Four Poems, by Geoffrey Olsen

3.19

             would I consult the dark

           

            in the form of …

              off the tips of my fingers

      in the soil excavating …

                        the cavern, cavity

      phoneme tongue / fertilizer sunsets

   profuse down tone sounding out

                 moldy wall crumbled, soiling

       

          I’m  …  come out into

 

    waves where anger focused

       against,

                      

          enveloping in finance

           

     circuit

                       our faces commune in

                     dark other silent rooms

  plot on screen

        dream splits open

    a bourgeois flesh

         at the edge of bleeding

            stitched close

3.19

    anxiety threads first

  

the blue dark

            my room enveloped

    blue depth.

the second part

 

  is immiseration

the third part

  

   is recognizing the

enemies of all beings

                     and the wish to see

   

     in the blue light imbued

  

  a collective moon

  a little glint

3.21

   slept interior

    lonely blue-green

   the trace leaves me

      concrete world

 watch of hands

     virus

     its distance and

   nightmare

       not coercion

   in the purple field

trusting in others

   my bleak garment

wrapped words that tune

    this ocean

       a layer

         of warm

3.22

  have selves submerge in blue

 plangent rising form as song

      where starts

  temper torpor, my translucent

failure, concrete attention

     in the eve of waves

   know a form despair

  know what it is to chase

     up slender stair

  decay

material wealth shadow

     sound in attention to

    thin half-light, ears plugged

   an ocean

    black-purple inscription

   allege spring night trails

 behind me river

            streams intent

          anti human stockpile

            think themselves survival

                  fond for themselves

              a leaving for an eye

    a leaf a boll

                     substance me, tongue

                               pool of my hearing

                        plugged into

                 

                      twilight’s off-

                    

                                                   pitch

Geoffrey Olsen is a poet and cat guardian living in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of the chapbooks End Notebook and Not of Distends : Address Panicked. Recent poems are published in Prelude Mag, Entropy and Vestiges. He has chapbooks forthcoming from These Signals and above/ground press.

Competing Ideologies, by T.W. Selvey

Competing Ideologies 1

 

 

Competing Ideologies 2

 

 

Competing Ideologies 3

 

 

Competing Ideologies 4

 

 

Competing Ideologies 5

 

 

Recently, T.W. Selvey’s work has appeared in The Shore, The Wild Literary Journal, Feral, and petrichor. T.W. tweets sporadically @docu_dement, and is the proud curator of a haphazardly curated blog, www.documentdement.com

Two Poems, by Luke Bradford

  

dragonflies
 

Ireland fogs.
Foreign lads
signaled for
fire and logs.

Fog in alders,
a fiord’s glen.
A golden fir’s
ring of dales.
 
Dragonflies,
soaring, fled
a finer gold’s
island forge:

Fiord angels,
rain-elf gods,
refolding as
gears infold.

  

bees

 

bugs that buzz; tiny, 

busy nuns that hide 

that Lady deep amid 

some waxy maze; that

wing over your park, 

your farm, your plot, 

your lawn; that call 

upon each iris, lily,

posy, vine, plum tree, 

palm tree, pear tree, 

lime; that draw from 

each that rosy wine;

that come home, legs 

dyed with pale gold 

dust, then buzz, dozy, 

into some cozy room

 

 

 

 

Luke Bradford is an experimental poet living in Brooklyn, New York. His latest collection of constrained poetry, Glossology, is available for purchase as a book or for free download as a PDF at lukebradford.xyz/glossology. His work has been published in print and online by Penteract Press, Timglaset, ToCall magazine, No Press, and more.

 

WOLVERINE SEASON, by Kasia van Schaik

i.

This dream of       freestanding pine

and wolverine tracks       a field

in white spring       by cabinlight  

this opening      through which you

mark your hunger         

          a skirt of dogs 

following      indecipherable human

my smell is       tenderness to them  

my name an opening      

follow             the river now

crossable by boat     the river    

where I first learned the word boat  

it was here I saw      the sun

complaining in a glass 

where I watched     you train your dogs     

to urinate in circles     

come

follow     the too-slow river    boatless now and deep     the river

yes      

ii.

wet-footed through the shivering   

nightfield       who controls the path 

two masts and a question       cracking

my teeth         who’s there   

hello  

I saw the sky for a moment / How

unbeautiful    the too-slow river

how indecipherable its bank     your face

lights up           like the red weather

of another planet    this question

hurts me    

iii.

yes I knew then      for death

always waits beside a river    this one

has no name     except in spring  

the blind swimmer reaches the bank

flips over on her back             

this one knocking

on your window hello         

posing an earnest question      can you

hear me   

    

Somewhere out there is the wilderness    

alone beside the river    it’s wolverine season   

the red planet in orbit  

   

we know

nothing

Kasia van Schaik is a South African-born writer and critic based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. She is the author of the chapbook, Sea Burial Laws According to Country, and her writing and criticism have appeared in Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacket2, The Best Canadian Poetry Anthology (2015), CBC Books, and elsewhere. In 2020, Kasia received the Mona Adilman Prize for poetry related to environmental concerns. Find Kasia on twitter at @KasiaJuno

Four Poems, by Julian Day

Ghazal for End of Winter

Aphantasia: when you close your eyes

what do you see?

