Clairefontaine

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Susan Glickman

A bright orange notebook denominated “Clairefontaine”,
96 pages of papier velouté ruled in lilac and pink,
is the last vestige of two years at the Lycée Français
where each subject had its own special cahier,
its glossiness and heft implying the relative weight
and importance of the knowledge transcribed
within its covers.

My own students had flimsy yellow cahiers
indicating the low status of English at that institution
whose mandate was to bring culture to us
in our colonial exile. Recognizing this, they refused to pay
for their textbooks and handed their homework in late
or not at all. Meanwhile, around the corner,
a foreign language school was being demolished
having collapsed on a class overpaying for the privilege
of wrestling with “there”, “their” and “they’re”:
further proof that the study of English was suspect.

One young man died shielding a classmate
with his body; his actions heroic
in any language.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

“The tiled koi pond is filled with lobsters.”

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Sachiko Murakami

Heather Jessup, YHZ-(YYC)-YVR
December 4, 2012

Heather, there is nothing on the Internet that suggests
that this koi pond filled with lobsters actually exists.
Knowing you are not a liar, I can only assume
you are a romantic that misread holding tank as
koi pond. The lobsters not ornament, but there
for souvenir: the remembrance boiled alive and served
to friends. I was here. Memory dripping with sweet butter.
Here. I empty the tank of lobsters. What now,
wishing well? Signs that say you really oughtn’t throw coins?
Clear the coins, pull the plug.
Wherever, intones the PA. The empty space
a place to lie down before security comes
with its hook, with its hustle.
Race to the gate where the poem takes us
into there’s air with your rusty laugh,
your old cellphone with its cricketing clitter.
Wherever, wherever, wherever.

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from “Janey Settler-Invader”

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Rachel Zolf

Now and then the wolves cry like souls
in purgatory. I think they are reincarnations
of dead Indigns come to reproach the palefeces.
Every time c□ck hits in, energy shoots
from the base of my spine. Perhaps
Louis Riel, the ill-starred half-brood, is
among them. He simply turned his face
toward the sky and made some remark
about the weather. I should like to be that
bird or elk that lost her mate under the ripe
snooky moon. Once I picked bright blooms
from his grave near a great bear-like cross
bearing a prisoned figure of the Nazarene, pierced
hands and thorn-stung brow. He that resisteth
the power resisteth the ordinance of the plague
bot infesting animal intestines. I’m beyond
coming when only the lovemaking of the grass
hoppers can be heard among the clover. The shit
with distinctions between crazy and Kiel’s body
lies, but mayhap the Hebrew King’s soul
and his dusky Israeli braves hit the fan
and everything turns chaotic and wild again.




Here is a warrior whose legs are bare
except for a coating of terra-cotta paint.
He has the loans of a cave-dweller. A bright
red head sticks out of this apricot pit because
at age thirty the Prime Minstrel gircumsized himself.
Now, if you shut up and stay nonexistent, I wouldn’t
be surprised if even an Indign may have a desire
to display his muscular development. This man’s
tongue began to make noise in the settlement like an
unchained hurricane. Up, up into these trees! Lord Selkirk’s
heart sank, ‘I fear me.’ Leguminous odours from decaying
clover and rank, matted masses of wild pease, the feverish
exhalations of the tiger-lily, and of the rich-blooded buffalo
lilac. Abortions make it dangerous to f#ck, herbage crushed
into the mire, so I can finally get love, turkey buzzards
circling, I don’t want to touch it more than that, sodden eyes
gleaming with expectancy, a quick kiss, wet and slimy. Scotland
is a kingdom of the mind, an ambition overleaping Mayan ruins.
You know that Indign is a cunning diplomat. Is the story
of the Colony going to be an epic or a drama?




Noo Grodof ntck the(\the oivJ4this discord
of the bands, in opposition to the bagpipes and
tom-toms, excoriates one’s ears, but the squ■ws
and papooses in the wagons seem to enjoy the
injunction. Father, I want to apologize for how
I’ve been acting. A great passion-rose bloomed
in each cheek. The Devil is an image. ‘Du darfst!’
it says – ‘You may!’ Oroon^o-stood a.ftrt3pl05hl(^9
on the verge of JY*There are good-looking maidens
in the procession. (Corrects herself). One of them
had too much poetry in her sweet head,twxVI want
you to lead me without hesitation into the land of the
shadow and the monster of a dizzy steep overlooking
a gulf. I want you to plunge into my wounded body the
name of axtonlv ttvuo ottrLove. It’s a pity these soft-eyed
little bundles of femininity must grow into large, dull
Oftifcof ri .,. ^ IIC squOndtruawsXlVf. Here is one slim
and supple tn ntcklOct as a stalk of Oroond m>y soim corn.
Oroond US Beautiful, too, in that one requisite of a beautiful
face is light plop plop 3 i£,Mpir\n no air to splAsh LOith
thinq C Coloured light destroys all hatred. Love’s a lance
cutting my brain in two. While coughing up blood, she keeps
working on this rug.




