NewPoetry

Rik Emmett

 

in the seam of a concrete sidewalk
there’s a windblown seed
waiting on a drop of rain
a tiny ray of sunlight

in the thin purple lines between courageous and foolhardy
between the polarities of rational self-examination and irrational vanity
in the light years between humility / mediation / compromise
and the arrogance and conceit that turns into violence
in the nanosecond between a sober second thought’s moderation
and a knee-jerk of abuse
in the ironic, humorous coin flip between clever & stupid
in the journeys between confidence & arrogance, truth & deceit
in the shift of perception between music & noise
in the expanding cracks between virtue & self-righteousness
in the distance between free-swinging & unhinged
in the microscopic distance from a healthy cell                 to cancer
in the infinite consequences of the cleaving split of an atom              a big bang
in the space between worlds, planets, solar systems
between your ego & my empathy              your reasons & my emotion
my logic & your entitlement to your feelings
between understanding & misconception

in the relativity between millennia & the blink of an eye
between what is stillborn & what remains beyond imagination
between the praiseworthy & the rueful

mind the gap

there live the ghosts of chances
the dreams of a future
what might come to be
and what remains beyond imagination

mind the gap

there live the possibilities of the imagination
a whisper that promises a symphony
the infinite potential
of the creative, biological
evolutionary imperatives

in the seam of a concrete sidewalk
there’s a windblown seed
waiting on a drop of rain
a tiny ray of sunlight

 

 

Sheila Peters

 

There are, I’ve been told, people dying.
And I am sitting up here
in this room, this bucket of light
riding at the business end
of some complicated piece of machinery.
Someone else handles the gears and levers
that keep me aloft, up here in the night
looking out:
………….the stars pop, the fat moon
………….rises above the canyon rim.
………….A slow satellite passes.

All this to light a parade of people,
bundles balanced on their heads,
babies strapped to patterned cloth
fluttering on thin bodies. Carts dragged
across broken ground. Soldiers –
big-booted, bare-footed –
finger triggers, draw knives from clever sheaths.
Their hands –
some dark, some pale –
their long arms, wide shoulders, strong backs
wield clubs and blades and rifles
to break apart the translucent sheath of tissue
that keeps us separate. To release the blood,
spill its good bright oxygen richness
back into the air we all suck deep
ten times a minute, the same air that feeds
each detonation driving the pistons
of this machine.

My dog looks at me sideways –
eyes sly as her tongue slips out the other side
of her mouth, bright pink against her grinning teeth –
and laps up the blood pooling in the tracks
ground into the grass by this machine.
It holds me in its bucket
way out into the night
and shows me things.

 

 

Michael Holmes

.

For Mary

.

I’m dead and you’re 80
In a Circle K
There’s still gas and gas stations
And Circle Ks
And waiting for someone
To triple check numbers
And winner gagnant
When you just want smokes

And it’s your first pack in 35 years
And the liquor store paper bag
Is balled up in my seat
Cause I was always your shotgun
Your huckleberry until I wasn’t
And Dad says the car’s still a mess
And the bottle’s all fuck the police
Cracked like your whiskey smile

Drinking to me…
I’ll forever want you to be
Drinking to me

And you’re at the piano
David and the Russians approve
Filling side plate ashtrays
With scores of other boys
I coulda been all the other boys
So I’m not jealous any more
I know you change every chorus
The way you taught me to never do

Singing what no one will sing
When you go changin’ words
Cause our fading walls could use a coat
Maybe the Winter Dove I saw you in first
But your right hand floats a stutter
And my Jameson ripples to the lip
As you break up to the minor
The way we never did

Drinking to me…
I’ll forever want you to be
Drinking to me

I’m dead and you’re 80
And baby I’m mostly ok
You still wrestle my cold hand
Talking our way through the Flats
And cigarette punctuation
Shows me how to understand
What your last date said
Each day up to the end

You’re so damn young and beautiful
Do you know how much I love you?
I promised I’d never ask again
Though ghosts are only true
To their last breath
My vow will last until then
And when you fill a glass for me
I’ll be drinking to you too

Drinking to me…
I’ll forever want you to be
Drinking to me

.

