VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1
Michelle Barker / Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt / Jane Eaton Hamilton Daniela Elza / Karen Faryna / Patrick Lane / Alice Major / Kenneth McRobbie Frederick Mundle / Richard King Perkins II / Robin Rapoport / Paddy Scott Vanessa Shields / Aaron Simm / Dorothy Sjöholm / Heather Spears Review by Carleigh Baker
Cover Artwork: Markus Schoen Editor/Publisher: Tara Wohlberg Design: 24-point Helvetica Advisors: T heresa Kishkan, Patrick Lane, Tom Wayman, Calvin Wharton
Cede Poetry is independent of any government grants and is funded by submission fees. Cede Poetry (ISBN 978-0-9939316) is published by the Cede Poetry collective: PO Box 45567, 3456 Dunbar Street, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, V6S 2C2 Manuscripts should be submitted to the above address or emailed to editor Tara Wohlberg editor@cedepoetry.com using our on-line form. Manuscripts are read year round. All rights reserved. Copyright remains with the author. No part of this journal may be reproduced in any form without the author’s permission. © 2015
Contents Kaiseki / Karen Faryna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Waltz, wasp / Alice Major . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Chacabuco / Patrick Lane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 SIBLING / Robin Rapoport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Daylight Savings / Alice Major . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 The Sparrow’s Knitted Stardom / Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt . . . . . . 7 Ode to Apollo / Partridge Boswell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 First Dates / Aaron Simm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 waking up with you / Daniela Elza . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Great Fire of the World / Kenneth McRobbie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Beach Glass / Frederick Mundle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Da Capo / Michelle Barker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 reflections on paintings by alex colville / Dorothy Sjöholm . . . . . . 14 Sada / Patrick Lane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Krim hills, Ukraine / Heather Spears . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Immigrant Song / Paddy Scott . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 SPRING TOOK OFF / Robin Rapoport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Hide and Seek / Michelle Barker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 The Climb / Partridge Boswell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Pirates of the Southern Desert / Richard King Perkins II . . . . . . . . 23 Apologies to Famous People / Vanessa Shields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Circadian Arcadias / Alice Major . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 The Script / Jane Eaton Hamilton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Trenton’s Last Bookstore / Paddy Scott . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Comparative Review / Carleigh Baker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
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Kaiseki1 KAREN FARYNA
He tastes foreign to me. He is soba slipping through puckered lips in this place of tatami and shoji doors, soft light and delicate shadows. He is a slim fish the woman in kimono sets down. These chopsticks like walking on stilts— he is complicated to eat.
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Here, people reveal manners when eating fish with chopsticks. Into his tender side, I poke hesitant tips.
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He is a dish I do not recognize— in my mouth he sounds like footsteps through deep snow. I shift my weight not to sink too far. He is succulent sashimi. With each bite, I savor his words— relish in his underwater Mariana mind.
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He is crab in butter cream sauce. As I taste him, I chew slowly— as I sip saki, I try not to reveal.
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I discover he is like biting the ocean— salt water swoosh taking me under, sweeping me into seaweed tangles. And, I will discover, no amount of ginger is enough for his essence to disappear.
1 Kaiseki is a traditional multicourse meal in Japan
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CEDE POETRY
Waltz, wasp ALICE MAJOR
Autumn wasp crawling across the café window pane Sunlight’s soft pollen dusts the glass A waltz starts to spill from speakers mounted on the wall above the menu Dactylic pulse one two three melody and it seems as though the wasp begins to dance swinging on the downbeat turn again turn again tracing arcs across the polished floor of a golden ballroom. One two three harmony imagined. It’s an insect brain, an arbitrary accidental music yet when the song and wasp lift off together on a last high note I feel we are all caught in pattern, partners dancing
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Chacabuco PATRICK LANE
Remote fetish, this stone shard common as a beetle in grave litter. The wind scours, a fragment only, a red blush thin in the light. How the desert is a library, the fate of thought worn thin as fragile cities. A broken arrowhead among the remains of a condor, its bones narrow flutes the colour of clouds at dawn. Children play in the dust. Not yet a woman, a girl leads the others in song, her story the oldest one: how love leaves us as a white goose who flees south to the salt marshes. Its wings cup the air under the sickle moon. Vultures feed among wet bones. A man leafs through the ancient book of trees. The names diminish, the ink fades, letters sand mites hiding from the sun. The mind caresses stumps in the nitrate slag, desiccated rings. There are no words. The old ones held the babies across the wire in the hope someone might take them. Rags and tatters. All that is left of the days in the Atacama.
