Three Poems, by Mike Ferguson

  

(found in Monism in Arithmetic. – Mathematical Essays and Recreations by Hermann Schubert)

 

(appropriated from Chapter I: The Series of Natural Numbers – Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy by Bertrand Russell)

(appropriated from Chapter II. Classification and Fallacies. Book V. Of Fallacies. – A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Vol. II. by John Stuart Mill)

Mike Ferguson is an American permanently resident in the UK and widely published in online poetry magazines/journals. His most recent published work is the found poems collection The Lonesomest Sound (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2019) and the truth-elusive vignettes And I Used to Sail Barges (The Red Ceilings Press, 2020).

Two Poems, by Ethan Vilu

First Rondel (Memory)


In plundering the miracle of time
one can attack the higher court of shame,
collide all different meanings of a name,
and coronate a never-ending prime -

or else, unleash a purgatory clime?
A thunderous extinguishing of flame -
in plundering the miracle of time
one can attack the higher court of shame,

can hear the sweetest sound of freedom chime
reverberations musical and tame
and never pen the question mark of blame,
if one commits an existential crime
in plundering the miracle of time

 

 

Second Rondel (Bragg Creek)


If I could find the shade amidst the stones
and clear my sullen mind along the peak
have rambling water turn frustration meek
and emanate those deep contented tones

to walk against that hard-wrought road alone
and only have the stream with which to speak
if I could find the shade amidst the stones
and clear my sullen mind along the peak


those foothills form a great undying throne
to look with piercing gaze for what you seek:
a quiet darkness right along the creek
whose lightest touch would strike me to my bones
if I could find the shade amidst the stones 

 

Ethan Vilu is a student, writer, and editor from Calgary, Alberta. Their poetry longsheet A Decision re: Zurich was published by The Blasted Tree in 2020. In addition to serving as the current managing editor for NōD Magazine, Ethan works as both circulation manager and as a member of the poetry collective at filling Station.

Two Lipograms, by Lydia Unsworth

 

CENTRAL LIBRARY

 

learn literacy
narrate a reality
train a brain
recite a litany, a yarn, a lyric 

cranial nectar
ratrace abater
banality a rarity
a certain clarity 

banter
albeit binary latin linear errata 

a relatable tale
a liberal rant
a brilliant racy letter 

a cabinet, a cabinet, a cabinet
barely any telly

  

 

 

ST PETER’S SQUARE

 

a squat queue erupts, upset

a request        a spat        arrests

russet pets tear up terra, rape, repress

suppress a state, erase status

austere pastures
spare a rupee? 

past pressures repeat

a statue

 

 

Lydia Unsworth has published two collections of poetry: Certain Manoeuvres (KFS Press, 2018) and Nostalgia for Bodies (2018 Erbacce Poetry Prize), and two pamphlets. Her latest pamphlet YIELD (KFS) and her debut novel Distant Hills (Atlatl Press) came out in 2020. Recent work can be found in Ambit, SPAM, Bath Magg, Blackbox Manifold, and The Interpreter’s House. Twitter: @lydiowanie

Two Poems, by Elana Wolff

 

Calf Love

                 —after FK

You were lying

supine in the river. Held by the fevered

stream of breaking through.

You who were always

grieved by the deep

embarrassment

of human existence,

found exhilaration in display:

to write about ejaculation in traffic;

traffic over the river

drowning you out.

As if by word association,

one achieves release. As if—

but then it’s done.

Under the bridge and out of sight,

you have to choose:
                              Do I sink?

Instinctually, you swim.

Yet only between the lines,

and after the story ends.

 

 

Jejune

 

This tongue was never altogether mine.
I dreamt a guttural country,
desert mountains at the heart
and woke up parched. 
I put my ear to earth
for an indication,
heard a soundtrack—every song I knew
I had to learn: how losing isn’t opposite
to winning,

                      it’s making space.
One only sees the space
in looking back.  

You were every hydrant that July
I was on fire. Heat inside me
adolescent / green.
What did you see?
That value would eventually
increase? That one day
we would face the parent range?

                         (I speak of mountains.)
That language needs decoding
and translation (whatever we speak)? 

Where do dragons live?
                               —In castles.
What do foxes eat?
                                  —Gingerbread men.
What’s as soft as a preemie’s wrinkled knee?

           —The smaller wrinkled knee

                         of the tinier twin.  

Jackals howled in the street last night,
beneath the babies’ window.
Creatures tempted   
out of the woods,
into the heart of the city. 
I heard them eating off their knives,
licking the blades
as if they were lips—

                      like preternatural humans.
I ran to grab the babies from their cribs.

 

 

 

Elana Wolff is a Toronto-based writer of poetry and creative nonfiction. Her work has recently appeared (or will appear) in Canadian Literature, The Dalhousie Review, Taddle Creek Magazine, Vallum: Contemporary Poetry, The Banyan Review, Eclectica, GRIFFEL, and Sepia. Her collection, Swoon (Guernica Editions), is the winner of the 2020 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry.

Three Poems, by Chris Turnbull

 
this, from "[sic]"

from "notes from recently"

Chris Turnbull is the author of Continua (Chaudiere Books 2015; Invisible Press 2019) and [ untitled ] in o w n (CUE Books 2014). Recent chapbooks include contrite (above/ground 2019), Undertones, a collaboration with text/artist Bruno Neiva (Low Frequency Press 2019), notes from recently (Trainwreck Press 2020), and, with artist Dominique Cameron, a visual and poetic exchange, Converse Walking (stickywilly press, 2020). Other visual and text based work can be found online, in print, and within landscapes. She curates a footpress, rout/e, whereby poems are planted on trails: www.etuor.wordpress.com. 

