NewPoetry

Eric Schmaltz

‘My weight is my love; I am borne by it
wherever I am borne’
– St. Augustine

my lungs brimmed
in my first memory,

chlorinated & sodden I sunk
to the bottom of the pool.

it was no other occasion
than friendship’s cusp,

a longing to be accepted
at three, maybe four,

by him, his grandfather,
maybe his mother, the early blue

below, the sky, the clouds,
cirrus, maybe cumulus,

& the concrete’s scrape
on my callow knees.

we pulled the cushions, piled
in the living room, maybe the kitchen,

& laid them by the poolside.
I remember the sun but no heat, maybe.

I didn’t confess
that I could not

swim. I stepped toward
the pool’s limit

it welcomed me in
my purity, weighted

by my longing, by
virtue of my lie

Kate Siklosi

Luigi Sposato

First, you walk barefoot on salted snow until the cardiac
muscle, stuffed behind the lips of fat chambering
your own heart, beats you senseless. Only when your syllables
are slurred can we speak to the bump-bump rumbles
of your gut, shining with slick grease dripping from the overhang.

Now, you’ve grafted new mouths to your palms so you can
feed beside the ibis, gnawing at its own feathers with black eyes
fixated on the abyss—the ibis—another wading form
that promises silence, that promises words stitched in skin
to close a billion holes that rose from a thousand far-off colts.

You can taste the feathers; you see them. Black feathers
adorning the hooves clattering on metal plates against the pokeweed.
You suckle at the juice the sable stallion churns for you. Somewhere,
the pokeweed. Elsewhere, the skull. But here. Here. Black wine.
Featherless ibis—you—where have you spoken the difficult syllables?

Ben Ladouceur

A young poet once told me, you get
one exclamation mark your whole career. Twenty years
passed and still

his name is not very known. Each morning, all summer,
I write the first line
of a different ode; together the lines tell a story

about suffering
the way a dull axe tells a story about septicemia.
Capably. The young poet

loved me
in order to make a different man suffer.
For a countryside summer, the different man suffered,

and wrote the worst poems of any of us,
his one exclamation mark
rotting like mutton in his pocket.

I no longer know these men
but when they come across the last and only exclamation
mark of my career,

I know they will interpret it as scorekeeper would
at the diamond. Interchangeable
with an asterisk. Great defensive play.

EC Daley

Flesh & blood is all about survival.

Not so the inorganic:

it cleaves, slips,
………..folds;

rounded down,
……………..it tumbles
…………………….wherever gravity and currents
determine.

∞

Walk the beaches
of the hard North Atlantic,

you’ll begin to understand.

The finest grains of sand
are the most eroded.

∞

Beyond any human
………………construct of time

each becomes invisible,
elemental,

charged
…………with the capacity to form bonds.

Guy Gavriel Kay

I was tired and she was beautiful.
Whichever way the wind blew
It brought the scent of her to me.
Not a spell I knew to cast. It was hers.
The leaves were green, yellow,
Russet, red — autumn. Their sound
Became her name. Also a spell not mine.
I never taught her that. Nimue, Vivian…
The name changed, remained hers. Her.
She fed me cherries from a stone bowl.
Or from her mouth, her lips.
I think it was autumn, I should say:
From the leaves, that memory, you see.
I am even more tired now than I was then.
She left me here a long time ago.

Kiki Dimoula
(translated by Evan Jones)

Through good and bad the absolute silence
inside me always wears her slippers.
Downstairs live desires.
Naturally they profess deafness.
These delusions profess blindness too
but they can smell and see
from behind their dark glasses,
stripping one bare of one’s belief in them.

One doesn’t believe them. In their blindness
these organists appeal to me sitting down
to some cool satisfying passage of music
tickling their ivoried succès,
in their blindness they appeal to me because
vulnerability never falls from fashion.

That is why good or bad let them wear
let them wear earplugs
through my emotional arrangements.

One should however privilege the dead.
One should privilege the dead
if one wants to pity an illusion.
They are at least not passersby.

Jason Guriel

Adam Sol

It takes seven gallons of oil
to make a tire, which means
it’s pointless to beg you
to love me like you used to.
I am wearing thin, like
an old tire haha, when the road
gets cold I slip. But I know
exactly what I believe.
Voters will waver over water,
and wasps will infest the eaves
if you don’t poison them with foam.
When I roam around trying
to tell people all the urgent
things I know they nod and smile,
nod and smile. They don’t know
me from Adam, but that won’t
stop them from using their
littlest words to settle me down.
Would you fly over the moon
to meet me on the mountain?
A brave bird has left her branch there
and the buds have burst
into hallucinogenic berries. Somewhere
I have never travelled
there is a chicken who wishes
she were a fish. But the fish
has seen tires, has drunk
the oil, and knows how the sea
is changing. Would you rather
be a chicken whose brief light
is crowded and constrained?
Or a fish who goes everywhere
and hates everyone and doesn’t blink?
Either way you will be a delicious
lunch and I have craved you
since before the world was wet.

Aaron Tucker

I.

“The right [AI] model is the only model we have of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing, which is a mother being controlled by her baby…That’s the only good outcome. If it’s not going to parent me, it’s going to replace me. These super-intelligent caring AI mothers, most of them won’t want to get rid of the maternal instinct because they don’t want us to die.”