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Chacabuco – abandoned nitrate town in the Atacama desert Atacama – ‘ Desierto de Atacama’ – driest non-polar desert in the world – a 1000 mile plateau along the Pacific coast west of the Andes
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SIBLING ROBIN RAPOPORT
it was me who switched our brains at birth you with the bad one
why’d you go
hand it to both your girls
i kneaded and
pressed one of their skulls
but could
not alter the outcome
instead i thre
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my anger down the stairwell carpet stamped it out like a fire burning step a jab at our differences
each
how your
i throw VISIT cedepoetry.com
brain does not compute enough anger on the stairwell carpet stamp it
stamp it
stamp it
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Daylight savings ALICE MAJOR
What financial crisis? The sun has been pinching pennies for months, but now returns like a government anxious to spend its bright bullion on a package of fiscal stimulus. The cog of the day slips sideways by an hour. We eat our evening meal in light made suddenly available. The sun’s government mints incentives not to save, but spend, spend, spend with necessary recklessness.
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CEDE POETRY
The Sparrow’s Knitted Stardom TANYA BELLEHUMEUR-ALLATT
Edith Piaf began to knit a dress to drape her body like a love song. But the night of her début concert, when Paris was about to discover the intimate alphabet of her voice, the dress was still not finished. It would not be her first humiliation, Edith thought, before stepping onto the bright stage. But the one-sleeved dress charmed the cabaret patrons. They felt as if they’d been drinking martinis in the sun because of the way the stage lights illuminated her innocent shoulder, and the contrast of the red wool under Edith’s straight, dark hair. Her future manager sat at his usual table with of a view of the Champs Elysées. He held the city in his pocket like a watch on a chain. He knew the newspapermen. Already he was contacting the right pianist, the one who could play a legato melody to offset the sparrow’s proud and desperate voice.
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Ode to Apollo PARTRIDGE BOSWELL
Which astronaut performed a Eucharist on the moon? our daughter asks glued to the trivia app on her phone. We have no clue, but now imagine the body and blood consecrating that airless weightless dust, the wine curling gracefully up from the bottle into the cup, desiccated lilies rising from a tranquil sea of rock and lambs gamboling in craters with dogs named Laika and Pluto, grazing the barren landscape
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of a brain that quips: “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me,” nibbling lumpy gray matter of a colonized cosmology, the sacred universe and profane university interchangeable as
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two astronauts who in their levity stood and looked back over their shoulders at the lush blue-green orb of us swaddled in mist floating utterly bereft in that impossible abyss, as one of them reached for a six
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iron from his bag. The kind of god who can swap out Delos and Delphi for Houston and Cape Canaveral, a laurel for thorns, the roar of his four-horse chariot setting fire to the sky. His bow and lyre harmonizing
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a medicinal music of capricious arrows—confusing isms and schisms, fusing a man with a mission. The kind of man who walks for miles and miles and miles without leaving a single footprint scribbled on its watery surface.
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First Dates: AARON SIMM
For your first date, you take her to the Arby’s at the airport and you have no idea why Security confiscates your Christmas Cactus and you are left empty handed in a bathroom stall Your throat a desert the day you asked her out to dinner, you dream of its distant green and pink tendrils blooming in a prison cell These are the real interviews of a full body scan An introduction to arid climates and the storm of your armpits you wisely choose twenty questions over a handshake
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When you decide to depart together The inflight meal will be nothing but salty turbulence at the back of your throat and you will have a long layover in a city you can’t pronounce the name of This is not the worst date you can remember going on, but how you wound up at the airport Arby’s you are still not sure
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The two of you become the staggered crowds of airport terminals, deciding whether or not you want to sit next to one another for the duration of the flight She feeds you greasy hamburgers on your extended layovers laughing to each other, while trying to pronounce a foreign city’s name with food in your mouth VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1
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waking up with you DANIELA ELZA
how much more invisible we become in the city’s torque and thrust. the open mouth of the world’s sorrow. amidst starved shadows the unyielding cherry blossoms of our loss stubbornly line the streets.
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I can surely live without but there is this ripple this delight of you. I cannot resist the vascular webs of your kisses. their untranslatable vespers.
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grief has been a poor landlord— a house broken woman in disrepair riddled with insight reticent withdrawn.
