1/10/2021 POETRY: JUDITH PENNERWHAT ABOUT THE WEATHER? 1. July 2, 2012, Vancouver, just after 7 pm. In 32 out of 49 United States temperatures are higher than ever recorded, a hundred and five, a hundred and seven, a hundred and nine or more.... In some TV places the air is un- conditioned, no longer homes there, where fires have demolished neighbour- hoods in Colorado Springs. Everything here is lush, soaked, just a little out of season. I can sleep — if I’ve walked, worked at my desk, felt loved by someone, but these days even love won’t assuage anxiety. It’s not just a globe that’s warming, it’s something else – a rise in obfuscation, a lilt of lies? Oil oozing over the map will be no surprise and even the rain won’t stop it now, (such small hands and all that talk is over) — citizens gloved and scared. 2. The summer of 2015, Vancouver, the rain did stop, at least for too long, April to October there was never enough. The shock of turning off the tap, just brush with a cup, do not wash your car, your bike, the shoes you wear, stand with the hose and let a little dribble quench the roses, that old hellebore still blooming, let moss die on stones, my steps stay dirty, neighbourhood vigilantes take their high road turns. The day of my party, a turning point in life, in weather, rain flooded the patio, the pool, the fancied guests. But we were only midway and our thirst was bigger than the rain—a modest spatter, enough for a rainbow, not enough to turn the clock back to that glory life, the one we thought we had forever. After starting out as a poet, short story writer, journalist (The Fiddlehead, Best Canadian Stories, The Observer Magazine (UK), CBC, NFB), and co-author of several non-fiction books, Judith Penner spent a long time preoccupied with family, travel, teaching yoga and related workshops throughout India and North America, and her work as an editor. In recent years her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in catalogues (readymades, Smith Foundation), anthologies (Sustenance, Anvil Press), The Poetry Foundation, and in literary magazines, including Geist, Prism International, The Capilano Review online, and SubTerrain. Nomados published A Bed of Half Full: a landscape in 2018. She lives in Vancouver.
12/10/2020 POETRY: MEREDITH QUARTERMAINFLAGPOLES AT THE OLD EXPO GROUNDS jogger shoes flap flap flap bike chains jingle skateboards rush push on and on words surge to phone faces to laces no, I know, but it’s something I’ve really noticed a language I can’t understand the bolt of weeds through planks the mark of orange plastic cones a couple on yellow steps watch a play on a rotting stage its clatter of empty flagpoles its loom of concrete stadium once the water’s edge now Edgewater Casino spinning wheels spinning Highway ’86 yachts, trucks, ATVs giant Swiss-watch McBarge world in motion world in touch press on, carry on, keep on odds on asphalt odds on helicopter odds on geodesic I don’t think the psychiatrist warned them they thought they heard the deer they felt they were similar just look at the criteria look at the architecture the water’s push against land their nightclub they wanted to, they wanted very much they rallied, they studied, they held summits yet they knew they weren’t for plants they weren’t for wildlife videos they were for the stage they were on track for the house edge Meredith Quartermain’s Vancouver Walking won a BC Book Award for Poetry, Nightmarker was a finalist for a Vancouver Book Award, and Recipes from the Red Planet was a finalist for a BC Book Award for fiction. You can also find her work in Best Canadian Poetry 2009 and 2018. Her fourth book of poetry, Lullabies in the Real World, was published in 2020 by NeWest Press. From 2014 to 2016, she was the Poetry Mentor at Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio Program.
12/10/2020 POETRY: RHEA TREGEBOVLE TEMPS DES CERISES Massacre in my kitchen, the counter spatter incarnadine, my hands bloodied with the juice of cherries splayed, gutted, for dessert at a friend’s; my fingers dyed a red that keeps in the fine creases, under the nails, through the next day’s breakfast, lunch. I tremble to sacrifice none of this, even though the cherries, local, organic, spoke to me, insisting on their innocence, the plump, burgundy wholeness of them. I didn’t think to spare them, never do; not them, nor the shrimp I clean for my son’s home-coming dinner, each shrimp life given up, given over to our celebration. Deeper into that same night I hear, through my open window, close, someone else’s baby cry – such grief, and nothing will ease it, not the breast or rest or warmth or darkness or light; nothing will ease it forever and ever or for the long moment till all is well and silent. We can’t help ourselves: who wouldn’t trade their own child’s comfort for another’s harm, another child’s harm? We can’t help ourselves, knowing it’s wrong, knowing there would be a remedy if we wanted it. Now someone has written a book I won’t be reading, about how the Earth would do without us, rewriting not the past (airbrushing Trotsky out of the Stalin snaps), but the future; a projection sans project-er. It’s getting hotter, we’re starting to agree we’ve fucked it up. The review says the author has visited fresh ruins, a city abandoned only decades, and it’s easy to foretell: bougainvillea purpling rooftops, the small fingers of roots diligently rubbing out difference. No inside; no out. To some perhaps it’s comforting to think of the Earth scratching at its ear (good dog!) and us no more than fleas in its coat: a good scrub, a sprinkling of powder and all is well again. None mourning our self- massacre, not the cherries gone wild, the gleeful shrimp gaining, all we consumed. He imagines furthermore humpbacks releasing their arias without contest, butterflies sculpting air. I don’t want to. Useless though my own life has seemed to me at times (despite cherries, despite friends), I want this curious project to continue, our certain hunger, our subtleties, our complicated contradictions. The arias less necessary to me than the way a mouth is held, the look in an eye, that engenders them. Though my own evaluation of the human is that, as the song goes, you can’t have one without the other. Previously published in All Souls’ Véhicule Press, 2012 Rhea Tregebov’s seventh collection of poetry, All Souls’, was published in 2012. Her poetry has received the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize, Honorable Mention for the National Magazine Awards, and the Readers’ Choice Award for Poetry from Prairie Schooner. Tregebov is also the author of two novels, Rue des Rosiers and The Knife-Sharpener’s Bell, as well as five children’s picture books. Having retired from her position in the Creative Writing Program at University of British Columbia teaching in June 2017, she is now an Associate Professor Emerita.
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