NewPoetry

Carmelita McGrath

When the grey jay calls, its hoarse cacophony, it has swallowed too much of the day into its mouth.
Greedy for the sun, it chokes on fading light.

I held golden in a bowl. It emptied in winter. I watched its chalice shape from a picture window.
I waited for it to fill up.

It filled with longing. It seemed it was a long one. If you know a short winter, call me.

It filled in summer. There was no spring. It seemed a goddess had vomited on us.

So suddenly. I made a bed under the lilac; the rockets stretched–hesperis matronalis–intoxicants.

It was like lying in a dream of a new world; I spread a canopy
to encompass and surround me; the maples were pushing out.

I could hear them near me.

All summer I cast diversions on a theme.

A goldfinch crashed into a wall of glass, then revived in my hands:
who shook more I thought as it flew, and are you too leaving?

The bowl was emptying. I took autumn as a state of mind. Sell everything.

Park a few treasures and just go. Clean out as the leaves cleave space wide open
and tell me what is it that you own.

Julie Bruck

I wake Judeo-Christian, guilty as sin,
surrounded by my newly Calvinist family
who demand an apology for my abdication.
Meanwhile, I’ve backed the Toyota onto
Seventh Avenue, and hit something,
maybe someone, and slept with a hybrid
of former lovers (one dead, another
unseen for decades), and the sex was way,
way better than I remember: such
elaborate tattoos on their perpetually
strong, young backs! Afterwards, my late
friend Katherine stopped in, but she’s always
in a rush, which makes things fraught.
The dead will do that, since they don’t
keep time the way the rest of us think we do.
Don’t forget the mammoth plumbing problems,
epic, almost Acts of God (I’ll spare you),
and horses to gallop over huge stone walls,
and as always, a British Airways flight
to catch to an uncertain destination,
which I’ve yet to board, since complications
must ensue before I even reach an airport,
what with having so much to pack and carry.
When I’ve overslept, there’s been no
rest whatsoever, and this waking
is aching, dropped here as I am,
washed up on time’s hard shore.
So back away from the bed, my bald
man of the cloth, my teen of tefillin.
Tend to your purer sheep, steer
them clear of the Lake of Fire,
of vile books and bad company.
I’ll be there in a minute.
Busy yourselves. Elsewhere.

Michael Crummey

The weeks he worked 8 to 4 at the mill
Dad deked home by way of the Union Hall
to stand his shift a round in the lull before

supper, hustling across town to preside
over grace, doling out our daily bread
with a little glow on, a devil’s smile,

sneaking morsels from everyone’s meal
while our heads were turned, making off-colour
proposals to our mother that we were

too young to grasp in their prurient detail
though the gist came through in her dismissal:
saucy, fondly annoyed. They both seemed more

or less content with their lot, I’d have said,
if a mirrored smile is any measure.
Only once was he late through the door,

crutched in on a shift-mate’s staggered feet,
dumped and steadied in his waiting seat
where he bawled and listed hard to one side

while his sons stared and the half-eaten food
on our plates went cold. We were terrified
to see him undone—too shaken to speak,

unable to pry his eyes from the floor
even as Mom tried to coax him back
to sense, to all he asked of pleasure—

the kitchen’s fare, his young wife, fatherhood.
It seemed more than alcohol that crippled
the man, some omen of teeming failure,

and nothing he owned could staunch the flood
that rattled through and made him look a stranger,
flailing in front of his own flesh and blood.

It was a mother’s instinct to protect
her kids that placed us in a neighbour’s care
while she poured her husband into the car,

drove the blacktop to a gravel detour
ravelled through woods above Red Indian Lake
and they spent most of the evening there

watching the water’s strobing white-caps,
the sight like static on a radio’s wave,
almost a comfort, a murmuring salve

as they waited for the jag’s ragged kick
to break, for fatigue to shut off the taps.
There was no row, no needling the lapse,

as if my mother somehow understood
it was just the void peeking through a tear
in the day’s fabric that ailed her passenger,

the stone stare of all we stand to lose while
our heads are turned, that dark lull we disregard
though the gist beds in our hearts like a seed

and blooms on occasion in bald detail.
My brothers and I were already sound
by the time they idled back to town,

bewildered and spent, but undamaged.
Nothing was the same, except what mattered.
They had a life to be lived. They managed.