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and I write knowing in naming—
something is always lost
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the small shifts of winter light in your eyes. the urgency of your breath on my face. the fervour of your whisper in my temple. I trace how the opposite corners of our mouths attract with unexplained affinity. how in the day’s progress we become the pulse of a thawing puddle. how the moments burst with tenderness in the indefinite tangle of our bodies. the tangible eros of waking up beside you. and how close we are here to divinity.
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Great Fire of the World KENNETH MCROBBIE
Highway No.1. east of Regina
Dust was freckling the scarcely-dry paint on a few signposted centennial beginnings, as we drove across a prairie reduced to ashes, in this terrible summer of leaning barns whitened by winds from evaporated slews.
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Now as evening falls into night I stare into the great fire of the world in this campground’s corner.
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First to go, crumpled newspaper; next to go, this continent's New Testament dream of birth, inheritance.
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Yet still the brightest sparks ascend to unearthly certainties, before swooping to set the tree-wall dancing.
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Dropping from shadowed tent flaps, space-age insects cool their wings beside medieval moths in shivering sandy soils. A splinter flares, then dies; goodnight in the slanting vowels of Saskatchewan's lined smile. In that split-second halo no better place from which to see fire within fire: dove-grey cities whispering down, Florida listing another degree.
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Beach Glass FREDERICK MUNDLE
Ground amid a billion grains of sand so long unseen, time has tempered you. Tides have washed you. Your former jagged edges, smoothed to change your form, hide your see-through skin beneath a frosted flesh.
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Waves worked to mould you by thundering at your soul. Salted by the sea, here you are reformed.
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CEDE POETRY
Da Capo MICHELLE BARKER
I began again out of guilt, watching the three grunting movers heave and drag my full-sized upright up a flight of stairs. No elevator in the old apartment building we were moving into, my son and I. A marriage – over. A life spent in the country – finished. The windows of our apartment faced the back lane: slick pavement and black-eyed dumpsters instead of mountains and a lake.
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Seven hundred pounds of instrument they hauled, but that didn’t include all the baggage that came with it: years of lessons, my spinster piano teacher and her fierce devotion. My excuses for not practicing. Beethoven, by his hair. The openings bars of operas and symphonies, memorized and forgotten. The long twisted knot of my stomach during every performance. And silence, thirty years of it, the heaviest thing by far, during which I shunned the wooden beast, its black and white teeth gleaming at me.
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My first notes were tentative, like a prodigal daughter returning home, unsure of her welcome. Constantly worried about my wretched and invisible audience cowering in their apartments, hands clamped over ears, praying for me to get it right this time – my God, she’s played that passage in Bach three hundred times, it’s e-flat, E-FLAT. But no, they stop me in the hall. Somehow they all know me, the new tenant in number fifteen, the one who plays. It’s beautiful, they say. Please play more. In this season of regret, it startles me – to bring joy to strangers, even with my mistakes.
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reflections on paintings by alex colville DOROTHY SJÖHOLM
for the time being no one exists except the painted woman and me the seated man immaterial she analyzes me through binoculars— a specimen wanting a shoreline floundering toward the density of compassion love in the underbrush
~
why do the stallion’s nostrils flare as he gallops alone in the churchyard is he too spooked by the starkness of a white wall the approaching storm sign over door unmoved stone the mercilessness of the wire fence and the open gate
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~
in the marshes there will be ravens who know what to do and why the rest of us don’t understand
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why flesh droops from the constant weight of devotion why the sea lies so calm behind the woman who walks up the ramp toward us holds the handrails focuses on answers to unasked questions
~
what the man wants why the gun
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Sada PATRICK LANE
Barefoot in gumboots in the dark closet elsewhere, the table you sat at named the Crows. The mind of poverty. Mostly blind and looking out at the shimmering world. Light. And your friend Billy with his Mason jar of maggots. You with your gopher. What you brought, the others with their puppies and kittens. One girl, the blonde one he loved from the big house on the hill, brought butterflies in a cage made of bamboo. She was a Bluebird. How years later he left her with his children forever. Still blind. That innocence once lost can only be wonder. Billy weeping when they took his maggots away, one fly, the mother, he told the teacher, crawling over the unborn seething as they drowned. Sada – pure one, or Mitsuko, child of light
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Krim hills, Ukraine HEATHER SPEARS
Krim hills drenched in potential blood Krim fields also without guilt or fault, fence, ditch, demarcations human and temporary. To the east, unheard like daylight what will or will not happen.
