NewPoetry

Leslie Vryenhoek

……….Get me out of here.

Out from one of your back-
to-myself retreats
in the foothills—almost
but not quite
in the Rockies.
The mountains (you told me
they told you) block energy,
shade
inner light.
You added something
about elucidation and
I thought possibly
(my guess, unsaid)
that conference rooms
cost more
in the mountains.

Just get me
……….out of here.
We’d been driving an hour
but the words were caught
in your throat.
You kept coughing them up.

That woman was a lifeblood
vampire.

The foothills long gone, the flatlands
before us, the sun at our backs and flax
in full bloom—and I was mystified
by this vampire.

……….It means you wouldn’t like it
……….either, the way she sucked
……….up all the energy, gave off
……….such a negative vibe. God
……….I’m tired.

Eyes closed, you leaned
your head against the window.
I contemplated the potential
for T-bone: a truck barrelling
off a side road, a deer
sprinting from the ditch to fill
your ear with its clarified
knee. But the road
was straight and clear
so I let the openness
fill my head instead. Besides,
I thought you should sleep.

I thought it would be good
to have you home.

Erin Moure

Tomorrow I will write the work called “human cruelty”
wherein “cruelty” and “cherish” appear
in the same strophe

and trout for that matter

A pool in the hand where fish rest shaded
and the small child lifts one up

it is so patient it lets the girl do this

For what is an image does it shimmer
in heaven where the child E. has been banished forever
her small wrists beneath the fish’s fondest belly

the fish who is learning a beautiful patience
with all things

even cruelty
even with what looks like it could turn to cruelty

—heaven is dry and the fish
in the hands of the girl is rising—

A great wind and chime are hunkered over her

Sparrow, whiskyjack
Trout, armistice
Crimea, Debaltseve, the sands of Winnipeg

Please don’t send her away

Gary Barwin

Meanwhile the areola continued, a lateral grey endosquirrel down superior ambiance.

Refrain to the distalwolf, a thorasic minksong down and down the porcupine of ventral ectolight.

Eastern Occipital wood. Woodchuck proximal. Great shrew of red bat meadowbright.

Deer cooling against the cranial vole. The auricle inferior apprehends the coyotoid awakening. Who played only what beaver chose, who chose only to play “fovea muskrat fovea down.”

A dorsal sparrow emptied. The ruby short-tailed lumbar of shoppingcart racoonoplasty.

The pine vole’s silverhaired kingfisher perceives a Norway rat of seminiferous stickleback. Time’s flying needleminer.

It isn’t a horsenut ectosilver, wisenheimer. There weren’t birch skeletonizers to bullrush deltoid duskbat hiss.

At the brush wolf. When they were mink. The humans were hard glossy woodland. The children asleep on the dendrite swallow with the motor warm. Ventral bellybreath the ornamental swan of the pelvis. The spider’s private life: shadows animating a boxelder.

“Never avert your eyes.” (Pine spittlebug.)

The anthropocene is a writing of light, a flocking of swallows.

More than magnolia, crepe myrtle is missed. The white bushes especially.

Against undifferentiated dark. It is unlike night.

Nathaniel G. Moore

CATULLUS 71: GOATS N’ GOUT

If that prestigious goat
living out his days
in the armpits
of you know who
ever hurt a soul
(or the gout caused
as much pain)
that bath pal of yours,
busy pumping
that certain party,
between her hot dog thighs;
contracting both conditions,
well, it’s a fitting finish:
Every time that he bangs away,
he punishes both:
the odor makes her gag,
the gout knocks him off
his rotting feet.

CATULLUS 43: ADPOSITIO

Do you do it alat all-girl?
Do you do all
well sized nose
beached eyes vacant
stumps for hands
wronged toes
a total body
a monster’s spawn
but it’s not your fault
Friend of impoverished Forman,
the one whom Cisalpine Gaul rates
with my Lesbia
and dare not call werewolf
a tomato serenade this,
the pipsqueak generation
rotten on sweet fountains
of empty knowledge
gnawing on
each other’s cartilage
never learning

Jake Byrne

The Craigslist post requested two
boys: bushy-tailed, chipmunk-cheeked

pure hearts, yadda yadda. We struck
camp at daybreak in a hamlet

where Churchill’s voice is still
tonic as brandy. I love you but

we need to find clean water
and a flower that blooms

with the fragrance of mischief. I don’t or can’t tell you
about the men I think I’m kissing

before I’ve fully woken up. I’m not asking
for a love spell, just its shadow word: commitment.

