11/22/2019 ART + POETRY: ELAINE WOOHOPE OF THE HUMMINGBIRD For the past decade, severe wind storms have battered the little community I live in on the Pacific Coast. Leg-thick tree limbs have busted roofs, littered lawns, flattened bushes, and felled old trees in our adjoining forest. This spectre is climate change. Elsewhere, the world is burning. What can one person do? Our solution is simple. During fall, we hang up a hummingbird feeder, seed feeders for larger birds, and a suet feeder for winter. We nourish the most vulnerable creatures of the forest, without discouraging their natural ability to forage. The small, bright glow of hope of our hummingbird friends inspired this poetic honouring: Shimmering red tweed on green our tiny guest wings beat time its needle dips deep into the slit of our offered feeder’s yellow plastic petals your forest retreat thinned climate-peril windstorm our serving a small buffer against a grievous global surge of natural tragedies one shock-absorber stands firm ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS "A Vortex" previously published in print in Otoliths, issue fifty, part two, southern winter, 2018 and online at the-otolith.blogspot.com "Hope of the Hummingbird" first published by Elephant Journal, September 25, 2019 Elaine Woo has long engaged in the discourse on environmental justice through her poetry and visual art. She would like to see many more join in and take action in ways, big or small, as able. She is the author of the collections Put Your Hand in Mine, 2019 and Cycling with the Dragon, 2014.
11/21/2019 ART + POETRY: FRANCINE CUNNINGHAMTo Aliens (all) we fucked up the planet that is not by choice well not by my choice and not by a lot of people I know it was sort of an accumulative fucking up so you probably shouldn’t come back here or visit for the first time right now you should probably just wait until this part of humanity is gone because while we have fucked it up currently i don’t have much hope that we’ll be around that much longer to continue fucking it up and after that you can come visit again the things that come after us will probably be hotter anyways To plant life (all), you show what you heal in your very makeup the cellular structure of what you are giving us a map to all that means to be alive seen in valerian root shaped like a nervous system used to calm our nerves and send us to sleep seen in strawberries cut in half the picture of a human heart used to heal our hearts seen in St. John’s wort bright yellow flowers calling forth joy used to heal depression you show us and sadly, only some of us see Francine Cunningham is an award-winning Indigenous writer, artist and educator originally from Calgary, AB but who currently resides in Vancouver, BC. She is a graduate of the UBC Creative Writing MFA program, and a recent winner of The Indigenous Voices Award in the 2019 Unpublished Prose Category and of The Hnatyshyn Foundation’s REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. Her fiction has appeared in Grain Magazine as the 2018 Short Prose Award winner, on The Malahat Review’s Far Horizon’s Prose shortlist, Joyland Magazine, The Puritan Magazine, and more. Her debut book of poetry is titled ON/Me (Caitlin Press). You can find out more about her at www.francinecunningham.ca.
11/18/2019 POETRY: ANNICK MACASKILLBOTTLED Light slow as honey in its antique shell, rubber stopper lazy at the end, snarled curl of the lip ring silver round glass—yes glass, but thick, the kind that keeps you guessing, stretching feeble for the other side. The way a frenzied starling builds her nest in May, one flimsy clutch of twigs at a time. The light unclaimed through my delay, seeping in as if from nowhere, stilted, clotted as in the white-shelled tank I saw one inverted summer day in Melbourne, where a squid lay slumped in a corner like a pile of unwashed laundry, her eye a steady accusation before the rounded window that glimpsed our own grey-glimmer world. TRY TO HATCH FISH AND STONES* know what to do with your chalky misfortunes. Revive dreams like mammoths, an old relationship. Await the birth of a patience, eternal, yet to be mastered in any hemisphere. Know what to do with disappointment. If lucky, lucky. In the long quest for an everyday, don’t forget to revise your expectations. Protect the charge that is your wanting. If queer, well. Know what to do with heartache. Hitch your wagon to a laboratory. Keep that hope within your belly, under the perfect tuxedo flap of skin, snug beneath your lungs. *“Berlin gay penguins adopt abandoned egg.” BBC News from Elsewhere, 12 August, 2019. Reporting by Martin Morgan. Annick MacAskill is a queer and feminist poet and translator based in Kjipuktuk (Halifax) on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq. Her debut collection, No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau Press, 2018), was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Poetry Award. Her second collection, a book of love poetry, will be published by Gaspereau Press in the spring of 2020.
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