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How to Survive the Next Great Canadian Name Famine by John Emil Vincent

After Peter Dubé

“How to Survive the Next Great Canadian Name Famine” is written after the prose poems in Peter Dubé’s book Conjure: A Book of Spells (Rebel Satori Press, 2013). I admire the contagious lushness of Peter’s spells. I started out wanting to strictly follow the form, but, quickly, strayed fairly far afield. Mine is less a spell than an interaction between a magician and an increasingly resistant assistant.

How to Survive the Next Great Canadian Name Famine Worm the highway arteries to their capillary splay. To the one-way systems, sleeping policemen and tar-filled sneaker suck of your teen years. Take from the glovebox a photo mentioned in a Death Cab for Cutie song that you kept for one reason: it reminded you about a song about memory that was sad but made you feel oddly good. After all, doesn’t feeling sad mean you survived sadness, rising from the surf a new creature, a little leaner, all your body hair combed by the water and looking like fake fur? Thwack the edge of that photo with the stub of your thumb. I said thwack. Look, this isn’t going to go if you don’t work with me. I give the directions, you take the directions. Before you know it you’ll be sawing logs the other end of this full-symphony lullaby. While we’re waiting, write some “creative nonfiction” about the trip you took and the boyfriend who cheated on you. You can pretend you didn’t know, that you escaped to your very, very rich imagination-land of being a fiction writer and gosh it must be plush carpetty in there, with lots of big gilded wall mirrors and lines of cocaine stretching into the middle distance but not so far they are out of dip and weave reach. The granularity you imply undergirds your instinct to overdo things. Now, the tenets of irony capitalism require you make a small deposit. A wonder your dignity’s still worth anything. But this is the miracle. So, what chitlike chinchuck might you take for an above-index return? And you: earnest of a sudden: so serious. As if a million dollars was worth that much these days.

#after you #canlit #poetry #john emil vincent #peter dube

Divining by Gillian Sze

After John Emil Vincent I wrote a response to John’s poem, “A Certain Noisy Relaxed Quality,” from his recent chapbook, Cheshirization (Factory Hollow Press, 2015). I’m looking forward to his next book, which will be published this fall with DC Books.

Divining Trimmed baby hair tossed in the backyard now curls in a nest. Moss limes the bark. Beneath the sudden rays, ice laces the heads of hedges. The glaucous leaves of the carnations are fringed with melted snow. When did they find the time to survive? It’s almost April and we’re still lamenting the languid spell of winter. When panicked, I wonder how one ever achieves the unshakeable calm of flowers. As children, girls played psychics. One would slap the hands of another, pinch each spread finger. Which hurts more? she’d ask and the other responded in pain. Finally, hands ringing, the small clairvoyant would bend her head, knead at a fingertip to make out a letter, which became the first letter of her husband’s name. In the schoolyard, we willed the future forward. Such things are immaterial to the speckled shell or the stubborn bud. We played until we were old enough to realize that the letters always changed. For a while, we believed it worked. Before we felt bark rasp beneath our palms. Before we stretched forward to cup other sweetness.

#canlit #after you #gillian sze #john emil vincent

Imprint by Melissa Bull

After Gillian Sze

The poet Gillian Sze is a friend of mine. Gillian is from Winnipeg but has lived in Montreal a long time. We met in Montreal years ago when Ann Ward and Sasha Manoli ran a chapbook press called WithWords, and one spring, in 2008 or 2009, they published both of us.

Gillian's incredibly prolific. I respect Gillian's work for its own sake and I also very much admire her work ethic. I couldn't pick a favourite book or poem of hers, but I was moved by "Benison," a poem from her 2014 collection Peeling Rambutan. A prose poem, "Benison" is spare and nuanced. Clever, evocative, and loving. It's about a grandmother, food, aphorisms, kitchens. An excerpt: "You come to me in mid-bite. A slice of peach at the tongue. In your hand is a red envelope stuffed with folded Malaysian banknotes. Beneath your silver gaze, you murmur lowercase blessings. On the stove, succulent lily bulbs are tossed into the simmer."

For After You, I thought a lot about this poem. It reminded me of my own grandmother, my father's mother, Hilda. I opened one of my grandmother's cookbooks and thought I might do something with a recipe. But what came to me was the memory of an egg I found, once, when I was visiting her in Ontario. And I started to write about that. I didn't know enough about my grandmother to know any sayings she might have spoken. Instead, I incorporated a few lines from a hymn my father always told me was her favourite—"All Things Bright and Beautiful."

