This week I'm featuring the work of Amanda Jernigan. Encounter A friend, seeing his babe in ultrasound, imagined it an astronaut, “behind glass dome reflections, lost in space…,” and so I had that image close to mind when the technician finally tipped her screen to me, revealing—not an astronaut, but Earth, so “small, light blue, so touchingly alone.” Thus Leonov. It was a commonplace, back then, that once we had the earth in sight, the isolation of the planet “known,” we would clean up our act, would mend our ways— a kind of cosmic recognition scene. So much for that, the skeptic in me says. And yet as I beheld you floating there I felt myself grow small, the air grow thin, as if I were the one adrift in space, and you the one who might yet pull me in. Dos-à-dos We settle down to sleep at night, affectionate, facing one another, or torso fast to torso pressed as if our hearts could speak together. Mornings, we wake back to back. However much we love, there's something in us always turns away. Let us forgive this in each other. We can make it up by day. May 31st The crabapple tree is abandoned to bloom, the sky to blue, the barn- boards to the weather. Try as I might to abandon myself to work, I hear you splitting wood. You've lost your father. Scale Three weeks before our son was born you went out east to build a barn from panels of translucent glass: set in the middle of the marsh with nothing close at hand for scale, the barn might have been large enough to accommodate a man, or small enough for him to reach his arms around it. It took a while to build the barn: the week you planned to be away stretched into two. You said you felt like Odysseus, his wife and infant son at home, detained for years beyond his expectations. I think about Odysseus, set in the middle of his story, nothing close at hand for scale: it's hard to tell if it's his ship that carries him back home, or he who carries his black ship back into harbour. A lot of things are like that now: these days I carry around our son, who one day will carry us around, inside him. The poems "Dos-à-dos," "May 31st," "Encounter," and "Scale" are from the collection All the Daylight Hours, by Amanda Jernigan, published by Cormorant Books Inc. (Toronto). Copyright © 2013 Amanda Jernigan. Used with the permission of the publisher. Q&A Kateri Lanthier: You have an adept and unshowy way with rhyme, subtle and yet certainly powerful. “Mornings, we wake back to back. // However much we love, there’s something / in us always turns away. // Let us forgive this in each other. / We can make it up by day.” (From “Dos-à-dos” ) Your work connects strongly with the canon through epigraphs, quoted phrases and echoes, and polished rhyme... Continue reading

This week I'm featuring the work of Matt Rader. Music I awoke on Veteran’s Day in the United States To blue skies and a republican Cali sunshine That made the whole town of McKinleyville Appear lit from the inside, as if it were its own Source of light, as if it still heard the sad music Of its first name, Minor, and heard the minor Third McKinley sang when he was shot through The stomach and the pancreas and the kidney At the Temple of Music in Buffalo, New York In nineteen hundred and one. We were talking Poetry, my friend and me, and what happened To the lake in Blue Lake after the Mad River Was leveed and how McKinley was the last Veteran of the Civil War elected President, How he died of gangrene because the surgeons Had been forced to operate by reflected sun- Light and could not find the bullet. We talked As we drove the back roads of Humboldt County About our faith in the persistent wellspring Of meaning and sang along with Springsteen, Headed north to the tall trees at Prarie Creek, Past the beachhead at Trinidad and the casino And the Orick gas bar, past the present moment Into our late afternoon beer at the Fieldbrook General Store where we sat in the dimness And recalled things that happened long before Us like the redwood forest and the salt marsh In Humboldt Bay, like the Pan-American Expo Where the first x-ray machine was on display And President McKinley reached out to shake The hand of a man carrying a pistol concealed By a hankerchief. “All my people are larger Bodies than mine,” my friend quoted Agee, “By some chance, here they are, all on this earth.” These are the facts as I know them. McKinley Died from a lack of light and the assassin Was executed by electricity on State Street In Auburn, New York, on the traditional land Of the Iroquois Confederacy, two weeks before A wrecking crew razed the Temple of Music. (Poem from A Doctor Pedaled Her Bicycle over the River Arno, copyright 2011 House of Anansi) Talking Trojan War Blues “All the new thinking is