One man has three sc@1ps hanging
from his belt. He meekly marches along
to the tune the paleface sets him. Tut!
He is only a tomcat eating the family
canary, skin ripped off and (The. so(fiy red
muscle exposed. I roll my hands in his fat and
bite my own little hunted v£ni^htchan^E.pet!
The appearance of other birds and beasts under
similar circumstances are likewise tokens. Do you
consider the flowers I gave you worth preserving?
Eastern people, and folk from overseas, shudder
at sculpts on a belt. Their methods are different;
but I know! I know! The peelface stalks
his victim just as relentlessly, and takes
the scf*rf just as surely; but he hangs
it on his wife’s neck in gems of naked
flame; or he may hang it on his
wall in a Greuze
or a Millet.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Sarcophagus (1986)

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Stephanie Bolster

The spring Vancouver sang “Something’s Happening
Here,” something happened over there.

It’s still happening.

The prince and princess opened
65 pavilions, a highway
of stalled vehicles, an alabaster statue
behind glass. The city had arrived.



. . .


Gorbachenko suffered a radiation burn on his back where Sashenok’s hand was
located when he helped carry him out.

Vomiting and losing
consciousness. Pins and needles,
a taste of metal.


. . .


41 international + 7 provincial + 2 territorial + 3 state + 9 corporate + 2 theme + 1
special (treasures from the life of a pharaoh).


. . .


Just before it happened and before
it opened, Gram died
and there were sandwiches.
A new haircut she wouldn’t see.


. . .


Scavengers strip all metals.
Visitors ditch protective garments
at set intervals.
More horses than ever.

On Google Earth, a place of rivers.


. . .


She’d have remembered when they found
another pharaoh’s tomb. (The curse
of the mosquito, wonderful things.)

Though she didn’t know she’d be gone
before Expo opened, she hadn’t planned to go.
Too many steps to get there
though just three kilometres
if one could fly.


. . .


The man with the hand on his back.
The glass roof, fallen in instalments.
Her kitchen print of Jesus.
The shut-up air that held the meddled relics.
The land plaza, the air plaza.
Near her ear, that purple spot.
Kaput.


. . .


But: the geodesic dome.
A child’s hair in a drain.
The book beside the bed.
Some benches, now perched near beaches.
A classroom floor through which a tree.
What the looters left.
The bookmark in the book beside the bed.
Cards for future birthdays.


. . .


The place on East 4th lives there still,
made new. (Almost but not quite a street
you can go down onscreen. The time
of the cherry blossoms.) Of the cybercafé
on the corner, she would recognize the brick.


. . .


Her death, the last turn
of the turnstiles, not disasters.

In Kiev, they held the May parade
but no children of the government
went out that day.

Five years later, the princess
visited Chernobyl’s children, listened,
stroked their cancers. Click here to see her
lean her head into her hands. Even thinner
than at Expo. Listen
to the shutters.


. . .


Twenties set aside inside
a granddaughter card in one of many drawers,
enough for an ankh, Egyptian symbol
of eternal life. Sixteen, trying on irony
or was it hope.


. . .


As for the #4 reactor . . . , we estimate it will be 20,000 years before the real estate
will be fully safe.
Real estate?
Only the old were allowed back.


. . .


Her house brought in thousands less than Asking.
The adjoining lot, with dandelions,
next to nothing.

It all started after Expo
they say. Then the skyline
filled with cranes.


. . .


Her last steps up the steps.
Back from dinner for her 87th

No, she was not in bed,
she had gotten up,
the bathroom was a small room, hardly
large enough to fall,
though she must have.

The heart of course.


. . .


What happened over there clicks up through the trunks, the blades of grass.
Swallows with cataracts nest in the sarcophagus.


. . .


Where it happened, a whole
new city. They had to clean
the soil first, before they built
the glass towers.


. . .


Someone on Facebook has her name.


. . .


The lone and level sands.








Italicized material from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Grieving

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Susan Ioannou

In darkening days
when pulse slows,
a great shaggy bear
fattened on berries, and cranky,
lumbers to sniff out a cave in the rocks,
the warmth of forgetfulness, deep sleep.

Who would urge it to spring
back into sharp light and wind,
to lick only snowflakes swirling the snout,
to skid along ice
even great claws cannot grip
before time’s twist in the belly
hungers for a rebirth?