When we speak of things worth doing
we’re not talking about risk, I’ve tried

Advil and the almanac,
stuck my dad’s gemsteel machete

into the mouth of your tributary
but the beach was needled with Irukandji stings.

And if I fall victim to ensorcelment? Visions
of other lives spent with other bodies,

the subtle glamers of crème de violette.
Consulted a friendly teenaged haruspex

and she ripped a wet fistful
of entrails, orange with Easy Mac.

This is, at best, a neutral omen.
But baby, we can make this work. I can do it

for you: be a conduit. Interpret
the letter of the lightning:

every thing
that enters exits

into undiscovered country.

Kate Sutherland

A nose-horned beast,
strange and never seen in our country,
a very wonderful creature
entirely different from what we fancied.

In its fifth month, not much bigger than a large dog.
At two years, no taller than a young heifer
but broader, thicker, jutting out at the sides
like a cow with calf.
Large as a horse, not much larger
than the bounding oryx, bigger than a bull.
Equal to an elephant in length but
lower to the ground. Like a wild boar
in outward form and proportion, especially its mouth.
A mouth not unlike the proboscis of an elephant,
the underlip like that of an ox, the upper like that of a horse,
tongue soft and smooth as a dog’s.
Piglike head, eyes the shape of a hog’s, ears like a donkey’s.
Skin the colour of an elephant’s, two girdles hanging down
like dragons’ wings.

Dark red head, blue eyes, white body;
on its back, dense spots showing darkly;
purple spots upon a yellow ground;
red hairs on its forehead, yellowish brows.
Skin the colour of box-wood:
mouse-grey, grey-brown, blackish brown,
dirty brown, dark brown, dark ash,
the colour of a toad,
the colour of a speckled turtle.

It fears neither the claws of the tiger
nor the weapons of the huntsman,
its hide impervious to darts
so thick as to be impenetrable by a Japanese dagger.
Lead musket balls flatten on impact.
It does not feel the sting of flies.
Dry, hard skin, four fingers thick;
studded with scales, like a coat of mail, loricated like armor,
covered in calluses resembling clothes buttons.
Extravagant skin, loose like so much coach leather
lying upon the body in folds. Between the folds
smooth and soft as silk.

The horn stands upon the nose of the animal
as upon a hill, rises dread and sharp,
as hard as iron, a little curved up,
sometimes three and a half feet long.
The base is purest white; the sharp point,
flaming crimson; the middle, black.
The colour of the horn is various:
black, white, sometimes ash-coloured.
Commonly these horns are brown or olive-colour
yet some are grey and even white.

There is another horn not upon the nose
but upon the withers.

Small piercing eyes, red eyes,
dull, sleepy eyes
that seldom open completely;
eyes in the very center of the cheeks;
eyes placed as low down as the jaws;
eyes so small, placed so low, and so obliquely,
they have little vivacity and motion;
eyes that only see sideways;
eyes that only see straight ahead.

Teeth broad and deep in its throat,
teeth so sharp, they cut straw and tree branches
like a pair of scissors:
two strong incisive teeth to each jaw,
twenty-four smaller teeth,
six on each side of each jaw.

It will kill with licking
and by the roughness of its tongue
lay bare the bones.
No animal near its size has so soft a tongue;
it feels like passing the hand over velvet.

Strong legs as big around as a man’s waist;
massive legs terminating in large feet,
each foot divided into three great claws.

Sprouting from its slender, inconsiderable tail,
black, shining hairs a foot long
the thickness of shoemaker’s thread,
not round like other hair, but flattish
like little pieces of whalebone.

All the breed are males
and a female is never seen.
The penis is an extraordinary shape.
The female is the same in all respects
except the sex. The female has two teats
and an udder. The female brings forth
but one young. The male horn is harder
and sharper than the female’s.
The male has a small extra horn
on its back right shoulder.