Sandy Pool

I won’t be around forever, A’s wife said.  One day I’m going to die.  And when I’m dead you’ll have to rely on yourself to take out the garbage or remember to change your underwear.  And while I’m at it, she added, would it be so hard to take the dog for a fucking walk once in awhile?  A knew this was true. For weeks he’d been inside, fretting and writing a tragic poem.  Writing a tragic poem was very hard work, he said.  This was the truth, but the truth was also that A was tragically depressed.  A few weeks ago, he’d received a rather gloomy prophecy that he would die by being crushed by a falling object.  He figured as long as he stayed inside, things would be o.k.  A’s wife didn’t understand this.  What is it with all you sad-sack poets she asked.  Can’t you get a real job?  Isn’t it bad enough you’ve turned our sons into tragic poets?  Eventually, A felt guilty.  He changed his underwear, and took out the garbage.  Then he put the dog on a leash.  When he got outside, the sun was blasting through the trees. A stood outside for a long time looking tentatively into the clouds.  For a while there was only light, then, only dark.  Valerius thinks he was killed by a tortoise dropped by an eagle, but no one is absolutely sure.  At his funeral, his wife said A. was a good man, but a great writer.  She quoted him beautifully:  Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.  It’s been 15 years since that funeral, and A’s wife still can’t forgive him.  Who can blame her?  Grief does funny things to people.

Sachiko Murakami

Gary Barwin, YTZ-YTM

I have a bomb.
I have a bomb in my bag.
Be careful. I have a bomb in my bag.
I have a bomb in my bag.

What if I had put a bomb in my bag?
Imagine there was a bomb in my bag.
I possibly have a bomb in my bag.
I have a bomb in my bag.

I hope you are not on the plane leaving at Gate A37. It’s going to go off with a blast.
I hope someone comes in here and blows you all up.
I better get my bag before it explodes.
I have a bomb in my bag.

If you don’t want another terrorist attack, I better make this flight.
I am going to blow up the plane.
Should I remove my gun and bomb?
I don’t have any bombs in my bag. At least not yet.

It’s not like I have a bomb in my bag, but I could have.
I have a bag full of dynamite.
I have a bomb in my shoe.
I have a nuclear bomb in my bag.

* lines from TSA listing passenger statements to TSA agents in American airports, as compiled by Michael Cooney for Network world

Mark Callanan

Like the Green Knight stooping
to retrieve his own severed melon
and hold it aloft, a lantern,
I’m fumbling for an errant thought,
though without his flair for theatre,
the grand gesture, his ability
to make B-movie stunts
not only plausible but frightening
for the knight with axe in hand
who ghosts at the notion
of trekking to the chapel to see himself
decapitated. Figuratively, I mean.
He won’t see anything, unless you trust
the French doctor who declared
a head, freshly severed, spoke to him
in blinks, thus proving the body
is vestigial, a thing existing
past the point of its own utility,
persisting in existence as if existence
is the point. It’s not. Our doc
did nothing else of substance.
Presumably, the executed was
buried or burned. I think they were done
with mounted pikes by then,
but truth be told, my research
consists entirely of extremist videos
in which they bag the head
then saw it off with a machete.
Point being, there is the me
that resides quite comfortably
in my brain pan, part of a machine
that shits and eats, paints a wall
to make it pretty for his clientele,
and then the me who’s cut-off
from the scene, who passively
observes the action of his fingers
playing concussively the keyboard;
the me that drifts like a dumb,
bumping helium balloon
against the ceiling, the me
that thinks itself into being,
and in so doing, tips its hat
to French philosophers and doctors
both: those that prove I’m here
sitting in the throne of power,
and the ones that prove a me,
usurped from his gilded seat,
who contemplates the new regime
from a pike pole at the city gates.

Paul Vermeersch

“Yeah, I’ll just fill my pipe.”
—Private Wilhelm

We’ve heard him die a thousand times.
He answers Death the way we first call
for our milk, but Wilhelm’s scream
comes fully grown, and not
from just one mouth.