Some too wrap around ourselves
a thickening memory,
lie down, inhale minutes passing
fed up with foraging, fighting, or fleeing
and fill a hollow with rest
mindless, simply to be.

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The World Is Never Enough with Us

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Stephen Collis

I should apologize for another
Poem about death and political economy
But the daily walk is the graveyard
Emily, treading, treading
Like the Fang people of Africa with the
Bundled sticks of their dead dried
Folded and packed around on their backs
Thin children that never wake or complain

*

I open a file called “no file”
A messianic cloud of media
Rising above rioting squares
The colony called “don’t stop”
Does not stop—flails against futurity

It could yet be about corruption
It could yet be about better worlds
It stops just outside of town, rumbling
The largest truck you’ve ever seen
It’s bucket filled with half the earth. Literally.

*

The other night I read a novel
In the file called “no file” I lodge
Records of evacuations, abandonments,
Foreclosures and dispossessions

According to the avant-garde
This isn’t new
And “new” means “maybe we can
sell you another one of these.”

I am upbeat despite the end-times
Faux comforts and police horizons

*

My daughters are shopping at the mall
It’s a green space we call “eternity”
All their lives are an imaginary
Of the yet-to-come

Even the mall is still only a dry unceded field
Mice wander and developers eye
With hungry imaginations crooning

You’re so fucking spatial
I wish I was spatial

*

Note to self:
Perimeters are difficult to discern
And species are in constant motion
Curling towards their disappearance
Engines culling “data” we will not read

I find it difficult
To imagine the lives of many others
Though their abandoned velour couches
Can be found in the forest
Soggy Blue Star Dust, Dr. Pepper

*

Mostly we keep blowing
Each other up
Like bombs are our way of saying

S’up, I’m here too
Is this crazy human meat times or what?
Now let’s keep making money, death mill daddy-O

*

My daughters cannot decide:
Zombie movie or cell phones?
I could still be dreaming
Of France and revolutions
Or walking between the etched stones

*

I tell the girls what matters
Is the soft light just back
Of the collective’s desiring eye
The beach we build beneath
The mall’s unmade paving stones
(though I do not mention
the continuous rule of dead
labour over living
or their future riveting
to a single fraction of time)

We choose the Zombie movie
Because life is like that

*

Emily, shall we hide our brave face
On this daily walk
Or take us simultaneous
As complicit beings wondering
How to stop, but carry on differently—
All we’re freighted with—
Unearned privilege, debt, colonies,
Muttering doges, sputtering lanterns,
The metallic insides of the earth,
The proximity of death squads—
And still slink silently
Towards better worlds?

*

Of course complicity just means
You have to change yourself entire
When changing the tired world

Its Molotov banquets,
Its endless lines of tanks idling nearby
Its schools for unlearning indigeneity

*

As if all we had to do was
Make the world strange again, hmm?
What is the nearness
Of economies and lobotomies?
Note how money is
The cryogenic liquid
Of this period evaporating
What lasts
And filling the tanks of
Sulphurous lies—

Just don’t look up at the eyedroppers
Poised above our frozen faces
As we gaze at the empyrean
Of stained acoustic ceiling tiles

*

Meanwhile beneath the glassy surfaces
Of our smartphones—deep in pocket—
Young girls and boys
My daughters’ ages and younger
Pull handfuls of dusky coltan
From a muddy trench in the Congo
And somewhere some kid—god love him—
Says it’s all good
Just before his brains become
Some zombie’s next meal

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

A song in the context of its album

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Jason Christie

soon to be simply discs or tracks
not dropped like stitches nor
ushered by storks, not
pre-approved for mortgages
nor credit limits pushed
just within reach of some
golden sunset over what-
ever lush green hill waits

soon to be simply vinyl or tape
not appearing like magic,
nor jutting like so many
mountains through crust
over millennia, not rising
as temperatures, nor
advancing as armies, nor
swarming with all these
dead bees, nor falling
like reddish-orange leaves
after summer rolls on

soon to be simply laserdisc or mp3
not reigning down through
history like a monarch’s line,
nor splitting the heavens like
thunderous applause, not
angling for advantage over
the other anglers, nor
simply advertising success
in tidy couplets meant to
encourage a belief in an
orderly universe within
which rebelliousness
sells cheeseburgers

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Absence

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Jacqueline Turner

Ledgers make light of the news.

Policy equates practice, designates who is who.

You book it, reveal the space where light might leak.

All thorough, a pencil erases tremulous views.

Numbers can dictate geography, as well as balances.

(all the ways I inhabit you, take you in)

Rain evaporates eventually and it gets too hot to sleep.