It never attacks men unless provoked
but then becomes formidable.
If it meets a man in a red coat, it will rush him
and throw him over its head with such violence
the fall alone is fatal.

It can reach an age of a hundred years.
It is probable that it lives as a man, seventy or eighty years.
It seldom lives beyond twenty.

No creature that pursues it can overtake it.
It falls asleep before virgins and then
can easily be taken and carried away.
Attack it during hot weather when it is lying in the marsh.
Cover a pit with green branches on the path
from the forest to the riverside.
Destroy the old ones with firearms. If there happens to be a cub
seize and tame it.
Take it by gunfire.

[Note: Fragments of text borrowed from: Ctesius, Ancient India; Oppian, Kynegetika; Pliny, The Natural History; Kosmas Indikopleustes, De Mundo; Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo; Valentin Ferdinand, Letter; Edward Topsell, History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents; James Bontius, An Account of the Diseases, Natural History, and Medicines of the East Indies; John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn; I. Parsons, A Letter from Dr. Parsons to Martin Folkes, President of the Royal Society, containing the Natural History of the Rhinoceros; L’Abbe Ladvocat, Letter on the Rhinoceros to a Member of the Royal Society of London; Comte de Buffon, Natural History; Oliver Goldsmith, A History of the Earth and Animated Nature.]

Allison LaSorda

Hook an eel and reel it in. It wraps around my hand
and wrist like a boa constrictor. My cousin yells
to hurry up and get the lure out, but the muscle, the persistence.

For the past week I’ve been visiting. I hug people,
see them pause. Someone concedes
they last saw me at a funeral.

Resolving expectations leads to loneliness.
There are blueberries in an old ice cream bucket.
Things grow faster than I remember; I eat quickly.

Clouds look different, more cheerful, which stirs mixed-feelings.
Ancestors made nuisances of themselves here, casting
their nets, planting, skills that have long left my blood.

A high school friend tours me around the valley sites:
the pig farm he can’t afford will be developed;
this used to be that. The drive makes me ravenous.

Stay in his childhood bedroom. He tells me he used to open
a drawer to lock himself in when he got in trouble.
Later, I open the drawer while I undress.

Derek Beaulieu

Billeh Nickerson

Each morning he introduces breakfast
in a big booming voice:

YOU GET CEREAL! And AN EGG!
AND A FREE RIDE TO SCHOOL!

And your mother is an announcer as well.
They met at announcer school.

So, she’s all: DON’T FORGET YOUR FABULOUS LUNCH!

And sometimes they synchronize:

A ROOM! WITH A ROOF OVER YOUR HEAD!
AND THREE SQUARE MEALS!

And late at night
while they think you’re asleep
they make announcer love:

IT’S A BRAND NEW POSITION!
AND NOW IT’S TIME
TO COME ON DOWN!

And by that point,
you’ve plugged your ears
and hidden your head
beneath the pillows.

You dream of a normal life,
free of exuberant announcements,
free of the pressure to follow
IN YOUR PARENTS’ FOOTSTEPS!

Tanis Franco

Melissa Bull

i.

From the spatium of the boggy Circus Maximus
celebrants trill alleluia a capella,
rattle tambourines.
We pace the ancient racetrack past them
in the wake of a gust of nuns.

We are visiting ephemera,
stony-eyed stalks of marble,
our febrile bodies
wax pale behind wrought gates.
We grasp gilted apses
in ornamented veneration without end.

We are gawking miniatures
suckling clementine desserts
from piccolo cucchiaios
scrabbling Roman slabs shooting selfies
among the ostentatious graves we haunt.

ii.

Starlings swarm over Rome
at dusk in pointillated counter-currents,
the delicately etched double hooks
of their thousand wings crest
into jet strokes then dissolve, clamour,
and thin out –
a threadbare chintz spread taught
over a dimming titian night.
Their murmuration whistles over the Tiber.

