TWO POEMS 
BY ANNICK MACASKILL
 
BOTTLED

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.

WHAT TIME LEFT
​BY GEOFFREY NILSON

​Geoffrey Nilson is a writer, editor, visual artist, and the founder of poetry micropress pagefiftyone. His work has appeared recently in PRISM, CV2, Coast Mountain Culture, and is forthcoming as part of Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds from Caitlin Press in winter 2020. He lives with his daughter in New Westminster on the unceded territory of the Qayqayt First Nation.

CLIMATE ANXIETY
BY TRYNNE DELANEY

our grocery store is out of tofu
in Calgary
o town that runs on beef & crude oil
understocked soy blocks
a sign of hope
when we’re usually just coughing
our way out of smoke this time of year
instead
the amazon’s burning for profit and everyone’s
so scared of death they forget
some of us will survive The End—​
mass extinction doesn’t happen in a day!
yap the dinosaur jaws compressing below us
and if climate change is getting you down
you can send a gif of Jeff Goldblum
through a server system
that will burn as much fuel
as the airline industry
by 2020
it’s all pretty bleak
but you know, uh,
life, uh, finds a way

THREE POEMS
BY D.A. LOCKHART


OTTO E. ECKERT STATION TAUNTS FIRE TO GRANDMOTHER 
 
She rises through
nitrous oxide sunset
greets the  Boji Tower,
greets it in persimmon
sky, arrives in the fall
of this late burning sun.
 
Before her, coiling bolts
of coal cooked air pour forth
into diminishing  light,
slip and fade in opaque
whisps. One street over
 
in a sapling park, several geese
lament the lost Oldsmobile
plant. What song will rise
to greet the final train load
of Powder River Basin earth,
when it arrives to be cooked
up beneath the Eckert Station’s
unfiltered bundle of shareholder
ambition, pleasure, ambivalence.
 
Landmarks, despite their poison
are missed in the absences before
and behind us, their ends the loss
of measures to our traces left
upon creation. Grandmother rises,
her downward fixed gaze rests
               on the steady tumble
                                                               of coal-fired smoke
                                                                             feeding a hundred-thousand air conditioners.




SWALLOWS RUN FRANTIC AT THE WATER'S EDGE
 
Trace the pathways
of swallows, running
veins atop Waabiishkiigo,
criss-crossing whirlpools
left by minnows,
               stalking the same hatch.
 
Discarded, yellow ash leaves
islands unto themselves
crest and fall on this lake
swollen past temperament
by distant snowfalls,
               creation rising to meet creation
 
Beyond us, northward
our land peters out into
shipping lanes, currents
of sand, algae, driftwood.
Each caress of this lake
               refreshes us, slows us
 
Horizon holds mid-lake
lighthouse, toilet shaped,
blotting out Wheatley beyond.
A lesson that lake freighters,
pleasure boat fishermen,
               ignore in due course.
 
The lake, creation moves
slow. Swallows frantic atop
it, us lazy on this beach,
and the water rises, another
freighter steams past lighthouse
               green moves atop high waves.




MÀXKI SIPU
 
I come to you as you squeeze
into the cement culvert bisecting
the heart of Springwells treaty land
at fence line you stretch out
to the horizons, beneath lowrise
office buildings, straight as a slash
of a shixikwe bite, still, as moments
after the strike. Know your destination
arrives at an island of fire, constant
grumble of angry earth. Above us
shopping cart rapids slow to glass
top rifle of water, wailing past
weeds, nènèskakw  burst skyward
from cracks in constricting shore.

ARTWORK BY JESSICA JOY HIEMSTRA
​POEMS BY KATHRYN MOCKLER

DESCRIPTION
Part of a series of cathartic reactions to Kathryn Mockler's #thisisntaconversation poems: searing, pithy, moving and funny snippets of writing that put a finger on our collective nerve around climate crisis. Kathryn and I decided that we wanted to donate 100% of the proceeds from these prints to Shades of Hope Wildlife Refuge, a registered charity based in Georgina, Ontario. Licensed by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Canadian Wildlife Services, SOH serves the GTA and areas throughout the South Central Ontario corridor. Their mandate: to nurture and rehabilitate injured and orphaned native wildlife with the goal of releasing healthy animals back into their natural habitats.

Prints are available for purchase from this series, and 100% of the proceeds go to Shades of Hope Wildlife Refuge.

Jessica Joy Hiemstra likes what Paul Klee once said about art – that one eye sees, the other feels. Jessica works in a variety of mediums on many kinds of surfaces - from watercolour and thread on paper to acrylic on acetate to plastic bags sewn into canvas. Jessica’s also a poet and designer. One of the things people often ask Jessica is “what’s the difference between all the things you do?” Jessica doesn’t distinguish much between her mediums. She just chooses the best medium for exploring whichever question, concern or exaltation is most pressing to her in the moment - from delight in the body to sorrow and anger at how poorly we care for our world and each other. Sometimes she uses words, sometimes pencil, sometimes paint.  A selection of Jessica’s work is available as limited, signed prints in Jessica’s online shop.
​
​Kathryn Mockler is the author of four books of poetry and six short films. She is the Editor of  Watch Your Head, Canada Editor of Joyland Magazine, Publisher of The Rusty Toque from 2011-2017, and she teaches creative writing at Western University. She has a poetry chapbook written in collaboration with Gary Barwin forthcoming from Knife | Fork | Book (2020) and her debut collection of stories forthcoming from Book*hug (2121). She is working on a TV series pilot called Yardbird.
 

Nisa Malli is a writer and researcher, born in Winnipeg and currently living in Toronto. She holds a BFA in Writing from the University of Victoria and has completed residencies at the Banff Centre and Artscape Gibraltar Point. Her first chapbook, Remitting, was published by Baseline Press in 2019. ​