Volumes of Stein riffling in the wind left open.

You can’t survive without guts, gutters.

A return clunks if a typewriter, or if a driveway full of parked cars.

Ivy covers. Love persists.

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Lesson 12

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Colin Fulton

2.1 Front Facelock Variants 2.1.1 Swinging fisherman suplex 2.1.2 Rolling release suplex 2.1.3 Slingshot suplex 2.1.4 Suplex slam 2.1.4.1 Sitout suplex slam 2.1.5 Inverted suplex slam 2.1.5.1 Sitout inverted suplex slam 2.1.5.2 Delayed vertical suplex 2.1.5.3 Rotating vertical suplex 2.1.5.4 Drop suplex 2.1.6 Underhook suplex 2.2 Belly-to-Back Variants 2.2.1 Belly-to-back suplex 2.2.1.1 High angle belly-to-back suplex 2.2.2 Leg hook belly-to-back suplex 2.2.2.1 Bridging leg hook belly-to-back suplex 2.2.2.2 Swinging leg hook belly-to-back suplex 2.2.3 Cobra clutch suplex 2.2.4 Crossface chickenwing suplex 2.2.5 Electric chair suplex 2.2.6 Full nelson suplex 2.2.6.1 Karelin Lift 2.2.6.2 X-Plex 2.2.7 Tiger suplex 2.2.8 Half nelson suplex 2.2.9 Pumphandle suplex 2.2.10 Sleeper suplex 2.2.11 Three-quarter nelson suplex 2.3 Belly-to-Belly Variants 2.3.1 Super belly-to-belly suplex 2.3.2 Capture suplex 2.3.3 Double underhook suplex 2.3.4 Head-and-arm suplex 2.3.5 Table top suplex 2.3.6 Trapping suplex 2.4 Side Variants 2.4.1 Saito suplex 2.4.1.1 Leg hook saito suplex 2.4.2 Side suplex 2.4.3 Northern lights Suplex 2.5 Inverted Facelock Variants 2.5.1 Inverted inverted suplex

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Pig Heart

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Sue Sinclair

“Our bodies are mysterious because they are alive.”
-Dr. Doris Taylor, Director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota


A “ghost heart,” she calls it.
Lifeless, suspended in a glass dome
between worlds.

The lab is full of them.
Time pings off the glass like a swarm of insects
at night—yet inside there is no night.
No rhythm. No sleep. No end.

*

She rinses the dead heart,
injects its rubbery walls with stem cells,
flips the old organs like houses.

*

In the lab they speak of hearts
as “dead” or “alive.” Meaning what? Is there such
thing as the life
of a heart, a heart-like life? If so, it’s possible that a dead one
wouldn’t even be a heart anymore. It wouldn’t be any kind of thing.
A “ghost” then, as she calls it,
if we can speak of the body and not just the spirit
as ghost.

*

When she filled the first heart
with living cells, it didn’t start beating
immediately. A tiny pacemaker was attached.
Days passed,
then Harald and Thomas called her from the lab.

*

A rosy flush
like dawn creeps into the flesh …

*

A stem cell
can divide indefinitely, and in this it resembles God.
It is necessary and sufficient for skin and bones and eyes and lungs,
teeth and hands and hair
and heart.
But it is none of those things.
It’s might, maybe, perhaps, the incarnate what-if
of every organ, an idea in the flesh.

*

The lab fills with plums, ripening
organs suspended
in glass bells, the spell of death
slept off like a fairytale.

Half-orphan, half-parent,
they hang like sleeping birds, like orchids,
like smoked meats,
cocoons, candied apples, like oysters yet to be plucked
from their shells.

They swell in imitation of a world
they don’t fully recall, waken to a future
we can barely imagine,

tiny beating hearts,

first fruit in the kingdom
of first fruit.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Opening: From the Balcony

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Jenny Sampirisi

Without intent. The island. The lake in the foreground. The forest in the background. The sky.

The sky goes chest-first into the lake. The forest goes in backwards. Out there: call it overdose. Call it overwhelming. Goes in backwards. The light on Dublin, on New York, on Toronto, on St. John’s, on the rocks just under the surface of the lake. The place is of the geometrical. Infected frames. The real world and the human world.

Out there and in here.

The lines drawn are undrawing themselves. You lift your phone, take the shot, and the landscape is pulled inside your palm where you can hold it like a pear. Now: inside your hand is the water. The light in the water. You send it away.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Curtains

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Stuart Ross

I pull back the curtains. A parking lot. In the distance, a camel wanders. The sky is
nearly white with clouds. Oil stains.