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Whoever lives or lived here accustomed over generations to the configurant edges and rises seen against stars or an indifferent morning a trace, a synapse in the secret, gathered mind.
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The deep unhappy forests the steep light upright among trees, stands of trees, worked and familiar. Farther, across the next valley or the next less known but known larger boundaries like the red lines on maps, on parchment, as if permanent.
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3 April, 2013.
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Immigrant Song PADDY SCOTT
When Uncle Kap walked the cows he made sounds not quite whistling more a rush of air through drawn mouth to call the dog in that pitch Laddy bounding from under the porch into the sun even the cows knew to walk beside him when he whistled Come at them didn’t want to miss the relief meant in the whist and ho bossy-bossy so down to the barn beside him they went. Black rubber boots with the red stripes ho bossy-bossy he whooshed generous with his ass-slaps making cowhide whacks the shufflers in the rear hey-upped in bounding slow arcs like the ones over moons; mighty weight of udders’ ballast shifting swinging side to side Oh ladies he sang Oh black-and-white ladies amble home to hay for food straw for bed to keep you warm, buttery fat Like aunt Fay I said; oh don’t say that, soft his whist, a sigh. She was big-boned, red-faced fumbling her sad-eyed brogue carried here as a war-child set out cow’s cream bread crusts and eggs for her dog with jagged bones; his paper-thin tongue lapped the bowl the same blue tongue that hung from his mouth beneath the wagon wheel that crushed his head because he did not hear a heathery jig go whoosh to call him up and to the hooves – lost to dreams about meat, I think. My uncle called her down from the house so she could say goodbye in Scots; red-faced aunt singing Oh lucky lucky Laddy Now I am forgot.
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CEDE POETRY
SPRING TOOK OFF ROBIN RAPOPORT
spring took off
quick like a hare
and now summer’s deafening abundance i arrive small
my mind tripping to autumn
it had been spring kind of banging
tables
scrape each other a classroom bell instructions
in my head a chairs
chaotic and i freeze
their corners uncontrollable
wait for
place four outdoor chairs by
a newly sited table
wonder whether deaf
grandmother can hear anything at all of the brutality of beauty then the other
something
i undo first one shoelace
unfold and unstack linen napkins
remove rubber bands from berry cartons let churlish curls run
break through nature’s knots
become its tree roots
flowing with sap
juice for ants
who draw blood
their picture
tip toe backwards
straight lines into dots
i paint turn
transition is inescapable
transitioning takes time
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Hide and Seek MICHELLE BARKER
Up to then it had been a child’s game – me hiding in plain sight, eyes scrunched closed, believing if I couldn’t see death, it would never find me. Then came November, unseasonably cold. One foggy morning Penny’s husband Tom drove his truck off the road and into the lake. It took all day to find his body. Three weeks later it was Mike, the sheep farmer, dropped dead while helping us dig out our driveways after a snowstorm.
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Our house was already almost empty. The movers had taken most of the furniture and I’d sold what wouldn’t fit into the apartment. The rooms echoed when we led in Mike’s widow, sat her at the one remaining table, gave her a cup of water. There was no tea or kettle anymore to keep my hands busy. None of us knew what to say. We fell to reminiscing, making gentle jokes about ourselves, filling the silence that threatened to swallow us whole.
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Bruno won’t understand, she mumbled. Bruno was Mike’s dog. As if we did. The men trying to revive him, none of us knew CPR, one of them pumping his chest, wake UP wake UP, but he didn’t, it was too late, his stomach bloated, face an eggplant purple, death muscling its way into our carefully set schedules, the routines we’d built to armour our belief that all of this would last forever.
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The paramedics covered his body with a thin yellow sheet and left him lying in the snow. The afternoon was cold, minus ten at least, and I worried the thin sheet wouldn’t keep him warm and why didn’t anyone move him, because I’d forgotten, I was still in the habit of life, still grasping for my fleece-lined guarantee. One of the neighbours knelt before his body. Another was throwing up. Most were saying at least he went quickly. I was looking for mysteries to solve. Cause of death: heart attack? Aneurysm? Should I have offered him a sandwich?
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After Tom drove off the road, my husband and I walked past the spot obsessively, like worrying a loose tooth: where did his tires catch? If only we could figure it out, we might prevent it from happening to us.