Stuart Ross

Al at Moore’s menswear store in Ajax,
Ontario, is a pretty good guy. Not just
because he found me a nice Italian suit
for $199 ($270 with tax and alterations)
but because he found one below my budget
instead of trying to upsell me
like the guy in the Cobourg mall.
At first Al said “a little spare change”
would get me the really good suits
but I said I didn’t have any
and he believed me.
Also, Al looks good in a black suit
and not like an undertaker.
He delivered his corny suit-seller’s jokes
knowing they were corny. And he also
marked my sleeve cuff with a sliver
of white chalk just like my grandfather
Sam Blatt used to do, a tape measure
draped over his shoulders like a tallit.
When my grandfather was in Branson
Hospital dying, he scrawled
some Hebrew letters on a piece of
paper towel because he couldn’t talk.
I still have the paper towel but I’m
scared to find out what the Hebrew
letters spell. The cheap suits all looked
cheap but Al kept trying, even after
the store had closed. It’s the first
suit I’ve bought since 1972, the year
of my bar mitzvah. I told this to Al.
It was a bit of a test to see if he flinched
finding out I am Jewish. He didn’t.
This suit is for my wedding. I won’t
need another until my funeral. But
maybe if I stay in good shape,
take care of myself and eat well,
the beautiful suit Al found for me
will still just about fit.

Shannon Bramer

Gillian Jerome

The morning the quake hit the city
I swore I’d ride full gallop into that sea
and never look back. I listened to Jay-Z, shoved
tiny nectarines into my satchel,
and fled West past the Prime Minister
who stood at the corner of 4^th and Trutch
disguised as a Dutch milkmaid with rosy cheeks.
Kits beach was furious.
But I found my pony di Esperia
standing in my dory and so put myself
upon her and we rowed—
At Howe Sound a gang of dinghies
shepherded by muscular oilers slicked up around us.
In their faces the coast was a Shrinky Dink.
Dogs and cats galore were chucked and dunked
into the floatsam. The masked activists who had lain
their bodies down beneath bulldozers at Burnaby Mountain
flung themselves straight as arrows off the Sea-to-Sky cliffs.
Pony and I, in those first days, small in our boat,
shared our raisins and stale Triscuits with pirates
from Fort McMurray who stabbed each other up for their last rails.
All of the city’s private property was now public, but useless,
floating as it was, in shit. None of it, not the iPhones or Jaguars,
the Hunter boots or toy giraffes imported
from France, now bobbing maniacally in the water,
mattered. We shared stories and whatever raisins were left.
Alanis Obomsawin, sitting around our campfire beside Pauline Johnson,
asked what colour the sky was. St. Kateri Tekakwitha,
Ike and Tina, Joan of Arc, Marco Polo, Snuffaluffagus— they all came
galumphing back. Buffy St. Marie. Neil Young. Louis Riel.
We all sat around roasting raisins—
all of us intermittently
marooned on an unidentifiable Arctic island at Great Bear Lake. The sky?
We hadn’t looked at it.
Babies cried. Laura Secord handed out milkshakes.
Georgia O’Keefe stood as still as a petroglyph, entranced
by the horizon. We’d come too seldom
to the ocean. We were too busy with the 21^st century.
But eternal return isn’t infinite. Not everyone comes back,
nothing lasts. My pony refused to do the dirty work
and her brackish eyes were glassy. On her way to the slaughterhouse,
years ago, standing in a dark box car, despondent, she felt the sudden
hospitality of a man’s arms around her neck.
Turns out those arms were Nietzsche’s, crash-test dummy,
beloved by thousands of boy students of philosophy
the world over, lover of blood and birds and horses. When, after more
Arctic transit, we moved from ice cap to ice cap and watched off
the coast of Greenland the final outburst of the tide
flower up and die, we stopped
so that Pony could peer into the oily face of the sea.

matt robinson

everything laid bare. the dog? blissfully unaware, padding through

some faded haze of dream, its indigo folds. your favourite levi’s,

lap splayed. crotch agog; in need of repair, redress. it’s saturday;

there’s coffee; it’s morning. and near two cups in, your back’s stitched

with the riveted hunch a november’s reticent, grey-scaled light asks

of fine effort like this. the day’s already confounded posturing, each next

thought a seaming. more patch, more dogged denial and thick-thumbed darn,

than original. a slack, frowzy derivative. and you know this, this

uneven arithmetic; the domestic tetris of each inner thigh, how each step is

both unspoken terror and vague hope, all at once. a knit-and-purl logic.

