NewPoetry

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.

Kathryn Gray

I met a married man once, on a train. He was handsome.
He had the kind of face that made me think
of clean, smooth hands. I should add that
in the end nothing really happened.

I have done terrible things I will not own.

The dingo took my baby!

Bear with me.

Men have left me. No Vietnam. They simply went.
You must hear this sort of thing all the time. But.
I have stood, hooded, on the jetty;
the sea—the sea turned over my mind, roughly.

I have been very tired and emotional [air quotes].
I cannot afford a rehab facility.

There are not enough key lime pies in this world
for all the people who deserve them. In the face.
Yes, this is heartburn.
You might be onto something.

O Michael! O Michael! O Michael!

I worry that I’m all cliché.
I like to fake accents with strangers.
I suppose that tells you a lot.

I suffer from Imposter Syndrome. Or maybe not.

I had a farm—

Mark Callanan

Even the insane are guilty
of adopting the dominant
pose. Years ago, you were
nobody if you weren’t
the big J.C. hoofing it
down St. John’s streets
in a t-shirt in January,
spreading the good news
with venereal efficiency,
sparing fellow citizens
their handfuls of venal sins.
Came a time, the web of
self-delusion set its net
worldwide. Dial up. Early
Internet. You remember.
Then the tone switched
from sacred to paranoid:
G-men in surveillance vans,
phones tapped, web traffic
monitored. Tin foil saw
a new heyday. I’m told
now they’re returning
to the old tropes, visions
and revisions of Christ
talking through the buzz
of neon lights, bushes
giving sermons. The sonnet
is making a big comeback,
or might yet, someday.

Domenica Martinello

………………………………………………………………..11AM

Come now, take a crack at us.
Animal-women may be familiar

to you, or duplicitous women
doubling, working in twos.

………………………………………………………………..11:30AM

True, many men take a crack
but you don’t strike us as someone

so easy to bruise. We explore conflict
through metaphor, isn’t that true?

………………………………………………………………..12PM

Freud! what is your qualm with us?
Come, join me. Join us on the rocks.

Jung do you dream of swimming
or flying? I’m a cruelly numinous

………………………………………………………………..12:15PM

creature. I can accommodate. Memory
puddles like water, shimmers with heat

changes colour on the hour. As a boy
did you dream of monsters in dark grottos

………………………………………………………………..12:30PM

who approach, threaten? We do not approach.
Little fish, how can you break free of recurring

dreams when you’re petrified, when we don
the face of your mother, her lullabies?

………………………………………………………………..12:40PM

The thing about lullabies—you’re gone
before you hear their conclusion.

………………………………………………………………..12:42PM

Lie with us. There is no resolution.

Adèle Barclay

sneaker whites mint astroturf leaves
in fields beyond fields somewhere between
ravine-carved crab apple orchards
and soccer nets that catch halos of heat

drunk as a busted patio umbrella blackberry
barbs the crank of old bike chains up anthills
hive-mind engines hum in the shallow of night
wine cooler wells limestone moon

hungry hollow bends its newly paved
elbow where a fluorescent buck once fought a man
on fire by the glow of seven headlights before
silver creek swallowed the highway’s shoulder

all the stars in clusterfucks chime above streets
named for foxes put to sleep in open basements

John Degen

I.

The runway approach on days of southeast
shadows across acres of the dead beneath
a long pine lawn. Generations

of half wild rabbits, manged and
skittish; pursued through their dumb finite
days by screaming birds. Bolting

from the dive, skin contracted for a kill.
Never comes but once at night,
in cold murderous collapse; untold rabbits

flinging themselves through snowed hedgerows.
Dash 8 in a horizontal flatspin – total stall;
forty-nine souls slamming on top of one

watching television, or using the toilet, or
checking the expiry on the orange juice
at the back of the fridge; it was never clear

from the newspapers what he was up to
when all that exploded from within
and jerked him from life like an unknown

snail scraped from the seabed.
For centuries before, the rabbits of Cheektowaga,
of Amherst and Clarence, sat at the ready,

twitching and scenting
and fearing this disaster or another;
all that modernity they twitched

and witnessed the parceling out,
the measuring off. The foxes all but
disappeared and in their place, some unknowable

anxiety.

A wind sprang from the east, an idea of rain,
sudden, pervading the air. ¹

II.

