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.