I'm not sure what I've made is even a poem. If it is, it sides more heavily on the prose of a prose poem than the poem of it.

But it's nice to spend some time with these memories, and with Gillian's poetry, and to be folded into this very tender project.

Imprint

I spied a single egg, still warm, in a haystack at Pioneer Village. My father slipped it into his jacket pocket. I worried it would break on the drive back but it didn’t. He handed the egg to my grandmother, who scrambled me a sandwich for early lunch. My grandmother might have said something about the rain holding off. The radio was on. Baseball. Cardinals. There were two stained-glass birds in the kitchen window. A bluebird. A cardinal.

I kept the bluebird a long time. Here and there its yellow beak and tiny wing broke off and the bluebird became a sliver; a cobalt chard. I left it glinting and twisting on its line when I emigrated. A moulted quill. An emptied nest. (Echo, echo, echo we shouted into the staircase.) My memory of my grandmother weathers tokens bright and beautiful. Even here. Hatched all these kitchens later. In this country of strange rooks and shrill chimneytop caws. My memory of her love brightens the low, bleached skies.

#melissa bull #after you #gillian sze #today's poem #canlit

Some Jimmy Uprising by Anne-Marie Turza

After Garth Martens Confuse fur for a sound. Strip a roof. Be courteous to a mollusk where there is none. Some Jimmy finishes his coolness for irrational beginnings. He finishes his coolness for a wound. The sharp cramp of not being dead, of giving it or keeping it, whatever it this is, mistaking the air for a known hour in which to billow humanly. No one can say for sure what all is affable as margarine. Maybe we won’t spread anything. But praise the rounds of ping pong and the very paddles, clamorous and without schedule in gymnasiums. Whatever else, put on your heels, dear Jimmies, for the multiverse plus plus plus a singing part. Let no one not in want this time minister the tympani and all hairy else. Agree. You do know what to do with love.

#afteryou #canlit #poetry #poem #anne-marie turza #garth martens

Mash by Elee Kraljii Gardiner

For Melissa Bull

I haven’t spent much time with Melissa Bull because we live across continents, but she feels close. I recently made her a fortune teller out of a feminist desire to do something crafty. Fortune tellers recall elementary school bonding between girls, friendships that were instinctual and uncomplicated. The base of this poem—the first eight lines—are the fortunes from my teller.

You are important to me. You have soft lips and your hair is very smooth. I want you in my blanket fort. Your stories are strong. You are so smart. I want to give you pineapples, ferns, cashmere throw blankets. Let’s smoke. When I think of mermaids I think of you.

You grew up untended and I always liked people who ran around but I like practical, capable people more. You aren’t afraid of what you like. Your eyeliner is perfect and you have that eye for style. I think you are a great tree house architect. I bet you aren’t afraid of processes. I am afraid of planning but not change. You have famous actor cheekbones.

I am trying to write this letter to you and I am drowsy, all my sweaters are too tight, my wet hair is cold as the food left in the pan, which I will eat anyway.

I was well-tended and ran around the city not out of rebellion but possibility. I’m practical only intuitively, as with emotions. When a handsome person whispers to me be cool, be cool everyone knows this is an impossibility. I am not smooth. Am I fine with that, yes.

I am listening to a woman sing about calling the cops on her famous husband. She is singing about abuse. My attention is drawn from writing this to the open tabs where opinions about a rape case ping and pong. A few days ago I asked you advice about how to deal with a guy who date rapes. You know enough about this topic I felt bad for bringing it up, but then I knew you needed to talk about it, too.

Choose a number between one and eight. Somewhere in the church in your head a thurible is doing its obfuscation work. Somewhere in mine a midnight taxi is on call. When trouble hits, you turn to the choir. The soundtrack to my thesis on stories of repression during the Dirty War was Mozart’s Requiem. I am listening to Scandinavians sing it now but am distracted by watching emotions move through their bodies and faces. The translation of sound into sensation is irrefutable. When we were sad we turned up the music. We ate muffins with whisky. Every colour was rage. We had zero answers.