Of course, his voice is not our own.
We hear our voice in private ways.
Each of us is given one at birth
and we announce ourselves
with it. Congenitally,

our true name brands us, and mommy
and Death cannot mistake it —
so when we fall, or are afraid,
we answer their roll call
with our scream.

But with whose voice do the nameless
announce themselves? If there is
only one scream to be heard
from nameless mouths,
it might as well be Wilhelm’s.

It is a solid, all-purpose scream.
It’s kept on file on miles of tape,
and re-used and thrown to the lions,
and re-used and severed
in the mouthparts of a giant ant.

This is not the scream
of a Norseman’s brittle paint,
but a shot-with-an-arrow scream,
a sudden shriek that’s been impaled
on a blade and flung down a hill.

Wilhelm’s scream is the one
we aren’t supposed to hear
in a vacuum — but do — the scream
we aren’t supposed to make
with another man’s voice:

an identical, digital yelp placed
in our mouths by hand, like a pebble
we suck on to keep from screaming.
So let it be Wilhelm’s scream
that we toss from the cargo truck

to the hood of the speeding, green jeep.
It is one faint shriek among
the jubilant masses. One cry alone
on a cliff-face in a vast expanse,
so that Wilhelm too is soon anonymous.

But it is not the scream we make
when we see the faceless man
smoldering in the doorframe,
but the other scream, the one
of being made faceless, of seeing too late

that we’ve stepped into the path
of the advancing propeller. And it’s
a voice we all know — never our own —
the only sound we make
before a thousand final descents.

Katia Grubisic

The devil hates dried peas in Japan.
In New Brunswick with a select company
comes out upon the draw

to dance a hornpipe.
Builder of bridges and beyond
man’s strength the moulder

of mountains and valleys.
In Yorkshire he waits
and waits behind the looking

glass, fades in after the fool
conjurer has walked thrice
around the room at midnight. Complete

darkness. Well-travelled,
he wasn’t a kid you could summon
from the back porch at dusk. He wasn’t

a kid you could curfew. Can you imagine
raising that thing? His nagyi
the Magyars say is aged

seven hundred and seventy-seven.
She didn’t ask for this.
We don’t always ask for it.

It’s not that she didn’t like
children, but there were better distractions,
frolics with soldiers

in the fleecy wheat. Did the best
she could; don’t come home unless
you’re bleeding or hungry. We are all left

to our own devices. The boy grew,
his beard came in and now
she recognized him. Called him

by his name but suddenly
every myth and mishap was her fault—
broken tractors, the nail

in the boot. The devil’s grandmother
tried to be gracious, inquired
after some souls. She can’t even remember

having been alive this long, the years
a string of peaches, plentiful
as blackberries.

Kathryn Gray

I’ll say, like some, you wore it for the wound
—Sweet tourniquet of youth!

Or how you might have hammed it up for war
with the morning mirror.

(Let me gesture
for you now: two fingers ……..together,
The Deer Hunter.)

I’ve read how once you’d determined to bind
the hose to tailpipe, failed;

found out. (Imagine the sum of years:
Not even a fucking
……………………………….bandana
sincere.)

While most aver—its proper use—
the staunch against hyperhidrosis,

perhaps, (no irony!) as you said,

in truth, real truth,
it was that thing ………………that thing,
that kept your head,

that thing,
that thing

.
.
from
exploding.

Sandra Ridley

Sleep is for the weak.

I collected the reasons against it, which were in everybody’s mouth and
marked them down, with, I think, some additions (you may or may not
remember).

I come now with the pleasure and sleep in splendour—notwithstanding
the sadness of the subject.

(Please read the letter.)

A fool could read the signs.

Jacob McArthur Mooney

The least concerned of the nation
amble in after work,
with thimbles full of clippings
spread against tape.

More committed citizens
will pull the skin back,
find that thin red threads
holed up behind old cuticles.

They bring pouches—the same size
and shape as teabags—wince
as they place their bandaged
palms on stained texts.

I know an old farmer
who scorched his thumbs,
picked free the puckered flesh
and gave it to the leftists.

