11/21/2020 POETRY: NATALIE LIMconversations with mom I think I am scared to have children. what if I forget the kind of world we are living in? what if I try to write and all that comes out is a siren, a fire, some hot, angry thing, what if I am a siren and a fire and a hot, angry thing? the warning signs are not for you. they are for you. ignore them anyway. what if I forget how to hold you? what if the world will not hold us and we are falling and the fire alarm is ringing and I am the fire-- what if I leave and they think I am never coming back? what if I don’t want to come back? "conversations with mom" originally published in Room Magazine, Issue 42.4, 2020 Natalie Lim is a Chinese-Canadian writer based in Vancouver, B.C. and the winner of the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize, with work published in Room Magazine, Honey & Lime Lit, PRISM international and more. She is an unashamed nerd and a believer in good bones, and you can find her on Twitter @nataliemlim.
11/21/2020 POETRY: NIKKI REIMERI WONDER IF I WILL EVER MANAGE TO WRITE A GOOD POEM ABOUT HEAT DEATH This trajectory is all on us for inability to fact check or read critically. The sparring kangaroos were dancing with rain-joy, we said. That’s fighting, said the scientist, old photo. Those kangaroos are ash by now. Pictures of koalas in renal failure foregoing their fear of us to lap water from the road were deemed “cute.” No, no, said the scientist, it’s not cute. That creature is dying. We’d moved on. Wombats shepherd other critters into their burrows! Stewards of the underbush! Not quite right, said the scientist, wombat burrows are enormous. Most likely the wombat was hiding in another chamber. Too busy anthropomorphizing, we’d already created a hashtag. #WombatEmpathy will save us! I asked ryan what comes next, and he said, either the complete transformation of existing relationships or the heat death of the planet. One of those. My heart’s on relationships, and kangaroos, and scientists. No time for settler logic. No atheists in burrows, friend. No one is coming to save us. I ❤️ ALBERTA’S ENERGY take the elevator to my second-floor apartment bust out the biodiesel firmware use medical grade plastic bottles for my saline nasal rinse gotta keep those mucus membranes clean for u and the dust bowl, babe, gotta run that old car all up and down this city’s sprawl I try to keep warm through frigid prairie winters feel appropriate guilt at the plastic produce bags I bring home from the grocery store / forget the mesh ones every time / I’ve gone full enemy of the state assault vehicle applied to be the next poet-in-residence for carbon capture (mass species death, but make it fashion) everything you see is development gently falling leaves in the inner city: development Enoch Sales heritage home fire: development empty condo tower on empty condo tower: the firing of 5,000 Albertan nurses in the year 2019 / 9 dead from fires in South Wales since Monday now 17 now 24, meanwhile we’re bursting out the seams over here: Montana, Drake, East Village, Tuscany new history razed for imported ideas another thundering swing from settler colonialism’s long neoliberal tail clearing a path for the rule of the patch by the patch for the patch for the capitalist overlord bosses of our demise, for the dinosaurs who never left us Nikki Reimer (she/her) is a carbon-based life form of Ukrainian and Russian Mennonite descent who lives on the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta. She may or may not be undead. She writes poetry, essays and criticism, yells on the internet, and makes digital art. Published books are My Heart is a Rose Manhattan, DOWNVERSE and [sic].
11/21/2020 POETRY: ROB TAYLORKING TIDE The boardwalks scuttled like diving reef schooners – a walkable Galilee if anyone dared, but each jogger rears to higher ground. I’ve lost my son a half-second here or there before I pulled him up, his lips like planks, in tubs and pools and once a mirror lake – the obsidian endless kind that really ends abruptly in roots and husks and carcasses and muck. This country’s full of them. All summer we swim bellies up, avoid anoxic thoughts. The joggers, any other day, linger at the point just long enough to catch their breath and contemplate an app, perhaps the sun. Yes, there it is, afloat. My son, I need to know what you thought of water when it first, again, surrounded you. Your eyes were wide. You didn’t make a sound. Not one thing was born or died. THE SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE OF THIS WORLD The successful people of this world are always busy. They work all day then come home and need to do something so they cook the dinner, wash the car, cut the grass. It's because of the successful people that we have water restrictions: this side of the street on even days, that side on odd. They like that kind of thing: schedules, they are usually big fans of schedules, and when they have free time in theirs they spend it composing new schedules. When they take medication they always put it in one of those plastic things that divides the pills up by days. In conclusion: the successful people of this world are busy and efficient, their actions are their own rewards, and a green lawn during a heat wave is their poem. "The Successful People of the World" previously appeared in The Other Side of Ourselves (Cormorant Books, 2011). Rob Taylor is the author of three poetry collections, including The News (Gaspereau Press, 2016), which was a finalist for the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Rob is also the editor of What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation (Nightwood Editions, 2018) and guest editor of Best Canadian Poetry 2019 (Biblioasis, 2019). His fourth collection, Strangers, will be published by Biblioasis in Spring 2021.
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