A few days ago a man moved out and left his rooms empty except for three coins placed face up on each ledge and in each drawer. He has survived many killings and lonelinesses. It’s hard to know if the coins signal covert logic or prove disassociated madness. Does it matter. Pick another number. Did I know I would end up in Cascadia. Did I listen to the fortune teller on the bus in 1992 who said I would. She picked out a narrative and threw it at me like an old sneaker. Did she draw the line from there to here or did I make it. Does it make a difference.

You will notice I am not using question marks. This is à la Eileen Myles. When she signed my book in Vancouver we shared a moment of reminiscence for our hometown. We awkwardly commiserated about names with too many Es which led me to say “I am in you! I mean, my name is in yours!” Why I said that I don’t know. We were both appalled. Her inscription of my name is a mangle, understandably. The Es look like combs. What a let down. All these narrow misses pile up like alewives, which is to say, they don’t. They slide and swallop. What is between or what is miscounted can mean the difference between one life and another. I need somebody to share guard. This blanket fort is ever-expanding and prone to cave-ins but it is ours.

#Elee Kraljii Gardener #Melissa Bull #canlit #poetry #after you

The Undergardener of Holes by Ali Blythe

After Anne-Marie Turza

Today we are learning about the hole in the centre of our beings.

It is being said the hole will eventually be filled with the list we are to make now, filled with our own well-rested and -lovedness, until we no longer yearn to empty shot after shot into it.

Sometimes when people speak in this way I remember they have it both exactly right and exactly wrong.

I see my list is strange as the next fellow’s, and small. Two.

Retrieve warm writing sweater. Do not any longer ingest the small pills of narrative that make me wish for an exquisitely-sized hole discharged just below my left clavicle.

You are taking something that exists that seems to make you desire holes where your body should be—

take holes instead, maybe then you’ll want existence.

The voice levitating through the broken basket of my list is familiar.

The undergardener of holes presently doesn’t have a mouth. Only an ink-blue opening, glistening

like a frost-lit depression I quietly lie down in to listen anyway.

I take up one hole gently, as though it were the final dead pet from the bottom

of the birdcage of being eleven and visiting my father for the last time. A hole is needed here, the undergardener says, and sets to work on wings and sweater.

Take this hole in support of transformation, to the wings.

This hole is for despairing of or for others, to the sweater.

Not the physical ones, but the ones to do with time. The putting of one dream into some other.

#poetry #canlit #AM Turza #Ali Blythe #after you

Familial Geographies by Susan McCaslin

For Richard Therrien, author of Sleeping in Tall Grass (University of Alberta Press, 2016) Your father with his maudlin tears and punitive hand; my riven mother’s schizophrenic steps Your alcoholic father’s cabin dream; my father’s longing to fly, but not for war Your mother’s longsuffering quiet; my mother’s dream of weeping beasts Your father hospitalized after a stroke; mine fighting to die from ALS Two prairie brothers sleeping in tall grass; I with my ghost dog haunting the Fraser’s banks Your French Catholic ancestors tugging; my Irish and Scots-Presbyterian ones pushing utterance coming face to face (after all these prayers) with the unutterable gently stepping into one prairie, one river, one field, a flicker of words

#after you #poetry #canlit #poem #susan mccaslin #richard therrien

Lives of the Soul by Leslie Timmins

For Susan McCaslin

I find your bright field (unknowable, illimitable)* in the shape of a door painted white on the face of a house in the face of an infant conceived in rape who shines in the waters of my memory familiar beyond naming on a morning’s over-groomed city beach where a tree felled by a mountain escaped its capturing boom and was carried in tides, great winds so we may lean against that mountain and rest postures of unposturing find our seat in the saddle of the small brown mare who waits for us up there, waits until we find the quiet in our hips, gentleness in hands to ease the cold steel bit the body physical, the body soul intermingling as the moon’s full mountains turn their headlamps on

*All words that are italicized are from poems by Susan McCaslin, in order of appearance: (i) "Mapping the Human Genomes,“ Lifting the Stone, (Hamilton, ON: Seraphim Editions, 2007), 23; (ii) “Shanti, Shanti, Shanti,” The Disarmed Heart, (Toronto: The St. Thomas Poetry Series, 2014), 38; (iii) “Postures of Surrender,” Lifting the Stone, 60; and again, (iv) "Mapping the Human Genomes,“ Lifting the Stone, 23.

