1/10/2021 POETRY: KIRSTEEN MACLEODSWANS One frigid midwinter afternoon, early for the symphony, I look out on the frozen lake. Unseasonable cold, I worry. Climate change. That moment a huge bird glides by, slow motion, long neck outstretched, black bill, wings extended, body a downy white. I’ve never seen a trumpeter swan, mythical creature, surely dreamed to life. Inside the concert hall beautiful music swirls, like the thrill of the swan, elevating me, a wild reminder I’m part of the living world, an animal too. Trumpeter swans were nearly extinct. We think we protected them. But they protect us, from the impoverishment of a world without trumpeter swans. The music ends and I rush out, hoping to glimpse the swan, what it offers us -- a rare, precious encounter with what is real, the given world. Kirsteen MacLeod’s poetry and prose has appeared in many literary journals, and she was a finalist for Arc Poetry’s Poem of the Year in 2020. Her nonfiction book, In Praise of Retreat, is forthcoming in March 2021 from ECW Press. Her debut collection of short fiction, The Animal Game, was published in 2016.
12/10/2020 POETRY: CATRIONA WRIGHTNOTES TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOCENE FABLE AT A RUSSIAN SAUNA IN MISSISSAUGA Rumpelstiltskin’s first wife, I enter and exit the steam room in a eucalyptus cloud. My rumpled robe scratches. Silt rises to skin surface. I scrub my pores with sea salt. I pull a rusted chain and a wooden bucket tips cool torrent on my head. No one in these microclimates has a name big enough for forests, for air. I am trying to outrun my recurring daymare, the one with the turret. This olive string bikini, once sinuous, is now only fit for sweating myself alive. I beg a sauna man in a wool cap to wave his parched birch wand. My inner bitch wakes up, whining. I haven’t fed her in too long. My cells realign themselves, spread around. I eavesdrop on the heat, practice different pronunciations. He ate, she ate, we ate all the sun’s treats, licked black seeds from slit vanilla beans, plucked gold croaks from toad throats. I am trying to escape the king’s wealth, the kind that slashes and slinks through holes. I get to stay here longer than all the white rhinos, the bees. Will I hand a firstborn to the burn? Infused with cedar scent, buzzing, I lower myself into a barrel of glacial water. I imagine a cryogenic prince charming carrying me, limp, into the next ice age. Soothed, I shower. Calmer and slower, I sit in the tea room afterward, drinking vodka and kombucha, replenishing my salt sea with pickle brine. A television screens our ever after, a nature documentary about bleached coral reefs, all those fabulous bows and rainbows frozen white in the sunshine. Originally published in PRISM International (Issue 57.4: Spring 2019) Catriona Wright is the author of the poetry collection Table Manners (Véhicule Press, 2017) and the short story collection Difficult People (Nightwood Editions, 2018). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Walrus, Fiddlehead, and Lemon Hound, and they have been anthologized in The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry and in The Best Canadian Poetry 2015 & 2018.
12/10/2020 POETRY: GREGORY BETTSTHESE ELEPHANTS IN CANADA I memory is a mammoth failure a trauma dream a Zoroastrian declaiming upon a dead star weeping on a palimpsest of archipelagos on all that remains land written upon by rising seas animals run to land when the sea spills over its speech II overwhelmed by rising I spill my coffee onto the once fecund table as it pools disorder into the shape of an elephant’s ear I gaze into the lifeless dream to hear a scattering of sound reflection III alive a brown melted glacier going tidal the hot ocean of this elephant’s sneeze a disorder of all senses uncaging unguent memories drip out into the void of human space Gregory Betts is the author of Sweet Forme (2020), a collection of visual renderings of the sound patterns in Shakespeare’s sonnets (published by Australia’s Apothecary Archive, available here: https://bit.ly/383XaTl). He is the digital curator of bpNichol.ca and a poet-professor at Brock University. His next book is Finding Nothing: Vancouver Avant-Garde Literature, 1959-1975, due out in February 2021 with University of Toronto Press.
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