Guy Gavriel Kay
for George Jonas and Eddie Greenspan

 

It is mostly quiet here where the two of you lie,
not far from each other but not adjacent, either.
That’s probably how it should be. Eddie cared deeply
for some of us but didn’t like too much proximity.
He hugged me only once that I recall,
when my dad died. His father died when he
was thirteen years old. George and I
used to talk of being lucky in our fathers.
I have been lucky in my friends.
Standing beside one grave before walking to the other
I see joggers in the cemetery.
Someone on a bike, someone
walking a dog on a long leash. Autumn
has reached us now: colours, leaves
underfoot, driven to the ground by last night’s rain,
although just now there is sunshine in and out
of clouds. People are in your life,
vivid and loved, and then out of your life
for many different reasons. Dying is one.
Dying is one. Another cyclist.
Another woman with another dog.
The wind takes the leaves
and blows them along
the path that leads to the world,
out of the quiet, away from them again.

 

 

Derek Beaulieu

 

 

Shelagh Rowan-Legg

 

I closed my throat against my ghost
but it went down, regardless;
ghosts have strong hands

and long memories.
There is too much empty space

waiting to be filled with
the roughening fur of the elderly cat,
the smell of mom’s Bolognese sauce,

the booming tick of grandfather’s clock,
that first boy’s tongue, tinged with

banana popsicle and a bat-squeak
of sensuality; the first glimpse
swelling beneath my t-shirt.

I whispered in my mouth,
into my ghost’s hands,

Why now? This is too
much for these chasms,
too heavy for my slackening stride.

It murmured back, I need to know
how much aliveness you can bear.

 

 

Paul Robichaud

.

So often in life we take for granted
that those stories handed down to us
are true, that mother really did teach
Sunday school before she married,
that father’s career was a steady progress
of hard work and recognition,
that your great-grandparents never once
regretted sailing from the old country.
That the bills were always paid on time.
Now think of all the things that go
without saying. Of course there are
no bodies concealed in the garden;
your grandparents truly loved each other.
And somewhere in northern Ontario
your favourite dog is still playing fetch
with a stick thrown by a kindly farmer
who only wants more dogs to love.

.

Steve McOrmond

 

The hourglass has sprung a leak.
Everything feels like it happened
just the other day. Our first
kiss in the pissing rain, my foot
planted in a mud puddle, the idea slowly
sinking in that I might never love another.
When you parallel parked the U-Haul
on a busy downtown block, unperturbed
by morning’s peak vehicular melee, I knew
it was hopeless: I was destined to ride
shotgun, your eternal accomplice.
To live with you is to be indoctrinated
into the cult of radical candour –
you, the high priestess of TMI, and I
a reluctant acolyte, clinging to my silences.
I’ll tell you right now for free: as often
as the Golden Gate has been destroyed
in the movies, I should have said it,
should have said it over and over
again. I’m sorry, I thought we had all day.
Like a book that’s almost too good
to finish, I haven’t come to the end
of you yet. How many times have we
exchanged breaths, have I breathed you
into me, how many times have you taken
my breath away? Over and over, it is
over too soon. Walking along the street,
you say Hello, Dog to every dog you meet.

 

 

August C. Bourré

;tender(fragile
thank
you)ness

Maggie Burton

.

I populate her interstitially
constellate her memory cells

like Andromeda cleaving off
her dark parts until there’s nothing left

but stars. I watch her inhale what’s left of me
but like virions bursting I spark

a movement within. I render
her invincible. She voids her agoraphobic garden

cloaked in pruned hydrangeas she walks
through town, whole and speaking.

I seep in through holes of pores
and wait for the flint to strike the wheel.

Not now, my mother is finally the shape of me
and I’m not ready to die.

.

AF Moritz

…

I slept well last night.
How beautiful, those two sessions I had,
two hours each, of being dead while alive.
I was the dead-living. Not a manmade monster,
not a zombie, or a ghost—but like a black
swimmer in a warm black ocean
on a moonless night without a breeze or star.
What had given me to the water? Where did I fall from
to that place? Who saw me be thrown or dive?
I appeared and vanished in my arc.
I have known what it is to be dead.
I have known what it is to be a cloud.

Lisa Lopez-Smith

.

Jalisco, Mexico

.

I’m not saying that I’m good
as a neighbour. The grass out front,
during the rainy season exploding
human-high in a trifling of weeks,
becoming a kudzu of weeds
and spiny trees and wildflowers

just too pretty to mow. Mid-November
I get out the mower, and although
it would be easy to trim the neighbour’s
section too, I don’t do it
anymore, ever since he started
the grassfire that jumped the fence.

