Article Category Archives: Poetry

Salad Spinner

This entry was posted on by Moni Brar.

Salad Spinner

My mother is mystified by the salad spinner,
mesmerized by its whir and endless spin,
suspicious that it could do a better job
than her hands that know vegetables so well,
hands that know how to wash the silt from greens
– fenugreek, mustard, amaranth, bathua, choliay –
hands that know how to blot the wet from vein and blade,
how to fan the leaves on faded shawls in the sun.
Now these hands learn to assemble
and disassemble this new thing, these plastic parts.
She watches the merry-go-round
cull moisture from thin air, from tender growth,
marvels at the pool of water in its base,
excess and unwanted.
She fans the leaves on faded shawls in the sun
and boxes this thing that has replaced ritual.
She tells me, this salad spinner can only do so much.

Self Portrait by Nadia So

Milky Light of a Clinica’s Infinite Gaze

This entry was posted on by Daze Jefferies.

Milky Light of a Clinica’s Infinite Gaze

21 and I’m dispensing eight months of rent
to feel some weighted kind of fleshy titillation

trans girls from YouTube said it would be painful
having silicone bags shoved into the bust –
but then again, all the lips : hands : teeth : tongues
that I know from the meat market are no comfort

it started in May of 2014 when
I posted an ad like the ones on Craigslist
from curious anons and visiting beauty queens
whose wishes broke open with fishy trade

paid lover labyrinths have paid for this endeavour
to cultivate an augmented outlook on my being

this is what it means to hack the body in transition:

two years of hormones are barely enough
for kilogram implants and my little A-cup
to hold one another as if they can handle
the afterward waiting in a stranger’s embrace

never forget the surgeon’s misgendering

deep blue sleep in the milky light
of a clinica’s infinite gaze

hours later when the drugs wear away
I land like a needle on the full moon jellies
infixed below the surface of my tender chest
and cry for the first time this slow world to come

Manner of Speech

This entry was posted on by Dawn Macdonald.

Manner of Speech

I wrote a computer program to write haiku. This was in 1994 or thereabouts. I wrote it in PASCAL. Here is its best work:

art by Karen Boissonneault-Gauthier showing a woman's face and computer keyboard

Interfacing by Karen Boissonneault-Gauthier

The taller teacher
enlightens slowly, but this
ignorance consumes.

Or rather not its best work. It had no best work, because I hadn’t written into the program any sort of function for besting. It only had functions for working. The above work is the only work it made that I remember 25 years later.

The other day I was walking down 3rd Avenue and I heard a man say, “It’s about yay big,” which is a thing my father says. “Yay” or “yea”? Or “yae”? I thought of my father but it didn’t occur to me to call him. I actually need to call him for practical purposes to do with a kid and a car but I’ve been putting it off. I don’t like talking on the telephone.

Suppose that I had written a computer program for having telephone conversations. It wouldn’t have to have good ones. It would just have to have ones that followed the rules.

“Hello.”
“Hello.”
“Do you know who this is?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”

The Oriole

This entry was posted on by Virginia Boudreau.

The Oriole

Beyond lit panes, a flimsy fragile feathered thing
wavers on the highest bough, her scant weight teetering

above a paisley floor stippled with shadow and trembling
light. The bird trills as though her heart will fly

through gilded ribs of a gold chest, shatter
like a wave on a stony shore: wide open.

In here, the news stories flip by, tired cards thumbed
on an old Rolodex file. So quick, so awful I can hardly bear

view or listen. Now I’m watching the grizzled
trees in northern BC, scarecrow effigies ignited. Flames

scissor and smoke cuts a warning cloud in the tarnished
muslin sky. I imagine the elk frantic, the rabbits frenzied

and turn it off before the next reel can take hold. Through
the open window the ethereal lilting chords pour hymn

notes, rising to dusk’s flannel rafters. Don’t ask me why
I picture the listing Titanic: the brave orchestra playing, focused

and dogged. I see icy water breaching the deck, black
all-seeing portholes sobbing into a frozen sea. I watch it curling

back in a raging wave swollen with the last lost melodies. All that
remains is the waiting, the burst of flotsam on a distant dissolving shore.

Photograph by Sara Harley showing a building submerged in water and one bird flying overhead.

Rising by Sara Harley

Two Poems

This entry was posted on by Susan Wismer.

All the Words for Blue

                                                                   One astronaut returned
   held
the moon   and   the unknown                                        wanting
      one small safe place in space
         Earth        perfect                                       oceans
                     conditions 
                   for human living

Earth will survive, the astronauts say. 
                                                                   to tell us
It’s us. We are
flimsy, fragile, perhaps too soon
                           gone                                   every word
                       from this                                 for
                                                                beauty         
                    our only home.
                                                             all  the    words   for   blue.

Textile art by Rachel Ryan showing trees surrounded by blue.

Morning Moon by Rachel Ryan (fabric collage)

At the Tree Zoo, Mesachie Lake, British Columbia

Big numbers                spray painted             eye level blue
                       across their horned bark
tall trees

I lean
all my weight        slight        close to earth
into

a vast living wall          long drips fall slow
                              in      my mouth        open      raised

green cloud of needle and branch

Grow feathers        spread wings           be eagle
             see mountains        snow in high reaches
                      these giant firs        numbered
                                   tree zoo 

It is late, I am tired, the motel bed will do. Under car wheels,
the road whines slick, nearly frozen. The radio, CBC.
“Can you use different words?” asks the host. Snow slides in clots
down the windshield, car fan on defrost set high, wiper blades
can’t do enough. 

The guest is a lawyer,  a woman,  Indigenous
                  even-voiced, firm, implacable         

in my ears, in the storm, she repeats

Apocalypse           Water              Hypoxia               Trees.