truth is, you only wish your worry unseemly. each breath: a thread weight,

drawn – upholstery’s thick gauge a knowing nod to coverings-up. this

is, at best, a juvenile failure. middle school fumbling. your uneven stabbing

a staccato sheet music for some psalm to the little-known saint

of dropped stitches, loose knots. suffice it to say you’ve pricked your numbed fingers,

but you’ve yet to draw blood. your pockets hold nothing but vague recollections

of clenched fists and chewed nails, the cotton a loose gauzy liminal

staunching some yet unseen wound. you wish, once again, you’d been as transparent;

understood what worked denim might proffer. about effort and fabric?

about honesty, about mending? no. about how fray serves as both verb and as noun.

sometimes, all at once.

A. F. Moritz

The clock began to tick. Or I began
to hear it in the room where it had always
ticked and I had rested. The rhythm

appeared, like blood that had been there
circling invisible that surges from some cut,
that bursts open a flaw. A spurt, another,

regular. Won’t they ever end? Won’t it run out?
And it keeps running out, the blood in the terrified
attention fastened on the fountain. The drops

fall on the floor, gather, and flow out of sight
to harden somewhere, lose the nature of blood,
be knowable as blood to the scientist only

who comes later, tests the dust
and says at the end of scrutiny, This is blood.
The motionless face of the clock had begun

to forge forward, in that room that long had held
my body lying still. It was speaking now
a rhythm that ought to underlie a song. A rhythm

made by the mind’s arithmetic, as it figured ways
the skein of featureless ticks could be arranged:
iamb and trochee, spondee, dactyl, amphimacer,

all the paeans… A rhythm that made my breath stop
with conviction the next tick wasn’t coming. Star systems
were conceived and died in the silences

between each two. “Unbearable suspense”, it’s called:
the heart expecting to recognize it’s dead,
it’s been dead while the brain had to wait

a further second—the length of all true thoughts—
for the blood’s stoppage to reach it. Impossible, that ticking.
It can’t exist. In my room, in the resting of my body

there was no time, no future for any new sound
to come from or to sound in. All was silence.
And yet the ticking had come. So all was now

a prow moving in a sea
of black places that were not
till it cut into them. The voice of the clock

went on that way in my craw, dragging me
between excitement and exhaustion
while I longed to be left alone, to be restored

to the quiet of before, where I was paused
permanently, to consider until I could grasp it
this being underway.

Leigh Nash

Ride the wave, sweet darling; crest
that seven-gun salute all the way
to shore. Hunker down on the foamy
spit, head to knee, sheltered
from thunder’s thick rumble.

Listen as rain slicks your skin
seaweed-soft, rumours swelling
to the mossy surface. There is
an ocean inside each of us, bits of flotsam
and blood and bone kaleidoscoping
into new stars with every inhale
and exhale. The horizon slides away
like a mis-addressed letter
fated to wash ashore, later
pecked to mulch by wild beaks.
And that shoreline:

See loamy stalk wink out from sand
splayed like peeled-back skin. See
Atlas bone emerge from the earth,
moth rising from the dark, wings
a wide mouth in your palm.

It’s breathtaking, the body,
this loveliest of playing fields, this
husk we follow into even the darkest
corners. You begin as a bundle of
lost bones, of words and images
that stretch like skin flaps, tags latching
back into themselves in infinite loops.

Almost unnoticeable, as kindling is to wet
wood, as barnacle to ship hull, little
afterthought blinking into dusk like
a lighthouse’s light. You’ve been there,
tugging back layers of should-haves
and could-haves and musts. You’ve been
there with the water closing all around
you, and again when it drains away,
leaving your landscape moon-packed
and slick as a submerged log.

This is the response to your wild call,
prayer sent up from million-year-old
dirt or pushed ashore by the sea’s
steady hand. Swell, swell: the water
rows into its own current, soft and cool
as a wolfish howl. Cock your head
back, drop binocular to thigh.
Some things cannot be described.

