CIRCLES
 
   
    1
 
First they told me
the future would solve
the present.
 
Then they told me
the present
would solve the future.
 
The present is the world
minus intention.
 
I’m not allowed there.
They know this.
 
I begin a string
of letters, picketing
distance.
 
 
​
    2
 
The Cheerios
in the babies’ cups
are full of Roundup.
 
“Circle,”
one girl chirps.

"Circles" previously appeared in Conjunctions 73.

​Rae Armantrout's book Wobble (Wesleyan, 2018) was a finalist for the National Book Award. A new collection, Conjure, is forthcoming from Wesleyan in Sept. 2020. She was recently interviewed in The Paris Review's "Art of Poetry" series.

Marco Reiter is an artist whose works include photography, sculpture and installation art. His mixed-media assemblages combine photographic images with wood, metal, and discarded materials. A long-time meditation student, Marco’s work is contemplative, and explores ideas around transformation, healing, and interconnection, often relating to human relations with the natural world, and ecology. As a lifelong “maker”—he’s been a carpenter for more than 16 years—Marco embraces building as a mode of expression. His photography has been exhibited in Toronto and Kingston and featured in such publications as The New Quarterly and The Animal Game (Tightrope Books). 
 
Website: MarcoReiter.com

Sarah Mangle's work is peopled with beautifully flawed characters. Her work is concerned with growth, feelings, shaky lines and truth-telling. Sarah is white and queer and grew up in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada. Sarah Mangle’s bookworks, postcards and zines are sold internationally. Her large format felt works have been exhibited locally in Montreal, where she has resided on and off since 2000. Sarah Mangle's work has been featured in the Globe and Mail, Hello Giggles, Shameless Magazine, Art/iculations, The Montreal Review of Books, Nat Brut and Broken Pencil. Sarah Mangle is currently working on a comic about the lesbian-owned import export store in her small hometown and her teenage attempt to be hired there. It is set to be published in an anthology with Conundrum Press in 2020. She curates a comic and zine distro at Depanneur Le Pick Up and makes ongoing comic work about the benign cyst in her brain.

Social Media Things: 
Instagram + Facebook: @sarahmangle  

HALFLING BEAR (ECLIPSE)
 
the trophy hunter has it
the scientists & the media
celebrate, debate, discuss
photos of the corpse fly
all around the world
& linger for years
 
the miracle of courtship
alignment sought & found
the passing of a honeymoon
the wonder of apparent difference
transcended with pleasure
 
the private rendezvous of
polar bear & grizzly, followed
by months of solitary gestation
of nurturing, nursing
feeding
teaching the young
 
all the years of a young bear’s life
discoveries, missteps, accomplishments
the cultural patterning inhabited, as
taught by the mother
& the world met, step by step
 
all these
disappear
 
into bloodlust & big money
dna proofs & a too small sample
the death of a halfling bear reveals
the minds of scientific observers
& all forms of prejudice: miscegenation
still, so scandalous
 
this is not a freakshow
but evidence of life unfolding
& showing its shape as it goes
the elders say, usually they fight
but not this time

"halfling bear(eclipse)" originally published in Halfling Spring: an internet romance (Kegedonce Press 2013)

​Joanne Arnott is a Métis/mixed-blood writer and arts activist, originally from Manitoba, at home on the west coast. She received the Gerald Lampert Award (LCP 1992) and the Vancouver Mayor’s Art Award for Literary Arts (2017). She published six poetry books, a collection of short nonfiction and a children’s illustrated. Recent publications include her third poetry chapbook, Pensive & beyond (Nomados Press 2019) and the co-edited volume, Honouring the Strength of Indian Women: Plays, Stories and Poetry by Vera Manuel (U of Manitoba Press 2019). She is Poetry Mentor for The Writers Studio, SFU, and Poetry Editor for EVENT Magazine.

WATCHING THE DULL EDGES (​THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE OF A  23°27′ TILT)

Watching Dull Edges (the northern hemisphere of a 23°27′ tilt) is a series of photographs documenting the act of sitting in Canada during the winter of 2017 carefully watching the last snowfall of the year melting inside a test tube. It is a meditation on what it means to be living through the end of planetary regularities, like the seasons as we have come to know them. Winter in Canada as long months of accumulating snow fall will shortly be no more, if it isn’t already gone; this work considers what it means to live with this awareness.
 
 
Watching Dull Edges (the northern hemisphere of a 23°27′ tilt) is a work about paying attention to change, even when it arrives with slowly, or with dull edges. It is about staying still to attune oneself to a loss whose material and temporal dimensions are so vast we struggle to make sense of them. How do we stop to not just notice but truly register and mourn these losses accumulating? What practices can we enact to connect our lived experiences of the world with this urgent new reality?
 



​Lisa Hirmer is an interdisciplinary artist who works across visual media, social practice, performance and occasionally writing. She is primarily concerned with collective relationships: that which exists between things, rather than simply within them—particularly in relation to collective beliefs and in human relations with the more-than human world. Her work finds home both in gallery contexts and an expanded field of other public spaces. It has been shown across Canada and internationally. She has received numerous grants and residencies for her work including from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and Camargo Foundation. 

​Lisa Hirmer would like to acknowledge The Art Gallery of Ontario for project support.

Website:
www.lisahirmer.ca
Instagram: lisa.hirmer