She plants a full garden, enough
at least for one woman and an
occasional visitor, in a box

four feet by four feet, of cedar planks
from the Lowes on Niagara Falls
Boulevard; hides it as well as she can

from the windborne trash, and rabbits;
surrounds everything in marigolds,
because there is magic in a fence

of yellow orange flowers. And,
while she is away, the last frost
visits her yard like a friendly stranger;

a thief undeterred by fences or magic.
Does not take; but takes all the same.
While she shops once more at the

Home Depot off Galleria Drive, buying again
the new shoots of leek and eggplant and
pepper, she stops and looks directly above

the high industrial shelves of shovels and soil
and rain barrels, watches the final approach
of a Southwest flight from Vegas, the

surprising grime of an airplane’s belly
pushed at the ground by a backdrop of
grey cloud, and no more frost. It is a promise.

III.

The cardiologist suggests walking will
prolong a foreshortened retirement, so
he walks every morning his old route

for tobacco, now chewing gum for
the nerves. Formerly random firings
of doom across synaptic gaps once damn

blissfully dulled by afternoon martinis.
Yardarm shadows slip beneath the wheels
of the bike he creaks, handsfree, along

streets quiet with waiting. He’s learned
the artful discipline of waiting; how it can
be its own intoxication when each moment’s

departure is a finger up the ass of death. What
his lieutenant told him about sitting out the
mortars, at which he’d felt such a warm collapse

of relief he worried he might have pissed himself.
So the pretty young heart doctor tells him
to walk, and he asks how far? And can I ride

as well ma’am? Will it make a difference?
Will it hold off the advance another few weeks
or months he can fill with tracks around

the cluster of houses in his block. Because
he is mapping the rabbits; logging each
sighting on a schematic pinned to his

basement panel walls. He has named each one,
worked out the complex genealogy. He believes
he has the coordinates of burrows and the daily

migrations from garden to garden. One mid-morning
walk; one afternoon ride; a second walk at dusk and
the final piece, the one he keeps to himself

slipping from the bed before she wakes and riding
the pre-dawn pavement. Stopped by the local
cops, he taps the ticker and winks, makes a joke

about donuts and coffee, says nothing about
rabbits. He wants to leave this to his wife.
He wants to give her this.

IV.

they will leave their cars at the barricades
and walk in through backyards and
gardens transformed, pockets of the maze

smelling their way, and listening
for the hiss of firehoses, the rattle of
engines running the pumps; radio squawk.

It will be cold enough to hurt them,
to damage the skin grown loose
around their eyes while they spent lifetimes

looking at nothing nearly as interesting
as this compound fracture of a neighbourhood
and the tangle of limbs and luggage ablaze.

The firefighters, all volunteers, see
their neighbours push forward,
sense the danger to everything fragile

in a life of Sunday football; there
in the middle of it all, somehow
undamaged, sits a deep freeze full

of meat – ground turkey and halved
rabbits for stew. It will take days to chip
the ice away enough to open it.

¹ Libra, Don DeLillo

Katie Vautour

Finding himself able,
the cranking Icarus
honks south.

Made of lift and movement,
he disregards conditions,

climbing higher
than ever

intersecting the path
of flight AC 667
to Toronto.

He meets the turbine
head-on in slow motion:

the……..tug
……………..of air
that won’t let go,

pounds and pounds
……..of pressure

collapsing
breath

as he whips up
into the engine.

Hot steel snaps
……………….tendons,
scorches feathers,
melts hollow shafts.

Somewhere under all this,
wrenching bones.

Metal and wire wings depart
skyward as

the bird is cast
back to land.

Moulting liquid light, sun-
……………….burnt fragments

………………………….of desire—
……………………the deep

.

………….plunge

.

.

bringing him

down.

nathan dueck

Father 2bold dropped in
On me one time.
He cried, How Can U
Just Stand There As I Cry?

He cried, I Am Here 2 Tell U
Something Girl.
Have U Ever
Heard O’ The After World?

I cried, Brother,
If you can’t tell
I’ve long tuned out
The gospel.

He Cried, So U Want
2 B Led?
I cried, That’s just noise
In my head.

He cried, Honey
Let Me Guide U.
I cried, Sounds like it’s
On a loop!

He cried, I Am
Ur Messiah
Because I Would Die
4 U, Yeah.
Yeah, I Will
Come Again.
C Ya!

I don’t know what he said,
It’s been a while,
But, oh, Fr. 2bold
Stayed awhile –
Yeah, I knew who he was
All bible-style.

Paul Vermeersch

1

Herbal Weed Thrower

no chosen dude
pumps
a treadling whiz

rat we
hit with sickened
beeches

2

A Tooth Is Fermentation

A featheriest…………..thin pop…………of a christened cow :
A glob…………on Buckwheat’s pelt .

3

Acetone Hate Fjord

A spine ejects adrenaline.
Lithuania downloads porn
And well-versed yeti
Hunt lurid harlots in the slums.