Two Poems, by Lillian Nećakov

 

Wreckhouse Winds

It was a lie we told for years. That it had snowed in June of ’67, because we could,
because no one stopped us, because the trees that day, looked as if they were made
of bone or young ice. Because the inaccuracy tasted like snow on our tongues and
coaxed us into believing we were much further from the fracture zone than we were.
It was a cloud song born of broken storm gutters and puddles on the kitchen linoleum.
A thunderclap in place of a backhand on nights when darkness fell as heavy as a city.
It was you and I, weathering the wreckhouse winds, gasping for air, grasping for
sunshine, because the sorrow sprouting from between our fingers, like a tangle of weeds 
was not an anomaly. Because the funnel clouds that formed in our backyard
were simply the architecture that held our father’s fury. Because the world ended
where our driveway met the periwinkles and the constellations looked like they
were held together with safety pins and because 40 light-years away there was
something called a goat star. Because a moon as big as an opera would come
and go in witness of bone being broken into fossil. And the shoals and islets of our
childhoods were like lame animals left neglected under the northern sky, and the
horizon, as thin as a sheaf of wheat bridled all the madness of the killing frost.
It was a lie we told for years because it was you and I, lilting under the whisper of
the aurora borealis in wait of grace.

 

Ōkunoshima

We remove our shoes before entering the poison gas museum
you whisper Usagi Jima and the sky fills with watermarks
a flatus slips through the ginkgo trees unbuttoning leaf after leaf
until the ground is feathered yellow
later, we will find a secret map wrapped in rabbit fur
and a photograph of a fisher-wife holding a small child
covered in mustard gas
and later still
the cheery captain will ferry us across the Seto Inland sea
along the fog bank
back to Hiroshima
where the sun will scream open-mouthed
against a dandelion wind.

 

 

Lillian Nećakov is the author of six books of poetry, numerous chapbooks, broadsides and leaflets. Her new book il virus is forthcoming from Anvil Press (A Feed Dog Book) in April 2021. In 2016, her chapbook The Lake Contains an Emergency Room was shortlisted for bpNichol chapbook award. During the 1980s she ran a micro press called “The Surrealist Poets Gardening Association” and sold her books on Toronto’s Yonge Street. She ran the Boneshaker Reading series from 2010-2020. She lives in Toronto and just might be working on a new book.

 

 

 

Four Poems, by Chris Hutchinson

 

MEANWHILE, MYRMIDONS

 

Clouds float by
like the distracted minds
of underpaid lab technicians. 

Their hypothesis is
thoroughbred enlightenments
breed rough lichens. 

Meanwhile, the faces of Myrmidons
appear in the rear view mirror, grotesque
like half-formed similes. 

We mean what we say
when we say we say 
what we mean 

they say
without really having to—

 

ACCORDING TO THE ART OF POWER

Your resubmitted treatise on class wa­­rfare
has supplanted my feelings
which once tried to spell the word
“hunger” in blood-tipped toothpicks
on the paper plate of the moon. 

An evening breeze spins around your oyster mushroom hairstyle.
If they were real, your cheeks might boast a puce filigree of veins. 

From this place, Jupiter appears
multiplied in the compound eyes of office towers
before it rolls across your naked forearm and snags
on a razor-wire tattoo. It’s still summer. 

Another plinth gets vandalized
by billowing sail-shaped shadows, but then      
it’s too late. Liberty Island turns blue.

 

ANOTHER POEM THAT WANTS SOMETHING TO DO WITH HISTORY BUT NOTHING TO DO WITH ME, THANK GOD

  

Beneath a blue afternoon of evergreens
vernacular shadows and cerebral-colored mosses
once dappled and draped themselves in slow-motion-time across
acres of the exposed sandstone’s flesh. 

Behind a dust-spangled screen
of regrets, I once heaved and scattered myself into being like this—
with the charm of a pointillist, drunk on schnapps. 

Today, the sky slantwise thrusts the net of its will
upon you, and me, and everyone who’s ever been
quarantined with seven-billion hues, post-factual
grooves, and pornographic options. 

I slaughter from afar, as always. 
You text, twerk, invent new pronouns
sail away with Musk to Mars.
Pastiche, pandering, and politics
instead of poetry. Clout. 

I cross my heart, hope not to die.
Your mind’s sun-shot
like a hummingbird’s wing beneath 
sledgehammers of disinformation. 

Together, we once gnawed the mineral-rich air
spat vapid hashtags back at the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—
both of which, today, let’s both agree
taste like rust.   

 

YOU’D THINK I’D NEED A TITLE 

 

You’d think vanilla swimwear would be
the envy of chocolate statuary. 

You’d think psychedelic lichens would mean more
interest in four-player chess as a metaphor 

for metaphoricity.

But as you — who on a cold bench facing the river valley
feeds an albino skunk crumbs of stale coffee cake — 

as you might say — you meaty man of valor, you lover
of the word  “moreover” — 

Look on my works, ye mighty
and disambiguate! 

And the truth is never not anywhere. 

 

 

 

Canadian writer Chris Hutchinson is the author of four poetry books as well as the speculative autobiography in verse novel Jonas in Frames. His most recent poetry collection, In the Vicinity of Riches (Goose Lane Editions / icehouse poetry), appeared in spring, 2020. Catch him online at: chris-hutchinson.com