#after you #Leslie Timmins #Susan McCaslin #poetry #poem #canlit #npm2016

SELF STORAGE by Raoul Fernandes

After Ali Blythe

At parties I found myself drawn to those who seemed most like water. I love those nights we were in slight disarray, showing more ghost. We'll probably forget your name, they said, but tell it to us anyway. Let's have it in the air. And isn't is strange that a poem has to begin and end? As if it was a framed photograph of a wave breaking and not simply a wave breaking. My four-year-old son intuitively understands the idea of transformers. Once, as a plane, he lay down on his stomach, arms apart so passengers could enter the doors on the side of his ribs. I don't know why we'd have such trouble with this. Did we read too many books upside-down and with anger? Could we not do the extra second of homework when a stranger enters the room? There's a diner along this highway where with infinite coffee and infinite time we could solve this. Transform ourselves into prisms or creeping vines or a stack of poems. Better poems, I think. Though we're bound to fail for hundreds of years, first. Passing the SELF STORAGE building with its quiet climate-controlled rooms makes me smile. The Smile You're On Camera! sign in the dollar store doesn't. I can clip the labels from the inside collar of my shirt but it just itches more. Paint over my storefront awnings, but the original text ghosts through. When I borrow someone's pen my handwriting changes—somewhere halfway between mine and theirs. But a few pages in, it's mostly just mine. Almost. Not entirely. By the end of the long night we've built adapters upon adapters so that all our devices, no matter from what place or time, can talk to each other. By then we're so exhausted, our code frayed, the floor a tripping hazard of tangled wires. Still though, right? Dawn's light surfaces like homework solving itself. Our ghosts massaging their equations. I'm sunk into the couch, thirsty as hell, dreaming a river that flows right through the room. A river I know I can drink from because it's moving, clear.

#canlit #after you #Raoul Fernandes #ali blythe #poetry #poetry month

Poem by Kate Braid

For Leslie Timmins

It’s the tenacity that gets me. We all know it: the family that would prefer our perfect silence; those seeming endless letters from the publishing world saying “thank you but…”; and there’s not a lot of money in the world for any writer.... Then it’s the tenacity I watch burn as it carries you through Silence and Rejections and Maybes and those occasional lovely publications that say Yes, it matters—your passion, your work. Your generous and open heart. Keen eye, your technical skill. You found solace in Matisse who abandoned his easel, turned the canvas away from himself* and even then didn’t stop. Felt the world’s wide incomprehension of his daring work yet held on, caught one small arrow of light and began to paint windows, openings. Worked on. Regardless. It’s fierce flames like yours that keep the rest of us warm as you work in the morning for clear-eyed justice and in the afternoon write those precious openings—the poems. Regardless. Thank you, Leslie, for your burning colours, for your fire, for this one window so wide to the outside.**

*“Even If It Isn’t There: Studio Under Eaves, 1903.” Leslie Timmins. The Limits of Windows. Alfred Gustav Press, North Vancouver, BC, 2014.

**“Seated Woman, Back Turned to Open Window, 1922.” Ibid.

Research Proposal by Jennifer Zilm

for Shannon Maguire

Our data is an accounting of nouns in a 21st century poem: for nouns are the nerves of the sonnet. It’s all about outwitting decay: preserving our syntactic heritage. Cold storage only forestalls archival erosion: the artifact won’t last forever. Oh HONEY, we openly risk getting sticky to chart the metrics of our collection. Now more than ever the mindful mining of values is crucial. Our accountants of light will soft-pencil through the wrecks of texts to present an account to the disinterested public. Here is our frilled list of persons, places, things. Please pay attention before rust erodes the pronouns and the aubade seems equivocal: of the farewell of morning we can be certain.

An East Van Dental Sonnet by Chelene Knight

For Jennifer Zilm

It’s like when the dentist makes you feel bad about your flossing habits, you lie, say you do it everyday but the blood in your mouth says otherwise. There’s no trust really, this whole doctor-patient bullshit, it’s a game: There’s an intercom outside, you have to be “buzzed” in to get your teeth cleaned or filled or checked. You’re a bad person if you don’t come back in 6 months. Please! Teeth—blood—gums, it should be more like an art: subjective, or like poetry chapbooks with a pay-what-you-can mentality where lacy words swim freely in a clean mouth where cavities are always welcome.

like fish in the fullness of their stream* by Daniela Elza

For Kate Braid a fine summer day— a blank page between us. you brought us to this cedar fountain taught us how to drink our fill how a line breaks what is said to make it better. in the precision of syllables we catalogue human error speak to what is ill forgotten dead. these words that are also the music the ruffled feathers of darkness. it was not just drawing Emily to the page but how paint curves around emptiness how the sky ripples through our diminished days hospital rooms the tensions between two— a longing that sifts inward to the bone. how turning left to the ladies does not mean we will be appeased. how between the hammer and the nail we emerge as well-mannered storms negotiate the crooked ultimatums of fear. write poems. love. journeywoman we are still far from home. still untameable fluid unformed here where words like hands heal us. *Note: The title of this poem, as well as words in italics (some modified) come from lines and titles in Kate Braid's work.