I pull back the curtains. The trees are so close together they appear to be hugging.
Caterpillars dangle between them. The colours smudge and blur, like watercolours.

I pull back the curtains. A perfectly groomed lawn with a folding chair in the centre.
A child with Peter Ustinov’s head sits completely still. A lawnmower passes from one
side of the lawn to the other.

I pull back the curtains. Another lawn. Green, but speckled with yellow dandelions. A
rippling breeze.

I pull back the curtains. A conveyor belt carries dolls’ heads from right to left.
When the heads reach the end, they fall off the belt, into a pile on the floor.

I pull back the curtains. They pull themselves closed again.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

To My Suicidal Husband

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Priscila Uppal

Please do not look for poetry
in your death. Your drowning or
hanging or tsunami of pills & booze
will not be poetic.

There is no residue of poetry
in a bloated cheek snagged by a fish hook,
in a cracked leather belt swaying
from a light fixture or in a sludge of vomit
protruding from your throat like a second tongue.

And certainly no poetry will fall
upon your devastated wife folding
the last pairs of your dirty underwear &
ignoring the phone on a Saturday night,
piles of pizza crusts on the coffee table,
one of your horror films running aimlessly
on the screen, wondering why you
never imagined her twitching hands,
the packing up of your extensive library,
or the signed book of your own poems,
To Priscila, my love, because nothing exists
without you, under her lumpy pillow, now
warm as soggy shoes left to dry in the sun, and
her sobbing the last of her suspect memories
of your tender eyes, your brisk, hunched
gait, the slow circling of your hands
across her belly, into the awful emptiness of
hangers, towels and toothbrush holders,
microwavable meals and refrigerator
reminders, because your imagination
failed to reconcile the oxymorons
of her & your death.

This is not poetry.
Trust me.
While I am still your wife, and not a warning.

There is nothing less poetic than your death.
And nothing more plain.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Programme

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Garry Thomas Morse

Recline upon bird down, tightening loopholes, feeling a touch of the artist
in the middle of the night—palaver &

slaver to mark the occasion of our first impudent glare, everything flared
tricked out like seasonal cues & slashes in fabric stuffed under coat
rushing through alarm with a genteel corner of your dripping image

Read: the double helix hologram on rear license plate stalks is the only real thing
in this freaking place

Reach across arm rest when the tympanum is being retuned & tenderly clutch the
ineffable junk of the significant—okay, now who does not have a partner
for this exercise—your musical bust should be turning and grinning

Run, run into frozen sea of grey square with flopping image in arms &
draw continual comparisons to that fishy petroglyph before you can
dredge up the food that is life and so on

Wait for one thousand and three eternities. Wait, I said not to interrupt

Read: the double helix hologram on rear license plate stalks is the only real thing
in this freaking place

Remove your things & find the bird down in the dark & indulge in the shock
gathering static at the first cold snap—slapping flesh & smacking that idiocy
forming in the puddle of a gormless face, then stiffening into muddle

Tread beyond regime & routine toward that frigid grey sea & perfectly striking
wait in the cold until you freeze into sensuous folds of marble—wait, wait, you
leave a smouldering hole of light in the clouds

Bite the fourth character in line & then behind that tricked out longhouse
offer compensation that is two hundred blankets inside a canoe then
tweak the hidden rebellion beneath your thawing folds of marble

Read: the double helix hologram on rear license plate stalks is the only real thing
in this freaking place

Break any heart that lacks the subsistence of root vegetables &
bury it at sea, or in the choppy grey square during a squall then
tell me this is not happening upon the squawking bird down

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Quikrete Self-Levelling Cement Compound: Consumer Feedback

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Helen Guri

From the window I can see it has already happened,
in the time it takes a tub of time to tip.
Lawn and pink impatiens pulled
inch by quick-inch under the lip.

It tumbles down the stairs in practically
no seconds: me. My saddest shoes are flat as tickets
to an exhibit that’s just appeared.

The lookalike lake is opaque as a spill in MS Paint,
as the yard before anyone saw it.
It takes my reflection under its wing.

It is cake batter, panless, tempting each direction.
Invites the eensy clovers to change behind its towel.
Which is grey, drenched, immense, curiously
gritless, silken, impossible to lift.

Maybe Google Earth has something, just here, to hide.
A vein in the brain blooped like a metallic-inked pen.
Or Celeste, Universal Dentist,
could be taking an impression of everything.

I have always loved the little sharp-edged tools.
A natural assistant, I select a spackle
blade, row out, face almost in the starless,
rudder of a nose set to “hover.”
My idea is just smooth things over.