about death,” Robert Hass said, longingly, in a scribble Of blackberries. I was dreaming Seamus Heaney On the porch while the children pedalled Their bicycles down the street, Dragging their long, late summer shadows To death behind them. Such tender Desecration. Even Achilles’ horses wept In the field of battle days before They were made to drag through dust Hector’s body. “Longing, we say, Because desire is full of endless distances.” Robert Hass said that. You can be in my dream If I could just remember it. I said that. My Life Aboard the Last Sailing Ship Carrying Cumberland Coal You give your firstborn daughter A central-Asian name Meaning blue or water. Years later two bluebirds alight on either arm And an artist’s quick needlework Stitches birds to skin So even In your obsequies... Continue reading

This week I'm featuring the work of Souvankham Thammavongsa. At the Farm I was sitting in the car counting the black flies They had come in through the open window There were four One was on the rearview mirror The other three were perched on my left hand I heard a gunshot by the barn and thought nothing of it We were at a farm I saw a cow come charging forward with half its head gone A man with an axe came running behind it He hit it once Once he hit it And it fell to the ground Everything was eaten Its eye appeared in a soup that night Everything was accounted for Noor The Arabic word for light Two circles sit side by side Twins, equal in size and shape and the space they both contain They had been made to be like each other Up there, one contains all light Kept at a distance, as far away as a lost love, a hope long past, an apology that changes nothing The other by its proximity seems only to have light, a compass for the sun, a backseat to, a smaller sidekick On this sheet of paper, these two circles look to be the same, as close in likeness as they could ever be Stripped of light, one is like the other, as small, as equal, as alone Stouffville The houses rise up overnight, brushing over fields of dandelions, bright circles soon to be grey fluff. It seems the swans don't know yet. The reservoir now a parking lot, row upon row of outlines of white. Ever loyal to daylight and rain but never quite knowing how hard the storm, soaked and stooped, they keep their manners in all of this. They still come out, preened, their long white necks bending, a curtain call, a curtsy, bending and bowing down, bowing down, down low for bits of that sun. Postcard The real hour of the day is not known The sky is blue-grey The snow is flat in these fields Bare trees line themselves along the horizon like shards from black glass The sun, if it will rise today, will begin on the left Every shape of cloud has been here once In an hour, the buildings will be the first to rise into view Each building, a neat ordering of glass and light Nearby a needle sticks out Two circles at the pointed end, a thread-through, the start of a beading These circles are different in size They do nothing but offer us a different view of ourselves An assemblage of pretty dots and moving bits Into this, we are coming for the real hour of the day (Poems from Light by Souvankham Thammavongsa, copyright 2013 by Pedlar Press) Q&A Nick Thran: When you began to lay all of these poems out together and think of the book as a whole, how much did the subject and presence of light throughout just naturally settle into its... Continue reading

This week I'm featuring the work of Stevie Howell. A Gospel That picture’s somewhere still: First Communion, 13 girls in lace and satin “Like a Virgin” frocks, legs crossed man-style under frills, floral hairpieces hanging flaccid over ears. Marrying God. An overlit confessional, gilded chairs, Father Antony’s embroidered bib, pew-fulls of frog-eyed parents who’d endured years waiting for our exorcisms. This was just before my faith fell and I stumbled toward Hari Krishnas at the Eaton Centre causeway and paid $20 for a tome they would have given away; tried to find in mock-leather what they found there, but it hid— or snapped up free papers about “the 18,000 realms,” and visited living room churches north on Bathurst with congregations of passive mutes; or let the Bahai indoctrinate me on Bloor, one afternoon, where they fed me channah in a muralized Olive Garden basement. I left with a cassette and a mental image of a saviour cresting a hill with a hankering for garlic bread. My high school and university were poverty and violence. A quadriplegic classmate lived in a Winnebago. Her mother’s ex cowered in a laundry hamper with a gun and killed her after mass. That’s all I know. I̶I̶I̶I̶I̶I̶ A 6-year-old child’s blanched skull sits surprised by its naked self on a curio encased