#daniela elza #kate braid #poetry #canlit #afteryou #poem

the music we are is* by Arlene Ang

After Daniela Elza

space strummed into breaths in the wake of crows their wings fanning out like hands shape the dimensions of sky & sound this wind ~ borrowed tempo ~ is a directive to let go rise above the music we are

break away from the weight of holding on to ~ us ~ * from Daniela Elza’s poem, “Trans/late” in Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets, edited by Valerie Fox and Lynn Levin (Texture Press, 2013).

#arlene ang #daniela elza #poetry #poem #after you

Self-portrait as future zombie by Ivy Alvarez

For Arlene Ang

That’s the face I’ll make when I come back, I can tell you that now. In fact, I’ll write it down.

This isn’t a pose I fall into lightly, you know. It takes several goes. Sometimes months.

Years. Know it’ll be easier without some limbs, unhampered by tendon strings. Pain. Skin.

Muscles slough minute by minute. Innit? Here’s a crow. Here, a downward-facing dog. Let’s draw something

we know. Can swamis be zombies? I think so. Predators have a hunger to be filled.

Let’s bend these bones into place, our words to our will. What’s the matter? I’ll lie still

in shavasana—corpse pose. My hands will be open, eyes closed, full of everything and nothing at all.

#after you #poetry #poem #arlene ang #Ivy Alvarez

Monday Morning by Kevin Spenst

For Raoul Fernandes, revised from a poem written for Pocket Museum, a collaborative chapbook

A constituency of Pinot noir on the table, late fines on the Rymes with Orange CD, and the screwy freedom of a Rube Goldberg machine: the startled cockatoo quotes a rusty semblance of Wallace Stevens, waking the dog who chases the cat whose tail is tied to that ancient catastrophe of a toaster. The burnt bread leaps and lapses, landing next to the match-box cars that race through wrapping paper tubes that then roll towards the Christmas tree, which tweets “Need more light,” releasing the drones mounted with tommy-guns that aerate the wall with gusty bullets. This wakes the Hungarian neighbour whose head thunks the underside of his shelf and a bounty of books fall onto a teeter- totter’s upside with a poet on the downside. Thrilled with an experience to write about, he employs a pen that’s tied to a supporting beam pulled out from under a tower of Heaven’s Hill taxis trained to roll and release a glory of objects forgotten in their backseats, creating such a clutter for ordinary folk around town that a social media campaign contest is announced in Mr. Farmer’s social studies class and the winner’s smile reveals braces that shimmer an imperishable bliss and blind the bush pilot who lands on the man who refused to ever set foot on a plane. Grief ricochets from ear to ear around his hometown, until twenty years later the son discovers the clunky chain of events leading to his father’s death and writes speculative fiction around the premise that the world occasionally surprises itself into consciousness, which is when deities are born. His book flops under the title Living in an Old Chaos of the Sun, and all of this is to say that you, even with your lovely, hung-over brains, can hit snooze once or twice instead of “off” so that you won’t be late for work again.

#kevin spenst #raoul fernandes #poetry #poem #afteryou #canlit

Mortal* by Argel Corpus

For Ivy Alvarez

Our first meeting, the only one, was a total success. Naturally, we exchanged books. Yours has a special place in my bookshelf: Between Auden’s and Plath’s Collected Poems. Mine? I can only hope it found a public place in your private room. A place where the sun warms its way in.

In my memory, our encounter seems to have taken place decades ago, London is linked to your book. Is this a happy coincidence? Certainly. Every line of yours is now a street, a part of a city, which my memory re-writes according to your design.

Thus life and the city, memory and poetry live as a cosmos, celebrating words as stars and space as rhythm.

*Name of a book by Ivy Alvarez

#Argel Corpus #ivy alvarez #poetry #poem #after you

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