Euro-phenol Twisted Sister
Prolongs adrenal rewind and would
Shower thunder upon a rotund jag,
Anoint a pratfall android.

The bra was grey and ajar.
My Wookiee tried heroin on TV.
Bingo voids the fibroid turd
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Alice Burdick

Final eyes toward
names that only end in ‘c’, the same cat
cleaning on the sidewalk,
birds diving at the cherries,
fallen ripe, a dog towards
a corner, a talk to the hand,
a strange man fainting twice
in an open house.

The humour in death,
the dumbness of no-nos,
the money that changes hands
in theatres of death. The arena
of hopes naming the one who goes.
The rule to end pain – a sharp voice
Don’t go out after dark, there are so
many stories you can hear.
The humiliating puddle,
the surprises, a flapping promise.
Even a vaccine for morass,
a void of delicious stars.

Wheelbarrows that are old
ladies. Dark goes into the frame,
pinching the nerve around the ear
and chin. Contortions in finger
foods. Always a gardener or digger
of start-away, get-out, keep-stepping
lower or higher than any actual level.

Nikki Sheppy

Steve McOrmond

They’re neat party tricks, I’ll give you that.
When I wasn’t looking, you swapped my hands
for papier-mâché copies of your own.
How do you do it? Making me believe
you’re using the table saw in the basement
workshop when I live on the eleventh floor?
A voice, a tendril of aftershave, cigarette
smoke (your brand) wafting down the hall.
I’m jerked awake, afraid something’s on fire.
When I fly into a rage, dinner table talk
devolving to a blood sport, it’s your barbs
my dummy mouth spits out. My wife holds
her ground; the cat pancakes from the room.
It’s time you quit the premises. We can’t go on
living like china in a bull shop. It’s not
as though I’m putting you out on the street.
You have the spacious heavens to roam,
a million-acre farm. You mean to say
there’s no place you can grow your roses?
I never could talk to you; now it’s even worse.
Pregnant ellipses… non sequiturs. I should
try a Ouija board. How can I grieve properly
when you just won’t leave? You always did
show up unannounced, staying as long
as you damn well pleased. I never stood
up to you when you were alive, but now
you must vacate and surrender the property.
I asked you nicely. I’m not asking any more.

Allie Duff

Stale purple hydrangeas swim
in winter-grey thoughts; cling
to faded light, bruised necks
strain toward bright spots (dancing auras
always warn of future pain), how simple

…………..to lose summer; it’s much worse
letting go (I moan in my sleep
at a dream of you), shivering
through fall, at the precipice of being
plucked by rough hands, and instead
passed by, (laughing, always leaving),

I think of bringing you a leaf,
yellow birch: I press it between pages
and carry you with me, past
nettles that prick naked legs
and highways and early mornings,

before leaving you somewhere between
Winterhouse Brook and Trout River,
while I wait for winter to settle
into petals that fade
at the touch of early snow.

Jaime Forsythe

A bathtub filled with melted snow, a baby’s legs churning

studiously. Dusk highlights our dust, crumbs lodged in seams, fairy

door shimmering a little. The baby’s hands smell of watermelon, nutmeg,

raw sliced squash. Once I did things like a ride a girl’s crossbar at midnight.

I crouched in a clawfoot with a budding anthropologist, mapped the faucet face,

prelude to a walk of shame past a cemetery. But yesterday, first bike ride

in a year, my body mine, safety supplies lacking: lightless, helmet loose.

Animal prints and military bedtimes, pastel shaker eggs versus the warm, silent

chicken kind. Race around the swing set of a neglected public school, eucalyptus

rubbed into our chests, water passed back and forth, cold mouths. Churning

in my own underworld, words rotting in my gut, a foghorn cuts the drone

of the shower head. A sweet shadow drapes itself across the stairwell

while all the humans stay sleeping, head to toe.

Matt Rader

Maser’s cameo-collection wall-art Anne Devlin
On the corner of Carmens Hall and Meath Street,
The Liberties, Dublin, versus Cadbury’s white
Script Chocolatey on irradiated blue panelling.

Her Pantone 292 skin. Her card-white hair.
The Warhol-hued shawl we might call KSU™
Bleeding into Eminence™. That yolk-toned
Crème Egg–shaped stencil sprayed on concrete

Side by each with the corporate giddy-up to shift
From noun to adjective. Where modifier is what
The modified meant. A billboard in a compliment-
Ary hue we’d eyeball to be Reflex Blue™.

Who cares if we know who Anne Devlin is
Or where the tributaries of the River Poddle went
Or why Houdini Bang Bang is carved into the steps
Of the Coombe Lying-in-Hospital monument.