museum shelf. Halogen glare bleaches eggshell, a smooth, ceramic plate forehead and hollow eye wells. Look closer nose to cold case, let your eyes trace outlines like starched lace, cheekbones hallowed out like caves, a fused stalagmite face. Beneath the eyes, lining mandible, future teeth hibernate in alcoves, a millimeter of mortar through which they’ll trake. Pincer roots of a surface tooth fork each underling in place; they rattle in their caverns, loose, small still, slanted, half-plane, as a child’s jittery script trounces lined pages before their handedness is identified. As if, in-between ulna and radius, a new toothpick plots to usurp an infant’s arm bone, ejecting the elder out the wrist. As if the skull has an innervated crank, a clock geared to mill-saw tilling out of a self-sarcophagus. Rip Torn Almosted into marble by medusa-eyed hoi polloi The Queen’s stone jowls, eraillure of crow’s feet, are freshly quarried—fifty years late, her face is lithic flaked into a lustrous, toothy smile, as electricity excites mercury vapor, she is lightboxed, backlit, mounted every few paces in the chambers of the London tube. Her cumulonimbus-hued bust, the size of Easter Island moai, is shit-grinning over diamonds, on exhibit for the great unwashed to grub up and drool over. Jewels encased in UV-proof acrylic vitrines, whettingly argon sandwiched, cannot be made stonier by our countryside-bred, dazed un-blink. We share our sheep’s hypoxic shrug at the Lorenz curve of the earth. We leap magpie-footed, shriek obsidian disbelief tidings, fervent for useless, shiny things. The Janus of the Jubilee and Olympics has her visage pinned to the bricks and loitering in tunnels; a tattered flag to the proclaimed, uncharted country of herself billows above the footbridge— the... Continue reading

This week I'm featuring the work of Jim Johnstone. Dog Ear It was years before I learned to call this prayer: the right-hand corner of a page turned down to make another page. I attempted to escape, then return to the boneyard where I’d removed an earring from my wife’s right ear – diamond, the crux of the universe contracting to leave a pin-sized hole midair. In that margin, my words remain transfixed until she disappears – proof that while I swore the world I’d created would double like a hand beneath my own, it merely stretches before me in consolation. There, there. Evel Knievel Negotiates the Fountain at Caesar’s Palace Heard myself speak fluently in my own language, have heard myself too described as hard work (as hard to get through as Scotch broth), though once someone rather bladdered told me I was magnetic. -Roddy Lumsden Behold my face at a quarter turn: dragonly, dog-eared, a carnal mask mirroring half-lit spits of wood. This morning Nevada furrows, my shoulders too warm for leather; yet I’ve no better armour against the wind, the stagey palms that threaten to bend and replace my stationary ramps, Caesar’s fountain. Downrange, I prepare to be bandaged, hear myself speak fluently in my own language: “Bridge the strips around my bicep. It’s where I... fuck, not like that. Grip the razor down-hilt... there. Push... shit... it won’t...”. I turn my gaze towards the melee that surrounds my bike, making’s landfill a network of forgotten jumps, a backwards glance before a maelstrom of sand. Derelict, I’ve seen how closely my muse lurks, have heard myself described as hard work: having the face of an eagle, lion and ox. Tricked out in off-white chaps, cape, the valley of the shadow of death, I gauge the line from rubber to ramp: uncamp its frame on doubled wings. Fountain-side, Romans balance, flock to witness my ramshackle horse couple with sky: behold my stance, my corrugated flanks that rake the air, its absence, (as hard to get through as Scotch broth), though once I groped around and found myself unmoored at latitude. What mechanics hold me, having already landed, what patience, body tossed ass-first over the gas-tank’s hive? The desert revives as if in dream: my head a brick, a helmeted weathervane unraveling in every plane at once. Lo, it’s clear that this is paradise, and if given a mic someone rather bladdered will tell me I’m magnetic. Louis Dudek, in Love Umbrella held aloft like paper pulled from a piñata, we trace the limits of Marie-Reine-du-Monde and bull inside. Bad luck: the basilica chaste save for the confetti of our entrance, the incline of a room within a room inked-in in happenstance. By chance, we’ve stumbled on our Waterloo: elderly parishioners lulled to sleep, pews like broken fingers on a working hand. I take yours now, know your grip, the clots that bulge like latticework, confine the prize of blood’s ascent. See here? Your skin grows lean. Exeunt. Love... Continue reading