Witness the love affair between bees
and flowers, and how bees
will sacrifice their lives for the hive.
Once an old man, standing at the local
cash point, thrust his card
into my hand, rattling off his PIN

but he didn’t know how much
is pension was or how much he needed,
laughing, no más el dinero, mujer!
I once saw a girl at the corner tacos
tuck twenty pesos into the hand
of an old woman, bent over double,

as if she and the girl were both trees
passing nutrients and water to each other.
Another time, I watched two teenagers
walking from the maternity hospital,
he gingerly carrying a tiny bundle,
she a few steps in front, shambling

and shipwrecked. I’ve watched wild
egrets perch on my cows, cleaning
them of ticks and insects, that time
my kids picked up roadside garbage
in front of the house, mostly to-go cups
and hamburger packaging

from the narcos eating lunch there
every day. Just then, unmarked
trucks pulled over and stopped,
guys rummaged through flak jacket
pockets, rustling through the rifles
on the front seat, handed fistfuls of bills

and coins through the windows,
thanking the kids for their effort.
Even our own bodies are collaborations.
Trillions of cells, breath and blood.
And back on the street corner,
that family from El Salvador

(it’s a long walk north with a toddler
and a baby) but that day, the day
before Christmas, the two girls
each clutched a new doll, standing
on the speedbump with their parents,
begging for coins for the journey.

Consider too, that there are 30,000
varieties of roses (everyone knows
just one kind of rose is never
enough), 500 types of sharks,
14,000 species of fungi, 6000 bird
varieties to eat 500 million

metric tons of insects, many of which
live in the jungle out front
where I haven’t yet mowed. My neighbours
are outside, playing cards
by a full moon and fluorescent lighting.
The crickets continue chirruping.

.

Barbara Arenburg

.

Wet grass and a brook with a bank
we hang our toes over, talk
about some poet I saw on Insta,
and wasn’t that her just now,
carrying two grown sons,
and wasn’t that strange, seeing
as she’s so outgoing, laughing
and living life while they can’t move
a muscle, aching and lurching up
lunches in her wake?

And over a garden fence, Nancy
(isn’t that her name?) is listening,
and it matters that this picnic
table needs cleaned up. I grab at crayons
and scissors and rope and glue and a big
white plastic basket with holes
and handles for the crafty things,
tuck away for later use. All that we need
now is a getaway car to getaway in,
from the Nancy’s and Heather’s and Sue’s

that plague us, follow us to the car, ask
questions like, why is your mother
at the wheel? And in the panic
of answers, I’ve forgotten my tattoo
sleeve hanging on a bough that borders
the brook, red dragons breathe fire
and the brown background like skin—
like this is really my skin—
Of course, in a dream, it never works
out. I don’t go back, retrieve the sleeve.

Impress no one. Instead, I hyperventilate.
In the going, the sons are one daughter
I have left behind, trotting down
the garden path like a golden retriever,
happily unaware we have already turned
the bend of the winding road.
In the end, a black ball like a miniature
sasquatch, all furry and scratchy, unfurls,
expands inside a crevice of my larynx,
where, from the deep, I throw up.

Lorna Crozier

.

The water in the pond is still.
The moss, more so.

The eyes of the maple redden. Such little sleep.
Such long nights go on inside you.

Wind drops slowly down its birth canal.
You are waiting for God to make something of it.

Soon the wind will reach you, nuzzle
your skin. Darken you with its old blood.

.

Jacob McArthur Mooney

.

The space where you say
“I hate these killings,
and also these killings”

should be endless:
fields, arenas, oceans.
But suddenly to say so

is to squirm beneath a train,
or a friend’s explaining tongue.
We can take complexity

when it also comes with cadence.
Or symmetry and archetype.
Help a homing soul out

and make the martyrs known
as nursery rhymes. I can’t
excuse myself, I can only reposition.

A carved country or a carver’s country:
cast your doubts
and your causations.

There is no calmer thought
than a locked and trusted door.
A room lit such that shadows

cast elective patches
on the walls you’ve hung
with children’s faces. Focus:

the news is not your father.
You can be bereaved and also hated.
But you were called to understand,

not alliterate. You decorous asshole,
don’t you count your dead?
Remember: it’s only gallows humor

if it’s you that’s in the gallows.
Or if you own the gallows.
Or if you own the gallows, but

it’s also you
that’s in them.
……………… Wouldn’t that be weird?

The antidote to mourning
is loneliness, friends.
We take it from each other.

Gary Barwin

.

The other-silver, the dimensionless aluminium-backed Kabbalah.

Heat to a thousand degrees until the voice is melted. Liquify the hands, the face and the mouth. The hand-filled torso.

The soul of the ventriloquist’s dummy is first sand then glass, then a mirror.