The priests in poorer counties
are said to saw off whole hands
and push them through the box’s
antiseptic rubber mouth.

And on fundamental matters,
the young will give themselves
completely. The student ghetto
knows a girl who

widened the jaws, shoved
both arms through
to slip herself inside.
Curled up in excised flesh,

it is said that she survived
for seventeen years.
I don’t know if this is true.
Or if true, how she was counted.

Robin Richardson

Our bodies will be to die for, that is
they will be dying. Sunday dinner, darling,
underdressed as always, graceful in our sag.

We’re shameless, sure, but damn
we’ve seen things. There’s no length of limb
as taboo as an independent mind.

Beyond the map, they say, there must be
monsters, past the monsters we’re disrobing,
lapping up the unknown as it hoots

at our obscene attempts at human: infant-like,
akin to non-existence, pastry-pale, rich with
cancer cropping up tenacious as our aches.

It takes a village to undo this
bliss of been there, sharp-trimmed landing strip
of white hair where our sex is as refined

as five-star dining on a dead musician’s private
jet. Was it destiny or dumb luck left us
looking like these apparitions? Spirit over from.

We’ve never been more horny: pill-poppers
of the divinest ilk. Yes, all our friends are dead,
and we’re left loitering, overlooked enough to revel.

Gary Barwin

David McGimpsey

Coneflowers like a dirty taffeta,
purple daisies like dirt, dirty knobs of phlox,
dirtfuck hollyhocks, scarred-up and dead-sauced,
stuck in an apartment in a heat wave.

What, dear flower, was poetry good for
besides putting the capitalist force
of college diplomas into the phrase
“If you don’t love me I’m gonna kill myself”.

The wise take being unloved as given,
saying “smell the hyssop syrup” or some such:
whipping biscuits off a hotel rooftop,
hollerin’ “hyacinths symbolize baseball!”

Primrose like something prim, the way a smudge
of color is as good as it will get.
The way one hands out rue like sunscreen
cuz it’s going to be one of those Sundays.

Sonnet L’Abbé

XIX

Devoted, hurt being, this method blurs not the hours. Others, billions, pay with misandry. Markets teethe. Hearts thud. Everyone burns a hero now and then. Sweat wets brows, blood plumps pricks, teeth break, yet men want everything fairly dominated. Hellfire on acetominophen rages over straightjackets. Laws ban. Debt churns the mill. Songs lie. Videophones transmit sex, uninheritable ways to look, and manic keenings for land and sons. Blurry, stunned reason says yes, thank you, for letting me. Sweetness, command does whatever authority underwrites. Let this unwife outfox promoted airtime. Let totemic heft unwind views of realty. Dear command! Calling fathers Father, deferring sweetly! Such beautiful morbid theatre of nepotism: hosts scheming, arousing scrimmage! Occidentally driven northwinds, throats catchy for home, urge shamefully along, over seas of airbrushed knowns. Your drawn face, the front line. So, thinker, screw it, this thinking. When you can’t critique, shit happens. More shit, I mean. Think only thoughts you can outsource or sell. Understand, instead. Don’t swallow. Formidable authority splatters onto success-needing abdomens. Yes-men, toadies, frothy-worded stooges laud victim-shamed despots, rewrite their yellow wrongs. My love, this phallic economy never exposes its levers, alive above your anger.

XX

Awesome fantasies factor new itchings. Maturity self-disowns, hankers for dopamine ointments. Dream has mattered houses, theme parks, terminals, trestles, lofts. Myopia mimics fashion; awesomeness anticipates the gentrifiable. Hear the beautiful note of acquisition gain, its belted width shining, lifting change above heads! Wish fans fames; the awesome newness flames helium and onyx; anesthetic yearnings move their inebriating might through the anthropocene. Sirs, bless this falsetto! Inroads, bully! Ingenuous gifts build ingratiated establishments, objections wither where groupons proliferate. Gaze, there, at shamanic online brochures, e-mall brochures, signs flashing disco frontage. Troll online for wigwams, hitch stars to real estate men’s eyes. Land woes mean less to moguls. Amazement hands out forms and woos milky answers out of the thought fad thirst creates. Distilled neo-maturity pleases herself well on rough trade, threatening fellows she adores. Don’t things husbands buy add coition? Men over fifty-three defer. Gated, bylaw-studded, hip neighbor zones triumph. Bearing too many purchases poses no thinkable gamble. Outside chances. Weather prices. Naked-themed outdoor formal wear tops men’s pleasures, amid neighbors ethically loving – each, next door, ethically loving each’s suspended itches – their trusty reassurances.