This week I'm featuring the work of David O’Meara. So Far, So Stupid All those selfies I posted look really great. So spontaneous. Arm tentacled through bad light past the frame, an umbilical toward my ego. Freud, meet Descartes. Intentions, like airports, look deceptively the same, then you get a security pass for the doors just off the escalators. Inside my mind, there’s another mind, like a prop warehouse, dramatically cluttered at times. I go there, for the wind machine and free-standing door I just slam and slam. How I Wrote You must change your life, but first, wait a few minutes. After all, Rilke couch-surfed from castle to château for a decade before his internal mood ring shifted to purple and signalled the muse. He finessed this later as creative possession: an impulse so focused he’s said to forget the time of day, though Wikipedia claims he never missed a meal at Duino. Big deal. Whatever it was, he could direct the spirit’s surges and knew how to work a crowd in its wake. Imagine him on Facebook. LOL. Precious, yes, but how not to be when you’re born in Prague and write about angels. In any case, you won’t catch me mooning along parapets and sea walls; not because I wouldn’t, but so far there’ve been no offers. I booked a week at Banff in a forest studio, ate scones, startled a ground squirrel, kept forgetting to bring a jacket, and one night heard blues harmonica drift from the aboriginal arts lodge nearby. I texted a friend who’s Ojibwa. WTF? He wrote back ‘Why don’t you go over there and ask them what they’ve got to be blue about?’ Touché. So I managed some edits, and through the skylight watched yellow leaves parachute the branched heights to amass as ground cover. No thought-fox raised its rusty snout, or gifted prints across the page, though a few fingers of cask-strength Scotch made the waiting a little easier. Paradox: to be perfectly here, you must stop thinking about it, then it’s on. Most days I leaf around trying to sidle out of the peripheral sight of myself, so when I focus again, I might be astonished, do something real, feel like Jarrett at Köln, overtired and saddled with the wrong piano, forced to work the corners we get backed into. It might be a thunderbolt, but mostly a mule I keep thinking of when I picture myself in the grind between the start of some work and its end result, but like an apprentice before the koan, I’m afflicted by the absent revelation, never sure if it’s better to change the light bulb or stare into the dark. Silkworms Home-grown for extra income, they’re warmed in the watts of a standard light bulb till the egg forms a worm, small like a hair. Each one feasts on mulberry, a month-long course of shiny leaves, chubbing themselves into a pale, lazy wiggle. They wish to be a kimono cloud, ball of... Continue reading

This week I'm featuring the work of Sina Queyras. Elegy for the Letter Q as It Appears in The Waves No question, it was the quality of the quadrangles quailed with queues (in quads) that no queen – queer or not – would have sufficient qualities to (quarter or no) quarrel her way through. Though quarrelling might be thought common, a quest among quirky and quizzical quartets, it was actually quite uncommon. Quietly she quivered in a quicksilver quarto of quoits. She was quickest, at least quicker, and she quarrelled, quenched and in quotations, finally, quizzically, quit. Like a Jet Little streams passed all over their bodies. – Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass 1 A hole in the sky where softness hung, A crater where the world was, a moment The size of Manhattan: amazed We are not all sliding in. I skirt abjection, drag my nails against The hours. My eyes for one more glimpse, Ochre (August, the rough tear of cotton, The lace and wire, a harness of Clinging). There is no shrugging off Weight, no exit ramp, no ease or release, Perpetual shoulders on orange alert, jaw Scraping the floor, the body contorts, The body is fluid: I am leaking, I no longer care who sees me leak. 2 I held her briefly at the end because finally She could not scowl me away. Felt her unlatch, A small mass, rocketing like helium, body Already a swelling replicate of self. I could see no verve, no afterburn, no spirit Lingering, just my empty reaching out: How the dead can cower on the wing of A plane or, like a missile, shoot out of sight. Muffled drum of heart, my lungs, aging boxers Swelling in a crow storm, hungry as Buck Mulligan for her words, I chew them now, Hollow seed pods catching on my tongue, Those whiskers of good intention: sad Eliot’s jet, as if hoarding, gorging, on pain. 3 Every last vein crammed with absence. Hers Yours, ours, I must return to the now. Two Incompatible screens, the