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The Climb PARTRIDGE BOSWELL
…the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.—Lorca
…and so we ascend each day and dance the dance of no hope rain soaking the land like an overcooked artichoke see what I mean? from hopeless words and wordless hope sometimes a salvaged joke a rhythm & rhyme to fill our pockets
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with music when we’re otherwise broke—a cantaor throws off his yoke singing dreams darker than all the wine in Andalucía
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we crack & scramble indigent thoughts into sunlight’s dazzle a child’s lone red nemesis sock that’s lain on the floor for days
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without moving from its spot waiting for a mercy hand—big or little matters not—to lift and pair and so renew its purpose
…bend now and pick it up and fold one into the other tuck the soft knot into its chest of drawers—a heart untethered
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Pirates of the Southern Desert RICHARD KING PERKINS II
Beneath the sands of the outback; an incoherent drumming of monitor lizards. History drains into the scrubland; an old man with a metal detector sweeping in the goldfields the howl of a wild dog loosened into the low-cut plumage of the Australian sky.
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The incomprehensibility of a million feral camels stripping trees, bringing drought to waterholes
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and raiding aborigines like pirates of the southern desert.
Unplanned obsolescence— replaced by trains, machinery and the bullwhips of black roadways ever edged in red.
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Beneath the sands of the outback; an incoherent drumming of monitor lizards. Species shy from the hand of man, one old man in a salt pan of old men with speechless throats, unable to articulate the great random discoveries hoped for—
forgetting how skin could be any different than today, exposing the timeline of dreams, the empty canteen of tomorrow. Beneath the sands of the outback; an incoherent drumming of monitor lizards sends warnings as ships of the desert plunder on.
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Apologies to Famous People VANESSA SHIELDS
I’m sorry Sam Roberts band (the members who are not Sam) whose names even now I don’t know (and I’m sorry I won’t look on the Internet to look them up). I’m sorry I didn’t interview you when you came to Windsor to play at the riverfront. I’m sorry I let my crotch do the guiding when Sam showed up shirtless and sweaty and it was all I could do to not jump on him…it was all I could do to ignore everyone but him. I’m sorry Steve Martin for taking a picture of your face on my television screen when you were the father in ‘Cheaper by the Dozen’ and you screamed “Pasta de la Crotch” then tweeting it to you. Several times.
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I’m sorry Simon Le Bon for entering your house while you were away one rainy summer day in 1996. My Italian cousin was your number one fan and he made us ride the Tube to your house. Renovations were underway and there was no glass in your windows. We looked inside and saw your black grand piano and lots of art leaning up against the walls.
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I’m sorry Liev Schreiber for meeting you three times in Manhattan and you looked at me like I was familiar and you couldn’t figure out why. I wasn’t following you, we just truly happened to be at the same place at the same time. Three times.
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I’m sorry Bruce Greenwood for chasing you down Broadway on that chilly windy autumn afternoon. I was eating ice cream at Ben & Jerry’s and I saw you and I freaked out because you were the first famous person I’d seen. I’m sorry I chased you down the street as I laughed hard and peed my pants. You didn’t see me.
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I’m sorry Sydney Pollack that all I did was shake your hand that red-carpet evening at the Toronto International Film Festival. I hadn’t seen ‘The Way We Were’ yet so I didn’t know. I didn’t know what kind of heart you had. Your handshake was tight yet gentle. I looked at your black cowboy boots and black jeans and thought it was cool that you dressed down for the gala opening. I’m sorry Mitch Albom for having to change my son’s diaper in the aisle beside your signing table at Chapters that time. He pooped and it was smelly. I had to. I’m sorry you were shocked when I asked you to write a quote from your book when I finally made it up to you at the signing table. “Oh, you read it?” You said. “Of course I read it!” I told you. Of course I read it. I’m sorry Robert Munsch that we didn’t talk face-to-face. Our phone conversation was awkward. You seemed…off. But you were busy. Awaiting a flight in an airport. I could hear a woman’s voice over the loud speaker behind your shaky voice.
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I’m sorry Henry Winkler that when I met you in person it wasn’t more exciting. You said our telephone conversation was really great and you told me you were in your pajamas while we talked. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was in mine too. I’m sorry Bill Cosby for not asking you more personal questions. My editor told me I had to ask you about Detroit. I’m sorry you had to go so quickly and explain to your granddaughter how you weren’t in the television like she thought you were. I’m sorry Tom Cruise for writing you a letter the day my dad died. I was very sad and felt my mortality tapping on the back of my neck. I figured I should write you the letter I’d always wanted to write and tell you that I’d really like to work with you. That I have several scripts written with you in mind for some solid characters that will help revive your romantic comedy persona. I’m sorry for being someone who does that to you.
