11/22/2019 POETRY: HEGE JAKOBSEN LEPRI8 POEMS: SENRYU, HAIKU, KYOKA, TANKA I How did she do it Red Riding Hood, luring wolves into extinction? Was it expert marketing or her flawless marksmanship? II Is this blazing earth just angry - or signing our Eviction-notice? III The heavens last night Poured out their discontent heart Flooding our basements IV Showers in forecast After us comes the deluge Our prospectless toast Too drunk to dream a future Our off-key drinking song V While the ice cap thaws I'll regret my lusting for Gentler winter winds VI Lonely ice flake floats on lukewarm Arctic waters - my eyes are melting The edges of existence now bend toward depression VII Mid-summer sultry tiny bug bites won't disprove our insect collapse I offer my scratchy arms In pursuit of atonement VIII The city's humming I listen for sounds of hope through morning traffic Hege Jakobsen Lepri is a Norwegian-Canadian translator and writer. She returned to writing in 2011 and had her first story published in English in J Journal in 2013. She has since been published widely in Canada and the US. Her most recent work is featured or forthcoming in The New Quarterly, Carve Literary Magazine, Hobart, Agnes and True, Journal of Compressed Arts, Gone Lawn, Belletrist, Crack the Spine, Prism International and elsewhere. You find her on her on twitter @hegelincanada, Instagram: @hege.a.j.lepri and on her website: www.hegeajlepri.ca 11/22/2019 POETRY: SHENIZ JANMOHAMEDFLOTSAM bottles plastic bags underwear gum wrappers receipts caps toothbrushes lighters cups end up in the sea’s vast net of light waves heaving the weight of our waste back and forth back and forth the ocean tumbling shards of beer bottles into oblong pebbles of sea glass weaving bloated plastic bags into nooses for seagulls breaking bottle caps into bait for lantern fish Our sparkling garbage dump brims with cockles and crap. our hands throw trash overboard the giver of life receives. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT "Flotsam" was originally published in Firesmoke, Mawenzi House, 2014 Sheniz Janmohamed (MFA) is a firm believer in fostering community through collaboration, compassion and creativity. In her own practice, she strives to embody words through performance, land art and writing in the ghazal form. A poet, artist educator and land artist.
Sheniz has performed her work in venues across the world, including the Jaipur Literature Festival, Alliance Française de Nairobi and the Aga Khan Museum. Her land art has been featured at the Aga Khan Park, the Indian Summer Festival and the Art Gallery of Mississauga. Sheniz is also the author of two collections of poetry: Bleeding Light (Mawenzi House, 2010) and Firesmoke (Mawenzi House, 2014). Sheniz visits dozens of schools and organisations each year to teach, perform, and inspire creativity in her students. In 2015, She was awarded the Lois Birkenshaw-Fleming Creative Teaching Scholarship, and holds a Artist Educator Mentor certificate from the Royal Conservatory of Music (Toronto). Sheniz is also the founder of Questions for Ancestors, a blog that encourages BIPOC writers and artists across Turtle Island to ask questions of their ancestors as provide advice for their descendants. Sheniz is currently working on her third collection of ghazals. www.shenizjanmohamed.com 11/22/2019 POETRY: MARTA BALCEWICZDISCOURSE OF THE LAST BLADE OF SENSITIVE SHY GRASS Oceans recede and Henry Darger was tracing all along. Boys are carrying banners and I am not home. If my bedroom light is burning you’re hallucinating electricity and the on-switch. Your dryer is done, go on. That’s not a claxon. Wind blows that way—alright, wind blows other way—okay BOYS
We are the four who discover Lascaux we bring lichens and mold to the dun horse and stag we turn bison to talc, choke the longest living duck. When our mothers see the clay we part our arms, like curtains at the opera when they insist, we grow antlers cut them off and let them have it: the head of a stag, branched as lightning, is the new forest, centerpiece of her dining room supper to her feast. Marta Balcewicz's poems and stories appear in Tin House Online, AGNI Online, The Malahat Review, and elsewhere. She is the fiction editor for Minola Review and lives in Toronto. Find her at www.martabalcewicz.com.
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