pixelated grief, The polyurethane grief, stuffed, animated, Shrunken sweaters aping across an abandoned Gym, Sexton’s arms outstretched, smoky Scotch a glass clinking across the honeyed floor. I await your return and, with it, futures Uncorking. Hold tight, spray of time, we don’t Race to death, it comes at us; there is no safety fence. Once you drop, you walk into the forest as though You owned it, you turn, wave, inhale black of day, Exhale sight. Inhale death, exhale life, Ozymandias: Everything that lives is light and she is now dark. 4 Time, they say, time, and with it healing but also Recrimination and upset, my tumourette an airbag Behind my eyes, blind me, my lack of patience: Why is my exuberance rewarded? Hers snuffed? Siblings crumble slow, unremarkable As fences across the prairie. Who set the bar So low? Who has tagged her foot? Mine? Those red lines traced across a chest, A lung split open: hard... Continue reading

This week I'm featuring the work of Shane Rhodes. From Err IntraVenus Lynne, we met the day Don asked to suck me off – not my cock, he made clear, but toes, without socks [boys in sandals got him off] – you wheel through that memory, your legs in casts, [the virus rhyming RNA to [reverse transcriptase] your DNA] bones sapped [combivir, saquinavir, ritonavir] by the daily pharmablasts to make you gag and keep the docs away. Those were the days we worked in then: homeless guys down on 2nd drunk on Old Stock beer by 10, sex workers [hookers] dazed by night work up from the streets for the free lipstick and condoms [safes] we dispensed, high on heroin [smack], or [as the cell becomes a sieve] coke [crack], eyes blue with [another negative test] mascara or black from pimp beatings in the parking lot [turns positive] out back. Lynne, you fundraised, you spoke, you organized, you were one of the few who could help men die and I never once saw you, like me, teary-eyed. Every day since then [this, the line I tend], I see it, think it, caught [daring words to mean] by habit [everything I’ve touched and seen] my fingers still type its name [all caps]: “it” that floating thing [Sex = Silence = Death] called a referent as in The doc says I’ve got IT – voice quiver bold italics carrying us away from the linguistic things we never wanted meant: GRID, the gay plague, the empty cipher AIDS, and Christian placards saying God Loves Fags [Insert thread: deadbody: doc, i’m 21 & just found out ive got HIV – i’m done] Dead. I write it now between the faces of the faceless men who came and went [Figure 1: see this micron pic of a lymphocyte swarmed by neon pink viral replicants, look how they shimmer and dance -- a sequin dress of nothingness] like so many torn couplets each with something new to mend. Lynn, we were the same age but you got fucked [the body with sex is blessed] and I didn’t that’s where our stories split – fucked by a boyfriend who didn’t know he had it, fucked by the used needle he shot with, the pusher who pushed it, fucked [it’s also never at rest] by the grower who grew it, the mule who shoved it up his ass at the border and got through it, fucked [and can churn for years] by their needles and plastic, the politicians with their votes and budgets, and fucked [in its own blood] by the poster saying He [a woman carrying a boychild] Was An Innocent Victim meaning everyone else [and tears] deserved it. You got fucked by [the infinite] a virus [and its 33,000,000 faces] that loves everything it erases. Lynne, so many words [you and the drugs got better] to say it, why [we slept together in your bed] I haven’t looked for you since then, [no stupid rhymes] scared... Continue reading

This week I'm featuring the work of Nyla Matuk. Don Draper Moths feather your far gazebo like young sailors on first leave. You know something, and keep reminding me of my own needs. You see an audience of blooming heads and sugared bank notes, and act accordingly. The swallows see it at five o’clock, a Wolfman’s tragedy. They hang themselves upside down, handsome sienna prizes in the semaphore of bats. Swayed by a summer night, I swing out to your silk pocket square standing at attention, a bird about-face. You’re the dark dew on the green grass of home. Wishful Thinking Nice, France The busses will take you as far as the source of the Nile, or to mad beautiful Marseillaises. It costs almost nothing to get to perfume country, if jasmine, cigarettes and sinisterism are what you’re after. Ships, geraniums, and old money decorate the slumped logic of night, and it wastes no time wrapping its rocky switchbacks around your slipped mind. Melancholy fades, and you take out your navy jacket for our stroll into splendour. What’s this town missing? Is it the taste of caviar