(I’m not really talking to my husband,
who is, by the evidence, to blame—
plus, he’s busy trying to jerry-rig a barricade
with the cement’s own packaging.
Surviving fragments of the text suggest
we have less than twenty minutes.)

That’s when I notice the ant
stepping into the slow surf, matte
Jell-O on a windless expanse—
Whoa there. Hey. Hey!
She tries to turn but can’t.

Then, without a backward glance, her friend joins her.

It’s girls’ night out at Aquafit, with weights, Yes, someone has
in the deep end, and I am powerless tipped the carton
to stop them from registering. labelled “evening.”

It’s easier once you’re in, isn’t it?
says the second ant, in pheromone code, to the first,
who sweats a clumpy leg-lift.
The shadows flex and lengthen.

Whisked egg whites, soft ice cream,
blue smoothie, maple filling, wild
honey, ranch dressing, pudding with carrageenan,
barbecue drippings: a montage of pools
these gals have lapped before.

I can’t handle it anymore.
I grab a dead leaf from fall’s waterfall Disclaimer:
and scoop them out. They are two tiny elephants pouring may
towing their haunches to the statuary. affect the
Time is speeding up as the cement slows down. Season.
If I wash them clean, they’ll drown.

I should really stop looking, but, New Scene:
an earthworm spikes the surface, seamstress
pursuing her childhood dream of becoming megafauna,
a lake monster, and enjoying some early success.
She’s gained a costume’s worth of extra skin
like a hooded cobra’s crinoline
just by being in her element.
Who am I to play the skeptic?

My gaze only solidifies her fame. A dozen more ants
wade in to photograph her body with their jaws.
The trap is more complicated than any of us know.

“Should we be wearing masks?” This is the first thing
I say aloud. My husband, a man who cannot resist a homonym,
recalls a time he daubed grapefruit-scented clay
all around his eye holes. Though synthetic,
it parched like an afternoon of real sun,
the kind of singular experience statistics suggest
will add scenes to your life, stretching it.

Lines like that make me want to clock him.
I have just the trowel, twitching its shadow The end
like a minute-hand over our moonscape, dripping. is coming!

“Do you find it hard to breathe?” he asks. “The particulate…”
Yes, god yes. With all my heart.
We twang twin yellow bands around our heads
and secure our personal bubbles,
as the intercoms on aircraft instruct, “before helping others.”
Gravity, a rule I don’t especially understand,
is still visibly doing its thing.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Like the Shield of Achilles

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Shane Rhodes

I come before you today
one proud Canadian
among a nation
of these
in terrible times
in times of crisis
in security
in harm’s way
we are 35 million
projecting weakness
Consider this
We are smart
we are selfless
we are on the cusp
of
what
we are
and deplore self-satisfaction
but we come
great
we contemplate
great
we draw great strength from our
great
past
and welcome all those
who inhabit this land
the first
Consider this
to the last
we are
Serious
People of peace
gathering our
great
forces
and wherever and whenever
we unleash that might
we raise our grateful voices and
missing
Consider this
Pioneers
From the days of the coureurs des bois
built this country
where none would have existed
from them
we forge
new lies
before us
Consider this
under the maple leaf

All words in this poem are from the October 2013 Speech from the Throne, entitled Seizing
Canada’s Moment, which opened the Second Session of the Forty-First Parliament of Canada.

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God of Unfulfilled Longings

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Elizabeth Bachinsky

Happiness where are you? I haven’t got a clue. —Eytan Mirsky


Gina—pretty, thirty-two, and who wears a lot of black, not
because she is in mourning but because she’s got nothing else
to wear—has started making love with a boy of nineteen on
a semi-regular basis, a practice she finds vastly rewarding
although occasionally problematic, which is not to say the boy
hasn’t demonstrated a remarkable learning curve.

Elephants, having been hunted into near extinction, paint!
Sometimes better than people!

This one time, Gina’s boy (trapped in an elevator) thought:
I’m trapped in an elevator. You hear stories like this and never believe them.
The elevator rose thirty-six floors at an astonishing speed before
he hit the emergency button which, to his surprise brought him
obediently, politely, to the ground floor. He walked right out.