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I’m sorry Mike Tyson for spying on you when you were shopping on Rodeo drive with a tall, thin black woman with wild hair. I’m sorry I pulled my car over to watch you open the limo door for her and help her get in. Help carry her bags. I’m sorry Al Pacino for being a liar (or at least a liar’s accomplice) and crashing your movie premiere in West Hollywood. I didn’t have a ticket to get in. But I really wanted to go to a film premiere. It was so exciting and I felt hot being a liar.
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I’m sorry Alan Thick for ambushing you in the lobby at the film premiere while I waited for my husband to finish going pee. I’m sorry for suggesting you pretend you were my old friend from Canada. I’m sorry you were the butt of an inside joke and that was why I was smiling so big. I was really thrilled to meet you. For real. I’m sorry Chris Hadfield that it took me five months to transcribe and publish the interview I did with you. Meeting you was truly an extraordinary experience but I was working on my novel and wanted to finish it so I did that first. I’m sorry Margaret Atwood for taking pictures of you without asking your permission. You kind of scare me so I was afraid to ask. Then when I told you I took them and asked if it was okay, you said, “Well you already took them.” I didn’t know how to respond so I just handed you one of your books to sign for me. I’m sorry Margaret Lawrence that I didn’t know who you were until I went to a big writers’ conference and everyone was talking about you. I read one of your books right away. I’m sorry I didn’t love it. I’m sorry Brad Pitt that I never met you but that I dreamt you were Jesus. It was a wild dream and you were really sad. But we rode elephants into the sunset so I think you were feeling better by the end of it.
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Circadian Arcadias ALICE MAJOR
Zeitgeber light. All our green clocks begin to whirr. Molecular tick, protein tock. Spring rises from within, endogenous rhythmic shifts, a secret tic released by light. Blind bare branches see sun’s change. The inner talk
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of cryptochrome and melanopsin, rise and fall of circadian cycles, dawn to dusk, root to tip. April’s relentless pastorale. Caragana buds ruff out like silver lambs. Sparrows cross-talk.
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Even through the icy nights, ice wants to melt from within. Water’s constant drip and tick.
Et in Arcadia ego. Spring’s alarm sounds brng… brng… Bring your dead sticks and stalks.
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Time will bury them in green.
digital PDF download Note: A “zeitgeber” (time-giver) is any environmental cue that synchronizes an organism’s internal biorhythms to those of the earth as a whole, particularly the circadian alternation of light and dark.
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The Script JANE EATON HAMILTON
I’m not in the slightest sorry I know you thought I would be but expectation is a paltry bedmate and, frankly, I didn’t do anything wrong and I am tired of apologizing for things I didn’t do wrong just to keep the peace Wrong is perhaps beside the point (which, here, is your tender emotion and my long-standing pledge to listen) To press this home: I understand as I have always understood everything all the goddamned nuances you always direct my attention to How I said and then you said and then I said and then you said and you repeated that and then I said what I said and you hollered in frustration Nobody needs to read the script The script is always the script with pages so thinned by age they have softened to cloth
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Alas, I don’t care and I don’t care that I don’t care Which may signify that we’re done here don’t you think?
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Trenton’s Last Bookstore PADDY SCOTT
was dismantled the day mythopoeic visions in the window displays of titans dissolved one by one, were re-boxed and returned to senders without explanation like children abandoned for a life with corporate admen; now street sweepers must collect the brilliant paper scraps flickering through the alleys unsought, unsold, unread;
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starving cicerone resigned to the empty shelves reached out to a necrophagous addict with lavish grin; they stumbled over the concrete flower beds to buy in, had holes in their shoes but dreams in their heads of formulae for profitable statements addressed to a river’s name, honoured it, prayed to it, after selling at a loss;
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beauty’s range tied to the oligarchy’s limits, a well-heeled internet pimp dressed as an avant-garde whore who threw money into the wake of foundered anthologies, so no words remained to mourn grey brick hovels that brought art to light like moths to sudden wing from fieldstone walls, only a ravaged lexicon for pop-up ads and billboard signs
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heads bowed to weep falsely over services rendered no longer required he could not call to arms dead writers stacked against them; a life’s calling forsaken at the door is but the exit for a martyr’s vocation so he rises from the damp floor, this skull orchard all these barren aisles like Malchus whose ear pressed cold air, futilely listens for that old door’s bright chiming calling him to the front one more time to the Pergamum
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The last bookstore was no holy retreat under coral autumn trees but a gathering place for a few weepy scribes; they did not see this Marc Antony approaching on a salvage barge who for a house-warming gift would rob the place blind; see it teeter on a foundation of forlorn looks like the stacks of remaindered regionalist poetry books.