in my mouth, or is it the grass of youth? The casbah near the bus station is a dream on repeat, and that might be the best answer I’ll get. How desire becomes a hiving forest. On the empty boardwalk, I must consider this crime ring, this symposium of marriages, evenings of middle-aged sentiment, and a faraway sigh that realizes it has too much money. Why have we come south? Feel the wind ballooning. It longs to bring on a gorgeous shudder. One sunny day after another, Augusts come off the ocean and shorten our lives. Winter with me here. To An Ideal I noticed you first, your birth a paranormal float on that sintered causeway of white light. As a gift moves us to tears, so your amatory pleas re-amortized all our uses for Moreau & Mastroianni in La Notte, along Rome’s hospital road, the grace of her hardened outbacks swayed by illuminations of buxom blondes on ceramic piazzas. Do I take this man as a full bouquet? I do. Bus stations when they mattered—when they épatait la bourgeoisie... rounded the corners of each Viewmaster slide. They called me the hyacinth girl, an allusive-historical moment propice that fairly educated T. S. Eliot on Henry James. Then James was labeled pale porpoise by Vladimir Nabokov. Quick to judge; aesthetically judgmental. In truth, like a hyacinth, a limp handkerchief, a little goodbye. Whomsoever has reason to object. Juror, face the accused. Accused, face the juror. There’s that star moment, the delicate cliffhanger when an Olympian gymnast’s taped feet come into focus on TV, and it is the cliché, it is the still point of the turning of the world, from which an analogical chain forms in our minds: torrential rain to missed balance beam; Ayer’s Rock, resting as some junked furnace of the gods, to a motherboard which, from Central Command on the Deity’s... Continue reading

Over the next ten Sundays I will be spotlighting contemporary Canadian poets. The first poet in the series is Jeramy Dodds, one of the most acclaimed of Canada's emerging poets. The series revolves around listening. Each poet will answer a question by another Canadian poet. The question and answer component will allow readers to eavesdrop as Canadian poets talk about world literature, intimacy and voice, up-to-the-minute aesthetics, time travel, the importance of rhyme in contemporary poetry, and transnational dictions. Also, I've asked emerging American poets to listen and then join the conversation. Ocean Vuong, Adam Fitzgerald, Natalie Diaz, James Allen Hall, Tarfia Faizullah, Adam Clay, Rebecca Lindenberg, Jamaal May, David Tomas Martinez, and Eryn Green will write poems informed/inspired by the work of the poets in the series. The poems written by the American poets will be published in Canada later this year, and then reprinted online in the United States. Ladies and gentlemen, Jeramy Dodds. LONG WINTER FARM You’ve got to get to the country. The fields are empty as if all farmhands have the clap. The trees have taken off their fatigues yet no one’s wives rise to shoo their houseplants out for exercise. Acne-scarred planets are light years, soufflé years away, but toddlers with twig pistols guard the cisterns. I’ve met albino elves who harvest the guano smokebats leave in my lungs. I suction-cupped a Baby On-board sign in the rear window of a hearse. Clouds suck sun-sheen off the rocks. I’ve a mound of creased choir gowns that need irony. My favourite dog’s buried in the yard. She was dead but she got better. Now I have a Mennonite’s fear of the automobile. A raven puts on his soot and goes to work the warmth from my algebra. Most guys in these parts grow a goatee even though it’s cattle country. Come on to the country, there’s still seats in the nosebleeds. It’s like living below a dam built during budget cuts, loving a geography this much. Why must this landscape look like luggage left unattended in an airport to get our attention? Any resemblance is purely reciprocal. I have an ex who’s on the run in Mexico, or who has the runs in Mexico, or who is running Mexico. I don’t know, is her hair art or a gaslamp mishap perhaps? My dog and I were like two peas in an escape pod. When cattle rose from those valleys, cankles in frost shackles, I watched silent films with my eyes shut. My biggest mistake was wearing white jeans to Rib Fest, but it’s for fun us waxwings set controls for the heart of the sun. Get thee to the country. Our ash-eyed cremators decided all’s lost and paused their little holocausts. I’ve fletched every sparrow in this war. The mollusks shushed. When the killswitch sun kicks on you can watch the lunar rogues beeline into miles of turnstile trees, trees belching out birds like a salesforce at the brink of banking hours. Sucked in at... Continue reading