash himself
and then went down the slide. The dog,
a good one, had gone to follow.
The ones who believed the boy want
to see him punished, put to shame.
But the father thinks that he can feel it,
what his son must have felt right then,
watching his friend put paw over paw,
each step slipping like the last.
He knows, at least, that it’s a lesson
best learned young: to tell a lie and give
it up, before you have to shoulder it
for what will be, with any luck, a long life.

Rebecca Salazar

Our mercurial shores shrink with frost. We’re denser,
receding. You lack arms, and I’m greying at the hands.

There are no borders in a lake zone, only tailing pond,
cool spring, and brook trout semen melding underground.

We’re ailed with vapours: the spit of wet oak,
and the black fever sprung from our brows.

The rust pulse of your sliced thumb in your mouth mimics
the beat of falling rain. Its metallic gush oiling your chin.

Lakes gather teeth from dead walleye, lost swimmers,
and rumoured cetaceans. Keep clear of islands’ jawlines.