‘God of Unfulfilled Longings’ from the collection God of Missed Connections by Elizabeth Bachinsky,
published by Nightwood Editions. Used with the permission of the publisher.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Scars

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Katherena Vermette

1.

scars glare
like glyphs
on a wall long dark
uncloaked
by the finding light

lines etched on
skin white
against brown
marks imposed
curved
a script to decipher
slow
a story of another
time





 
2.

lines emboss
smooth skin
tattooed like secrets
read like code
spoken with hand
crooked to ear
breath hot
against the lobe
did you know?
we should have known
this

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Iphigenia’s Crossing

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Larissa Lai

(for michelle sylliboy)

wood element green
and young yang
turns the cycle pushing wood through water
dook chung! (rattle rattle rattle)
dook dook dook

dook chung!

time
latitude north
longitude west
winds, weather and remarks

t. hudson’s receipt for two hundred and three sea-otter skins

a boat then iphigenia nubiana
200 tons burthen
self-sacrificing daughter who dies for father and country
which?

it’s 1788 virginal
iphigenia crosses water

under command
of mr. douglas “officer of considerable merit, who was well acquainted with
the coast of America” meaning Canada-to-come
our home on native land

here comes another
metal element copper bottomed
felice, ever faithful

to cross the northern pacific
sailing the long arc of the sandwich islands
from wampoa to nootka sound
captain john meares at the helm
and passengers tianna prince of atooi
winee of hawaii
a boy and a man from maui
and comekela, a nuu-chah-nulth man
ghosting back
multi-critical

and what? a chinese crew?! for both ships?
partially—
“The Chinese were, on this occasion, shipped as an experiment : — they have been
generally esteemed an hardy, and industrious , as well as ingenious race of people;
they live on fish and rice, and, requiring but low wages, it was a matter also of
œconomical consideration….”

o economical
an ode owed
old owl says it was all about the otter
sea otters in water
pots and kettles for pelts
metal melts or oxidizes into air

up and down the coast meares and douglas trading
ditidaht
coast salish
nuu-chah-nulth
kwakwaka’wakw
heiltsuk
tsimshian
haida
lingit
pot for pelts
markets for canton system
British East India Company vs. Cohong
with Hoppo to collect taxes for Qing Emperor
and the Thirteen Factories where it all went down
pelts for porcelain and tea for two
the global snowball
already gathering steam

this is the house that meares built
or rather his chinese carpenters
the wood of our rather not
this is the cannon emplacement
built by chinese smiths
and for the water–
a schooner: the north west america

this is the house that douglas tore down
dishonouring the promise
meares made to nuu-chah-nulth
who built? whose wood?
who forged? whose metal?
and later, who destroyed?
whose axe?
whose hammer?

i’ve been working on the railway
all the live long day

sing a song for the wood and metal men
who crossed the water east to get west
to make the world go the other way round

trade roots
contact of our always already
between the lines of which
we might have become family

britain vs america vs spain
spill crisis at nootka
strain for colonial sovereignity
when martínez beat out meares, douglas, kendrick, funter
where did the chinese smiths and carpenters go?
to san blas as captured crew?
to china?
to death?
or into hiding
among coast salish
kwakwaka’wakh
nuu-chal-nulth
stó:lō
secwepemc

the qing once self-sufficient
giving trade itself as gift
undone by opium

iphigenia smoked by the treaty of nanjing
my home on ceded land
recolonized by the master of all trades
trade

water nurtures wood
iphigenia crosses east to get west
unceded columbia
calls in the ghosts

callicum
maquinna
wicananish
hanna
detootche
comekela
acchon aching

aching for earth’s return

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Orphan

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Jordan Abel
It was also learned that their mother had died before their father had taken the homestead, and therefore they were left           s to fight their own battle. This government ought to be indicted for running a gambling game, robbing children,
       children of a soldier, at that. If I could have had just a few tears on tap, with that hospital talk, and you boys being poor and                  s—shucks! If a firing line of veteran soldiers can be heart- ened, surely the spirit and courage of
waifs needed fortifying against the coming win- ter. “We may not be very han’some to the naked eye, and we may not wear our handk’chiefs in our shirt cuffs, but there ain’t no widders and        s doin’ our washin’, and a man can walk away from his house, stay a month, and find it there when he comes back.” Their joints were limber, and their legs unsteady; one and all were              ed, too, for in that babel of sound no untrained ears could catch a mother’s low. If I wanted more money inside  a  year  or  two, I  would  have  to  work  for it just as if I were an         without a dad who writes checks on demand.  That  was  long,  long ago, when the             came into the Campbell family. There was a subdued exclamation from Manners, but Pete went on, “Seems he was the uncle of this Bull; took Bull in when Bull was
           ed, because he had to, not because he want- ed to, and he raised Bull up to be a sort of general slave around the place. All this about a camel–” a devil and an ostrich and an              child in one,” as we have been told–but remember that often in the solitary bush one’s animals are one’s only companions, that on them one’s life depends. The romantic fact that Lois was the        of white captives  to  the  Senecas,  and  had  living  neither kith nor kin, impressed Angelina sentimentally, and Lana with an insatiable curiosity, if not with suspicion. This ‘ere ‘s for the relief of widders and           s. Why, I could tell you of many                    s
who–whose stories were different.”      Mrs. Lar- kin died, and little Fay was left an        with no known relative. But let me tell you when your duty’s done here that I will have a word to say about your future. It’ll be news to you to learn I’m an                       . If you were half a man you’d go out an’ kill him yourself, an’ not leave a lot of widows an’               ed children!” Whatever she was–                    or waif, left alone in the world by a murdering band of Sioux – – an unfortunate  girl to be cared for, succored, pitied–none of these considerations accounted for the change that his power over her had wrought in him. He had lis- tened to a moan in his keen ear; he had felt a call of something helpless; he had found a gleam of chestnut hair; he had stirred two other men to help him befriend a poor, broken-hearted, half- crazed              girl. I’m an              . Them as wish- es to contribute anything toward the              will find a hat handy.” The woodpeckers only learned how Miss Mary was an           ; how she left her uncle’s house, to come to California, for the sake of health and independence; how Sandy was an
          , too; how he came to California for ex- citement; how he had lived a wild life, and how he was trying to reform; and other details, which, from   a   woodpecker’s   viewpoint,  undoubtedly must  have  seemed  stupid,  and  a waste of time. “I  understand,”  he  began,  “that  Melissa  Smith, an,        and one of my scholars, has talked with you about adopting your profession. I’ll bet a doughnut he’s an              , though.” The father that will not support his own child is not–does not–is worse than if they were               s.”
Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