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Comparative Review BY CARLEIGH BAKER
Linda King Reality Wayfarers Shoe Music Press, 2014 You are here
somewhere
To read thethe full between actual issue: and the imaginary In Reality Wayfarers, Linda King fearlessly grasps at the diaphanous. Probing the nature of physical existence, she invokes the works of philosophers Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger, most notably the latter. The voices in King’s collection range from anxious and apprehensive, to wise and occasionally prescriptive. These poems carefully articulate the kind of existential angst that is common in today’s disconnected world, while exploring human coping mechanisms.
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It is within language that King seems to find both frustration and hope in the search for reality: “what you get for existing/ is a little heartbreaking kindness/ and those twenty-six letters.” But language can overwhelm and deceive; King bemoans an excess of nouns—“too many names for being” and “words arranged to look true.” She appears to recommend flexibility in one’s definition of truth: “stop looking for the real story/ you need a richer vocabulary/ not that stockpile of facts.” Reality Wayfarers reminds us that to enhance our perception, an acceptance of the intangible, the beautiful chaotic, may be required.
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It’s no surprise that, in a journey towards meaning, King would cite the role of technology: perceptual information in ringtones a future that carries the past forward but never allows you to see the whole picture
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Much of Heidegger’s later writings explored the nature of both poetry and technology. In his view, poetry and technology were two very different ways of “revealing." While a poet’s work can allow readers to explore the nature of language (and potentially to articulate a definition of reality) for themselves, modern technology stockpiles “things” and ideas into mere accumulations of usefulness. It’s as if he saw the Internet coming, years before its time. Time and aging are common themes throughout Reality Wayfarers, but particularly in the third section of the book—shadows prove the light. King’s language is graceful and poignant: leave your face/ on the vanity/ mourn in proper fashion/ you no longer know/ how to have a body/ you are an oath taken. Although the manipulation and “folding” of time seems to captivate King, for the voices in her collection, time marches on.
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Reality Wayfarers expresses powerful emotions with King’s signature eloquence. Readers may find themselves discombobulated, and in need of a quiet place to think after reading. Go find that place.
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Annie Dillard Mornings Like This: Found Poems HarperCollins, 1995
digital PDF download In Mornings Like This, Annie Dillard deconstructs and reconstitutes material from strange and wonderful sources to create a collection of found poetry. From a Russian hunting memoir, to van Gogh's letters, to the Apocrypha, Dillard explores the common themes of love, aging and death through the words of others. These accidental poets and philosophers offer readers a poignant and often humorous look into the nature of existence. By working with found poetry, Dillard is essentially grappling for meaning within the constraints of language. A relationship with language is often overtly expressed in the poems: “You can hold what can’t be said./ The mystery of being alive;/ a basket of words that feels inevitable./ A counter spell.” This is a point of convergence between King and Dillard’s work, although their methods may vary.
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Dillard does not shy from the use of humour in Mornings Like This. Truly, she embraces it. Here she expresses a sentiment similar to King’s regarding modern technology’s effects on perception. The robots were going to take over and the machines were going to take over. Just last week it occurred to me: They have. It's just different from what we expected. You think evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots. It doesn’t come like that. It begins in the language.
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Readers may smile at the subtle and destructive potential of advancing technology being reduced to the image of a robot, but the warning remains.
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Time and aging figures prominently in In Mornings Like This, with Dillard keeping her sentiment simple and direct: “one day we are going to have to leave our children,/ leave the plants, the sunlight,/ the rain and all that./ It’s unendurable.” Both Dillard and King skirt around sentimentality while maintaining a certain melancholy honesty. This is, after all, the shared human experience of aging.
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Although their methods may be different, both King and Dillard use language to guide their exploration of the nature of being. King’s poetry, while not heavy-handed, does not seek out the humour in its subject matter, whereas Dillard’s might get a few laughs. Reality Wayfarers is a stunning offering to poetic and philosophical inquiry. Both of these collections are richly and thoughtfully constructed. Go pick them both up, get yourself a coffee, and enjoy.