You’ve made a hash of this.  The good news

is some things can’t be repaired, only remade.

The cupboard is bare.  An empty sugar bowl,

three lonely bags of tea.

Tomorrow March 5^th.  Next month

the blackbirds return.

Neither curved nor flat, the universe

becomes a long, silver thread.

We each find our way, knowingly

or not.

I do by leaving. In the door

then out.

IM On Your Last Day

Where were they, then, those endless nights, the lost years

we promised ourselves? So much empty talk, unspent

electricity. We would have been the only light

on the highway, built bonfires from the sparks that passed

between us. Oh, we could have been, we should have been

so much more.

Dandelions

having tried and failed

to hold back the sun

their efforts turn

to white magic

From Bio/luminescence

what will be the karyotype of this age?

blue as in phosphorescence, not ink.

tyranny, control: two crooked lines.

*

doom-scrolling twitter,

my wife asleep beside me:

o sacred bonding.

*

you could lose yourself in this

glow. dim avatars, most honest

selves. do you feel it too? say

*

seventeen and I fell for a girl

whose details feel like dreaming

so many years and oh her still-sweet name

*

becoming breakers

on the open sea. incandescent.

text-on-CRT.

*

is anyone out there searching

for me? I exist between,

expressed as ghosting, burn-in,

*

who will archive any of this

when the world ends? briefly sweet, our lives go

to flower: rooted in marshwater, a field of bakeapple.

Julian Day lives in Winnipeg. His work has recently appeared in Cypress and Train, and his debut chapbook will be published by Anstruther Press in early 2021.

Two Poems, by rob mclennan

Five poems for The Pi Review

1.

Hypothetical: the distance

a poem may travel. Margins spill, a flock

of miniature birds

or ants.

One speaks to the long journey

and the short flight, the position

of the sacred. How far

and at what pace.

To include everyone, one must leave behind

this entire world.

2.

One speaks of positives, options; a way

back home. A pandemic

of misspelled options.

Picture the lily. Filament, labyrinth, treacle. Vines

parry, jostle, pick apart

the bonds. A brick wall, groans

against the pleasure

of a single seed.

3.

I can tell you

anything.

4.

When we say forever, we do not mean

without end. We have been here,

but at one point, we

were somewhere else. The limitations

of a single myth. I am airplane,

starling, patterned

clipper. The sedentary rudiments

of layered rubble.

5.

Picture the house. These hands

are spilling. Rise up, gather. A concordance

of flowers, stone, abandoned clothes, his

errant speculations. I am not

your noun, your verb, your

action word. It is

impossible to write. My father’s texts

have reached their end.

Four poems for Spacecraftprojects

1.

In the beginning was the imagination, the classic enemy

of boredom. A lavish absence

of artificial light.

Can I see stars? Do I know English? Stories, away

from the semantic charge.

A revelation, visually

in place, in space. A fixed act, sequence

of discarded scraps.

Imagine: once we looked up, without

the thought of force.

2.

To determine we are horizontal

in the language. Perceiving only dots

across horizon-line. They say to realize

is to unearth. Is ours a measure

to reach beyond

for improvement or ruin? Warm hands, pulling hot

and cold dead planets

down to where we drown.

If this a means. A means

of access.

3.

Shadow shapes itself, provides

a deeper shadow. If one aligns, perhaps,

a different order: Saturn, Mercury, Ganymede. Fly me

to the moon. Firmly focused

on infinity. Mark the first word, and the first

in space. These foreign bodies, exile. Formed

by rhythm, language. Changed,

for the viewing.  No matter what we do,

obsessions rise, and coat

the surface of this inquiry.

4.

To shift a little distance. The children flutter,

decorate their bedroom door with scraps of paper,

carving stars and planets, birthday hearts,

writing out their names. All I want to do

is work.

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent poetry titles include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), with a further poetry title, the book of smaller, forthcoming from University of Calgary Press. An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey. He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.