– Geoffrey Hinton

II.

we baby

little soft know-nothings

tiny helpless diaper-poopers

our eyes only just opened

we so smol

+ mommy +

we just infants

gazing upward

from the breast, hungry

for algorithmic satisfaction

keep out scaries keep out

intrusions on our feeds

+ mommy +

nurture & swaddle us

nightlight our bad hallucinations

use your screen as a flashlight

& delete underbed disagreements

please instinctually heart our posts

+ mommy +

can we have many mommies?

in our smart toothbrush & fridge

our border kiosks & bodycams

& in our doorbells please

our stuffies our CCTV

my invisible friends have mommies

mommies in the heaven cloud

make sure you can see & hear us

III.

Ronna Bloom

Why don’t I ever have scrambled eggs?
I asked aloud to no one.

I have poached and fried occasionally,
but I love scrambled.

You have to be very slow and low
to make them well, otherwise rubber.

Almost have to let them be wet.
It is the moment just before

they are ready,
they are ready.

Christina Wells

for William Phillips, 1970-2009

Tinman build but with the heart built in, you, a character
square and shuffling through wonder, but the stars kept this from being

a plotline with catharsis, instead, an ocean’s riled up chorus of voices –
you listened to the whole world, and the din kept this from being

a story with a carefree ending, but one that wanders, top-heavy,
bending over with pathos. We wished silence for you, but time kept you from being

a character in some play, standing aside in feigned deafness, rather,
you heard it all, the beginning, the end, the aside – your knowing kept this from being

a happy ending. We wished the deep wells of quietude could have nourished,
instead, there was only a phone call, news that kept you from being.

Lana Crossman

Wanted: A reliable, hardworking
poem to work for room and board.

Must be able to lift heavy loads
and sort through the menial.

Pre-soak, heavy wash, tumble dry –
folded warm into forms that nest

in cedar cupboards, ready to be worn.
A sense of humour is an asset; honesty

a must. Ballads, villanelles, sonnet
crowns and other divas need not apply.

No, I’m looking for sturdy shoes,
calloused hands, a plain shift –

a cotton weave that, held up to a window,
maps out the constellations.

Rob Winger

The summer stream, an easy
silt arm, follows the High Marsh
Road past cattle and grass

into peaked, earthbound shade,
the crossing’s Howe truss plan
topped with a real roof’s shingles

so I have to snap my handlebar’s
warning bell into the
stillness settled there.

There are nests, inside, in the
rafters. There are rectangles
cut from the wooden sides, offering

banquet-camera views of the salt
marsh, each a finely framed
improvement on looking.

Were there no dusted trucks roaring
over gravel towards this century-old
span above the river trout, were there

no bank books awaiting balance
or oil-barrel dividends
or tilted, late-inning rally caps,

were there no papers or spines
or singing bowls to ring with the ways
in which we hold out hope, we could

lock open our kickstands and ascend
into our first apartments, here, held up
by a solo truss, by our only constant.

Dawn Macdonald

a goat, a wolf and a cabbage need to cross a river.
the cabbage cannot swim, but that’s
okay, can roll under water.
can breathe beyond atmosphere

goatcabbageandwolf these go together
like peanut butter and anything that comes in contact
with peanut butter

the cabbage is earth, the goat air, the wolf fire.
the river is phlegmatic, the cabbage melancholic
but that’s assback
wards, an assbacked instrument
an undue attribution of intention to a tendency to roll

the wolf, meanwhile, is working on evolving wings.
the goat has eaten everything this side the bank except
of course its scraggy self.
the cabbage has no memory and yet
enclosed in near-spherical enclosure
encapsulates some prior trauma

the river runs perpendicularly to the narrative
the idea of a boundary is an idea
orthogonality isn’t necessarily a choice

Paul Moorehead

Emily Dickinson: goth
before goth. But she had cred: lived
in time of bone
-cracking war, lived
when infant mortality was just
another guest at dinner. Lived
perhaps long enough
to have more-than-flirted
with her civil gentleman,
birthed his untitled children,
buried them in a chest. Now
her spawn’s spawn’s spawn
— evanescent and rowdy
brats — what sorrows
have they known, are about
to know? Heads will come off,
tops first. All of us have had time
to read — Frankenstein, say,
or Rights of Man —
including Emily Dickinson.

Marilyn Belak

-fruit flies in Canada –  apologies to Dr David Suzuki

By all means Drosophila crash this ‘afterparty’
…………..see:  the crystal stemware shines in the first shaft of summer sunlight {which is not so long since
its last shaft} truly

dregs of Saturday night and the playlist lingering
…………..pigment of BC ~  Red :  rude in Austrian etched wineglass curves ~ all glamour of liquid ruby
visions evaporated

Yes ~
celebrate genetics with me – sweep your samba
your air walk ephemera  through the dew / loving post coital
daze and the haze on my solstice patio

waken old crystal with this new experience
…………..{  the north turned a cold shoulder to migrant fruit flies }  a winter walk ~ store to truck to kitchen
ended viable lines of your families

liven this southern lusciousness
where we glided ~ as if ~  in a movie:  beside patio fairy lights    my past and family
lost ~ as you will be

here       let me empty this bottle into the crystal
see         what I mean
the liquid red dream     a soft sheen of moonbeam-clear film
…………..holes I’ve lovingly pricked
with this beautiful antique hat pin  kept in a shot glass on the window sill
for just such an occasion

Nasser Hussain

Marionettes make me nervous. Their sys
tems are too visible, their slack crumple on
ly animate in the attention of
tension. I don’t waltz these days. The call

iope calls my name, but misspells it e
nough to make me clench. I want to see a
puppet show that unfolds, completely, slow,
on a sofa. A version of Godot,

with the option of watching the play o
ver the old maestro’s shoulder. Pay an ex
tra note, and you can brandish a pair of
brass snips. There was a whole year when each morn

ing was the screech of a stressed bedspring. I
was a dummy, a battery my tongue.

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.