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Contributors Carleigh Baker is a Métis/Icelandic writer who lives in Vancouver. A Journey Prize 2014 nominee and past winner of subTerrain's Lush Triumphant award for fiction, her work has also appeared in Ricepaper, Joyland and The Incongruous Quarterly. She writes book reviews for The Globe and Mail. Michelle Barker lives in Penticton, BC. Her fiction, poetry and non‑fiction have been published in several literary reviews. Her first novel, The Beggar King, came out in 2013 (Thistledown Press). A chapbook, Old Growth, Clear-Cut: Poems of Haida Gwaii, was published in 2012 (Leaf Press). Please visit Michelle at www.michellebarker.ca Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt's poems have been published in Room, Crux, Qarrtsiluni, The Centrifugal Eye and in the Occupy Anthology. Tanya is an MFA student at UBC and a professor of English Literature at Champlain College, in Lennoxville, QC. Jane Eaton Hamilton is the author of 8 books including Love Will Burst into a Thousand Shapes. She has twice won the CBC Literary Award for fiction. Daniela Elza is the author of the weight of dew, the book of It, and, most recently, milk tooth bane bone of which David Abram says: “Out of the ache of the present moment, Daniela Elza has crafted something spare and irresistible, an open armature for wonder." Karen Faryna is a lower mainland teacher and 2013 graduate of SFU’s The Writer’s Studio. She is currently writing a compilation of short stories and poetry inspired by the time she lived and worked in Okinawa, Japan. Karen resides in Richmond, BC with her husband and two sons. Patrick Lane lives in Victoria with his wife, Lorna Crozier, their two cats, Po Chu and Basho, and their pond turtles, two Red-Eared Sliders called Drabble and Emily, along with myriad koi and goldfish. His most recent book, Washita was published in 2014 by Harbour Publishing. Alice Major has published nine poetry collections, three of them short‑listed for the Pat Lowther Award (which I won for The Office Tower Tales). She served as the City of Edmonton’s first poet laureate.
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Kenneth McRobbie’s poetry has evolved in a meta-social-political direction, reflecting an interest in oppositional Hungarian poetry. He has written books on that subject for Oxford University Press and Ohio University Press and is the biographer of the revolutionary Ilona Duczynska. Frederick Mundle won the 2014 Alfred G. Bailey award, as well as the Edwin Flaherty Prize for Creative Writing at Fredericton’s St. Thomas University. His poetry has appeared in The Antigonish Review, CV2, Other Voices, Nashwaak Review, Southern Poetry Review, Other Voices and The Cormorant. Richard King Perkins II lives in Crystal Lake IL. He is a three-time Pushcart nominee and a Best of the Net nominee whose work has appeared in such publications as Louisiana Review, Bluestem, Emrys Journal, Sierra Nevada Review, Two Thirds North, Red Cedar Review and The William and Mary Review. Robin Rapoport graduated this May from Sarah Lawrence College with an MFA in poetry. Her background is in fine arts and the moving body. From 2002–2011 she founded and was artistic director of Headless Horse, a contemporary dance company based in New York. Paddy Scott was long-listed in the 2014 CBC contests in both fiction and poetry. He was featured reader at the Sawdust Reading Series with Phil Hall in Ottawa and is FreeFall Magazine’s nomination in this year’s AMPA awards, The Journey Prize and the NMA Awards. Vanessa Shields writes poetry while sitting at the dining room table filled with life’s mess and lots of other places too. Her first book of poetry, I Am That Woman was published in 2014. She lives and loves in Windsor, Ontario. Aaron Simm is a poet, playwright, and hip-hop artist, living in Victoria, BC. He was a co-founder of the Winnipeg Spoken Word Festival, and his work has been featured on stages and in literary journals all across the country. Dorothy Sjöholm is a Toronto poet whose work has been accepted for publication in journals including The Antigonish Review, Lichen Literary Journal, and Jones Av. She is currently completing an MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. Heather Spears is a Vancouver-born writer and artist who lives in Denmark. She has published 14 collections of poetry, five novels and three books of drawings. The Creative Eye (Arcturus, 2007, illustrated 2013) is the first of a series on drawing.
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Colophon This book’s cover and contents have been designed by Miles Linklater of 24pt-helvetica.com in Vancouver, British Columbia. Canada. The text is composed in Mercury Text (Hoefler & Frere-Jones, Inc.) and Gotham (The Hoefler Type Foundry, Inc.).
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