On Reason

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Sandy Pool

He was thinking about reason. About how, for a short moment, he could see himself clearly: living with a woman in a large, empty house. He thought he might cherish the all-inclusive vacations, the daiquiris chaliced in tropical fruit cups. And he thought something else, too. He thought about the Greek mathematicians, who argued one did not involve number. That the hybrid marriage of one and two begot three. He thought it might be sweet, to have something to come home to – a roast perhaps, or a nice bit of lamb with a solid mint sauce. But then, he thought of that song—the one where one was the loneliest number but two could be as bad as one. He suddenly remembered two could be the loneliest number since the number one. And when he went to sleep that night, he thought of his poor head. And then he thought of Goya, and Goya’s poor head. And he thought how sad it was to sleep—his skull assaulted by all those owls and bats.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Run with the Creeps

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Nick Thran

At a shop window, he stares at a custom-made leather shoe. It glows like the hull of a conquistador’s ship. Starting price: five grand. Would it leave a trail of slug-slime wherever he walked? Would hummingbirds fly from dress-print jacarandas to feast on the ghastly sweetness of that trail? Would the walk turn to a run—past the stately brick buildings, past projects, past the fire pits where kids roast plastic dollar-store Halloween masks of cats and pigs, past the last brittle-boned streetlamp, and out onto the boiled-peach-skin surface of the river? Would it float? Would it chart a course backward through history? Would it stomp on each image in the kingdom of images? He lingers there at the window and wonders; knowing it’s creepy to linger, maybe even to wonder. Then a sewer rat slides out from inside of the shoe like a magician’s rabbit, and stares at him, and doesn’t seem afraid.

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Standing in Front of Antlers Mounted on a Wall so They Look Like They’re Growing from Your Head

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Paul Vermeersch

You must be still. You must be as a photograph. The slightest
tremor could provoke the antlers’ unexpected flight
into the wallpaper’s pattern of birches.

If you do it right, you should feel the coronets
rooting painlessly into your skull.

Let only those who look you in the eye see where you are.
You must will yourself invisible to everyone else,
or else you must will them all blind.

If you do it right, you will feel your blood rush to the velvet
tissue regenerating on the polished bones.

But you must be still, and your human silhouette
must be broken by the shadows of green leaves
nourished by a spear of light.

If you do it right, the birch grove will surround you,
and the predators will never know that you were there.

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Walking on the Moon, in Moulay Ibrahim

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Penn Kemp

We have landed they tell us
in the centre for all Morocco
of magic & the old ways
high in the Atlas mountains….

We have heard this.

What we have not heard or seen
happens for the first time
today via the one TV in the one cafe:

Apollo astronauts land on the moon
& high-step in slow motion, gawky
in grey scale.

“Ha!” says Omar. “What a stunt.
Those Americans are so clever.

But we know. Moroccans
are not easily tricked. This
is a fiction to entertain the people.

Quelle blague.” He pretends to toss
a rock off the dusty floor at the screen.

The crowd in the cafe laugh
at the outlandish gear, the preposterous
instrument & helmet gimmicks
clumsier than any cartoon.

Still scoffing, the moon men jostle outside
& hidden in hooded dun djellabas
melt into the lunar dusk of their grey plateau.

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