The bones come now that you’ve raised
your head to drink in the lilacs. The bones
drop from the sky, climb out of the earth,
evade rocks and trees and streams to cross
your path. The bones are your compass, chrysalis,
and you will sing over them in a deep, sweet
baritone, a salute to what they have been
and will be again. You will sing
to their skin, sinew and muscles, to lungs
and bowels. Heart. You’ll sing to that first
inhale, watery yet sure, small beads gathering
in the corners of your eyes. You’ve drowned
from too much air, from not
enough. Scraped your rough patches
raw. Ringed yourself in chains
silvery as stars, cradled your elbows
and curled knees to chest, a tucked-tight
bud ready to unfurl on impact.

Amber Dawn

If I think of it as a gift,
a present I could mete out to women
or, most accurately, if I think of it as a gift given
to anyone in possession of a cunnus (that’s Latin),
to anybody owning a cvera (that’s Etruscan,
meaning a venerated such and such, a charm)
if I offered it to all who would part their legs
and call their seed and pome into existence
then I could never choose just one.

I’d sooner lavish cunnilingus upon the masses.
I’m picturing a long line of drizzling asses,
split lips ready for a avid worshiper
like me, to recognize all that raunch beauty.

I imagine my tongue as a team
of baleen whales, older than gender and stark enough to swim
for days on end. For this vocation, my jaw mimics Tiresia,
immortal mandible, an oracle muscle
forseeing the unique desires of each partner.

Will I miss everyday
activity? Folding laundry, reading poetry, dealing repartee
and strategy with colleagues across our cubicles? How will it change me,
being smotherboxed through the ages? Will I become a queen’s settee
or an echo in the canyon? Will my gut bloat mud or honey?
Is there a new genesis in this oral orgy
or have I sworn myself to asphyxial infinity?

Troy Jollimore

One need not be a professional animal
behavior researcher to drape oneself
in shrouds of colorless fabric and force rats
to run through colorless two-dimensional mazes,
although it may help one avoid certain troubling
inquiries. One need not be employed by a major
academic institution to carry out such work
to be puzzled by the results of the blindfolded
honeybee study or think it a good
idea to see what happens if you give
a fake egg twenty times the size
of a regular egg to a herring gull
(answer: the gull ignores its own eggs,
keeps trying to sit on the big fake egg,
and keeps falling off.) One need not seek
permission from Church elders to dance the Charleston
in this day and age, nor wait for the latest
Supreme Court ruling to ask a person
who floats your boat if they want to go bowling
when the fireworks are done. In Antonioni’s
The Passenger one character says
“People disappear every day” and another
replies “Every time they leave the room,”
and one need not be Pauline Kael to enjoy
this exchange or to take a certain pleasure in and
at the very same time feel just a bit un-
persuaded by the fashionable nihilism of
Italian film directors. You can’t trust just
anyone to go poking and sifting through
the culture, what with all the deadbeats and
opportunists out there. Nor can you trust
the culture to go poking and sifting through
itself. One need not be confused to be alive
although one must ordinarily be alive
in order to be confused. One need not
doze beneath the coconut tree to be struck
on the crown of the head by a coconut,
resulting in half a second of total
astonishing enlightenment, then, wham, permanent
and equally total and astonishing extinction
of consciousness. Press anything hard
enough, long enough, between two stones,
you end up with something true. One need not
speak a foreign language to find the words
at one’s disposal profoundly inadequate
for expressing the thoughts that matter most.
Someday your shoes will fit. Someday
you’ll be kissed. Someday they will stop suspecting
you. One need not abandon oneself
to the furies, rend one’s outer garments, lie supine
at the Gates of the Congenitally Un-Self-Loved,
or spend one’s hours disconsolately perched
on top of a giant fake herring gull egg
to let oneself hope for these things.

Michael Holmes

let’s talk about Kevin
and by Kevin I mean benzodiazepines

let’s talk about the puppy you gave me for my birthday
and by the puppy I mean cocaine

let’s talk about Jesus
and by Jesus I mean IED and anxiety according to DSM-IV

let’s talk about migraines
and by migraines I mean “migraines”

let’s talk about sex, baby
and by sex I mean self-loathing, baby

let’s talk about family
and by family I mean the busy intersection of Cowardly Place and Munchausen Lane

let’s not talk about love
and by love I don’t mean this rotten fucking tattoo

let’s talk about something more interesting
and by something more interesting I mean anyone but you