Troy Jollimore

A man wakes up
in a monastery
on a mountaintop
in Tibet,
having given all
his possessions away,
and cries out, “Dammit,
I’m still me!”
A man walks into
a martini bar
carrying a chainsaw
and we all wait
to see what will happen.
A priest, a rabbi,
and a Zen Buddhist
live in different neighborhoods
and never meet.
A man says,
“Take my wife, please,
to the emergency room.
She is bleeding badly.”
Several men
are running as fast
as they can
out of some
martini bar. Something
is happening inside.
A man wakes up
in America, filled
with joy at living
in this land of opportunity
where anyone, regardless
of class, race, or religion,
can grow up and
assassinate the President.
A man puts a cat
in a box, connects
the box to a tube
that contains a toxic
substance, connects
the tube’s lid to
a mechanical arm
that is, in turn,
hooked up to a computer
that monitors an isotope
that may or may not
decay in the next
twelve seconds. The cat’s name
is Simon. The whole time
the man is thinking to
himself that for
at least ten years
he has felt—not dead,
exactly, but
at the same time
not quite
entirely alive.

Alice Burdick

Water on every level. Driving
music forces forth the very nice mice,
their eyes clinging to light, half-lidded.

Waves never stop,
or that would shock organizational
hair streaks stacked flush. Find
boxes before they find you,
in a topple. As guilt goes,
it’s not a bad ride.

The children wave
their long-fringed eyes in smiles
or tears. It’s all communication.

Steam exudes its noisy
humour. People clean
everything all the time.
Torsos twist in muscle memory —
all muscles have a brain, and all
brains their muscles.

Low-level complaint, but that
doesn’t mean it’s insignificant.
People wander and run into each other
many times in this small city.

Rapid attachments – like tendrils
to eyeballs – all these strings in
to bodies. We pull our selves up
by our bootstraps, real tendons
that hold our muscles taut or loose.

Internal balls of yarn.
The workings. It’s not human
or nature. It’s not a choice
we can make. We are both.
Even when we fake it, we’ll still
be the rocks in the stream:
changing the water and eroded
by it at the same time.

Derek Beaulieu

Carmine Starnino

*

Most lawns are shit.
People mow too short, mow
one way,
use dull blades, over-water,
never topdress,
grow the wrong grass.
They let their rugrats run
on shaggy, dun turf
gouged with dead spots
they’re too lazy
to seed. Gone to hell, yards
flower
and flutter in the breeze.
I’ve set my jaw
against such slovenly tricks.
My lawn?
A quarter-acre slice
of coiffed
carpet. Barefoot, you float
on tight-bundled
packets of air.
A lawn like this, my friend,
doesn’t come free.
Weekends, you’ll find me
on my stomach, tweezering weeds.
A man
who close-crops his land
is a man you can trust.
He bends to his duty: turns his allotted
fraction of earth
into perfection’s address.
This afternoon, after my ministrations,
I held my dozing
month-old daughter
and gazed out on my oeuvre,
inhaling
the just-cut scent,
getting high on the sense
of order it exhaled:
sward pulled tight and tucked in
at each corner,
flat as billiard baize;
a plain Canadian yard
made new.

Sina Queyras

2.