In Dean Swift’s day these streets were bathed in night
Soil and Dutch Billys. Where Huguenots wove
Calimancoes, druggets, poplins shot with clock
Reel, culgy handkerchiefs. Where the weavers

Left off to cross the Liffey and be butchered
By the butchers of Ormond Quay. My mother’s
Mother’s mother likely lived here, scullery maid,
In the family way, at the turn of the 20th century.

It’s 1803. Robert Emmet is hanged, drawn, and
Quartered on Thomas Street, and Devlin strung up
By the yeomanry on the very cart her father
Donated to midwife the aborted state. See Wikipedia

For further details and inaccuracies. Maser’s
Liberties Festival pop-graph portrait head-to-head
With a miniature Devlin sat for at Rogerson’s Quay
Two hundred years earlier. Which shows more

Torture in the rendered care of Edward Trevor,
Failed apothecary, Chief Medical Inspector,
Kilmainham Gaol? More damp straw and effluent? More
Erysipelas? Such tender mercy. Give us a sign.

Andreae Callanan

Gannets perched up top, stately, still.
Carved polystyrene crags, coastline
grasses massed and paint-spattered

to look for all the world like shit-matted
nests. Eggs everywhere, some tucked
around the stationary feet of razorbills

and turr, some untended and conspicuous.
Smashed shells, smashed whelk, smashed urchin,
upturned empty carapace of crab. Dirty

shafts of fallen feathers, spare, barbless.
Bones scattered, stripped with oceanic
proficiency. A gull with wings frozen

mid-flap, the silver arc of a caplin
clutched in its beak. Charcoal guillemots
in cliffside holes, earth-black and curled

into themselves, like city pigeons.
Among the curated mess, a cracked
rubber baby bottle nipple, dry-rot dumbtit,

mottled grey and greenish, nearly
camouflaged against the simulated stones.
Midway down the rock face, puffins:

posed as though about to launch
themselves in their graceless way
into the graded blue of the display’s back wall,

into the brushstroke line meant to signify horizon.
Above it all, two metallic sprinkler-system
stars shimmer in cool fluorescent light.

Richard Greene

The storm when it came
…………had all to do with love and charisma.

She sat there beautiful
…………as skulls are sometimes beautiful
when we choose not to fear them

her skin growing taut and fugitive
…………where the bone of mere being
showed through
…………and there was no full sentence left.

It was the vacancy
…………that we construed.

Flying out, I wrote of her
…………in a tablet’s pale light
as the hours peeled away
…………towards Greenwich.

It seemed through that night of transit
…………over the black water
I was childhood’s dupe and God’s.

Tara-Michelle Ziniuk

I meet your new lover on the death bridge, the bridge where people die. Not even the one in town people jump from, but the ones where cars come and bring death. Amidst the memorial flowers and traffic, we run into one another. She is eating a popsicle. It is unnecessary. I didn’t want to get to this, to know you now. She turns her back to me. My daughter does not comply.

At home I butcher pregnant peppers, Sheppard, so deep in their redness they’re almost brown. My daughter says they are the best peppers she’s ever tasted. I think that’s a bit much. I show her that the peppers are having babies, but she doesn’t understand the gore.

When we have the whole house to ourselves, you and I—the house we borrow—we force sleep away. We cover walls and counters with ourselves, each other. We try to keep ourselves standing, our knees from giving in; try to keep each other down, but we fail and flee. We find that we have too much planned, that our minds race too fast, that it’s work for our bodies to keep up. We can never make it to the bag we brought, the next plan. We are all limbs and sweat together, a single body, a nameless shape.

Dina Del Bucchia

Put it away. This is not the right time for a good time. We are having a serious discussion about traditional values, about saving ourselves from enjoying life. If you put it aside it’s easier. Really. It’s like we’re real people. I will not make fun of the size of any part of your body. All of it needs to go away. If we leave some behind it will spark, it could sparkle. It could take up space and then we’d have to get another California Closet organizer to keep track of everything. Slip it into a drawer, a lock box, an old ice cream tub. Once it’s aside we can get to the real meat. Tear into topics with our teeth, the meat of life dripping in sugary ketchup, a dollop of mayo. Joking is the side dish and it’s optional. At some restaurants you have to pay extra for it.  When your laughter gets shushed at a casual bistro you’ll know you’ve been asking for someone to confiscate your joking, keep it in an office drawer like you’re in trouble with the Vice Principal. That’s the level of seriousness. You will need to win it back, but you won’t. It will be claimed missing. You’ve lost. After it’s aside you’re trapped, you’re held accountable for being fun at one time. All joking aside is on a bumper sticker from the 90s and now everyone respects it like it’s in the New York Times. In all seriousness, I crept up on you because it’s funny to scare people.