Saturday, September 5, 2020

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 5th.  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.


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