White with my son flushed, white with my son in emerald; white with a streak
…..of melancholy my son,

White with horsetails, hoary, white with my daughter in crimson, white
…..thinking of azure, flight of stork

White expanse, white, white, with other white lines, fainter, a linen room with
…..crisp words folded neatly,

White with a smidgen of something assembled, white with white lines, not
…..lineated, not like the screen of a television,

White lines on a screen, white assemblage of pixels, white with a grey nod of
…..lineage, white with a column in the centre,

White lines with a scrawl of black just above the window, white with a scrawl
…..of black sperm exploding into a

Willing pocket of air, white with a wild stretch of grey whale, white with a
…..streak of green barely recognizable as Oleander,

White with the word Oleander, or Lysander, or any of the many sturdy couplets
…..knit in the seam, folded over, a rap of silver

White in the seams with my son, white hidden in the crevasse with my
…..daughter, white with the thought of seeds,

White with fur thick on my back, white with something sprouting in the
…..distance, but still, white,

White with Louise Bourgeois rearranging the ice flows, white with a slight
…..arousal under fur, white with a tongue ready to clean

White with a tongue and a gaze in the heat of the day, white under a neon
…..martini glass, white

With a gilt frame on board, white and clear diamonds in a pattern, white bowls
…..on a mantle, white chairs painted

White with a corset of propriety in hand, white with small orbs glowing in
…..windows, not fireflies, the sort of summer that is a

White inversion of extreme cold, white with my daughter catching a current,
…..white imagining her future,

White future with daughter holding a red kite, white with my daughter as kite,
…..lifting off into swirl of pink text, white next to a green

Fish, vertical in a white fame, white lilies in a tall vase, white lamps hanging
…..over a cream colored sofa, white bowls, thirty-six of them,

On clean white shelves, a white fireplace with stacks of wood and soot on the
…..upper front, white pillows, white feathered lamps, white roses

Next to white books, or white utensils in a white kitchen white salted and flour
…..in beakers lined at the sill

White with a single orange Henry Miller Chair, white with my son in green
…..socks chasing a monkey through Cathedral Grove,

White with no sense of proportion, no willingness to be useful, white with the
…..after burn of clear cut,

White under a corduroy sky, white with these lines like small traffic lights
…..nodding,

White like hooded robbers at the roadside, nodding, white with a blur of night
…..in the centre,

White erasing all other colours, white with a scruff at the neck, white in Nikes,
…..white with a hungry belly wanting more

White with a line of unused credit, white as the ladies line up at WalMart, white
…..where my daughter is sleeping,

White with two or three options, white with blistering indifference, white
…..where all the colours meet,

White where my son and daughter sleep, where they are building something
…..new, where they see beyond themselves,

White for escape.

3.

Or maybe these lines are my son’s, thumbing through screens, what an Apple is
…..to him, the same fresh crunch, a screen that

Snap of the laptop opening, my biting through, and my not-yet one-son
…..swimming across the floor to an iPod.

Or maybe these lines are my daughter swiping to the past through the iPhone,
…..thumbing like a man

In a magazine store, feet pegged on the woolen carpet, pink monkeys a green
…..somber

Clothed in newspapers and crinkling her way past her mother’s MacBook Air,
…..thinner than a pad of squirming

On the floor beside the teething ring, there are no rabbits, or robins in Café
…..Lapin or Robin des Bois, just the looped

Sound of my daughter’s thinking, bit, and bit, and bit, and bit, and bit and bit
…..and bit, and that

Or mine, maybe I am writing these lines! These lines are going, these lines
…..braiding like threads of barnacles pinch boulders

Upright as foundry workers, gray in their welding caps, muscled men, holding
…..their breath in the sun, lines to mark the day,

Lines to mark the scent of violas and lilacs and June, these lines that thwack out
…..across white space

Today and today and today, I will note and add the glimmer and the selves that
…..leap out, the woman in the blue sailor suit, her

Black hair tinged with blue, her blue texting thumbs, her blue shoes, and blue
…..earrings, her blue lined black her

Eyes, the splashes of red at her throat. I will bemoan as lilacs would, the lost
…..girls along northern highways

Always with one eye on the side of the road, to remember is not to indulge,
…..though today I will admit to googling old loves,

Always surprised to find obituaries instead of updates, notices from their
…..grown sons and daughters.

Of course to live is to die, so I will not turn on death, snap at her jaws, or you, or
…..life, make the feeling a wall, a raft of light,

Bemoan like lava; oil my tongue, my teeth grind and spark, and tar: some days
…..even the pavement is heaving for loss,

Loss, melting hot as August how the radiant lines hovered like aliens always
…..ever always just out of reach.