You move through air as every day. Your body made of steps and breathing, spit and regret. Heart thumping like a Disney rabbit.

Ventriloquist in one room. Dummy in another. The invisible hinge of light. Infolded world in the millimetres of glass between them. The not-shadow of their separate reflected lives.

Come here often?

Often as you.

Why is it your lips are moving?

Because yours are.

I live in the silver world.

It’s my world, but reversed.

Let’s try an experiment. Be sad.

I always am.

Ok. But why doesn’t that make me happy?

It’s not opposite day.

Silver is an invisible fog. A reverse shadow.

Are you trying to see if that makes sense to me?

[embarrassed] Yes.

*

When I speak…

Yes?

You say the same thing at the same time.

I do?

[Both at the same time] For each word said, an equal and opposite word.

Now you’re messing with me.

Now, you’re messing with me.

*

There’s something metaphysical about speaking to one’s reflection.

One’s own image.

The Vladimir to one’s Estragon.

The Melania to one’s own Trump.

Let’s not go there.

I won’t if you won’t.

It’s like playing with one’s own shadow.

Trying to outrun it.

But it’s always there, unless you’re Peter Pan.

I’m not.

Me neither.

*

I look forward to being my own ghost?

Because?

No reflection.

Better to be a vampire.

But all that blood.

But we’d look good in a cape.

*

There’s something metaphysical about brushing one’s teeth or shaving.

You mean looking at yourself?

At you. The right-to-left dummy of myself.

How do you know which of us is you?

I use language.

So do I.

If I punch the mirror, do I not bleed?

Me, too.

But you fragment.

You also.

I carry me around when you’re not there.

But so do I. Listen to my whispers.

Theresa Moritz

 

Here the shoppers leave their faces
waiting in the cars outside the milk store
and their unoccupied eyes support us
across the palsied landscape.

Dust is falling into the water tower.
Unconcerned, police cruisers take the sun
beside the railroad tracks. The mannequins
are last to leave the vacant store for jobs
at a rummage sale

on the concrete stoop of a mobile home.
Praying in the parking lot,
children in baseball caps watch us
turn the car around. They want to ask
where our passenger got out, and how long
he will be in coming. The train conductor
will diminish with his goodbyes, but the road
widens from here
until it spans the earth’s distant curve.

 

 

rob mclennan

014 : “The Pipers”

They stand, with their backs. A row of tartan, sentries. In which ordered, and pristine. Pure, mental experience. Abrupt, rumbling. They hold a ridge, a reed. To work the vein of words. To their lips. To the lines above. Such truth, to this phrase. Such skin. A low rumbling fact. A sentence, plausible. Screech. This hard passing, undertow. This stretch of the hand. This pure sound, strained. This glossary of bees.

George Murray

 

Cut away all other
flowers from the vine,
let one fruit take on
mass at the cost of colour,
shape, taste, and all else
besides. A slow spill,
it flattens, whatever
pretense of pumpkin
it was begun with
left behind in favour of size,
every seed and visceral
string within held
back from splitting
the pale flesh by
simply adding more skin.
It waits in its field,
a shut-in anticipating
the beep-beep of crane
reversing in the garden
with enormous litter
telescoping through
the window’s mouth.
Ambulance straps wrap it,
cradle it, elevate,
evacuate, make it public.
This monumental shapeless
shape is what the blue
ribbon citation
calls pumpkin, and so
once defined, it is set
into a flatbed and sent
to take its place at the fair.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jeff Latosik

 

Is crooked math that keeps us from a perch;

juked sum flowing always after tax, surviving all of our efforts

to reduce it to a cell or set, an integer of what has come…

Not additive: more like gearwork gone berserk,

the macroscopic shaking free of recompense,

anthill of a hurricane of common sense.

 

Could it be what the classic films are said to have,

something in the chemistry, or is it strictly viz.,

a liner note we can’t yet see?

Whatever explains the totality of what you are is something

nobody can own. In Leslieville, a boy lets loose five bullets

into someone he doesn’t know and then bikes home,

 

sleeps in his room, and when asked he won’t say anything.

His hands are tied in a double bind of plastic

to perform his one magic trick and disappear.

Be sure tonight that laws blink on and industries metabolize

somebody’s share of oil or a forest;

iron pours out as piano wire on flatbed trucks.

 

Under a bridge, a voice pings back against itself

but look over the guardrail and there’s no one there.

Something went another way, decided that,

or went by blind habit, guided by sonar, radar,

or the thought that that was louder than it should have been,

it wasn’t me or there is something that wakes me from myself.