Proceeds will be donated to RAVEN & Climate Justice Toronto. |
A warning, a movement, a collection borne of protest.
In Watch Your Head, poems, stories, essays, and artwork sound the alarm on the present and future consequences of the climate emergency. Ice caps are melting, wildfires are raging, and species extinction is accelerating. Dire predictions about the climate emergency from scientists, Indigenous land and water defenders, and striking school children have mostly been ignored by the very institutions – government, education, industry, and media – with the power to do something about it. Writers and artists confront colonization, racism, and the social inequalities that are endemic to the climate crisis. Here the imagination amplifies and humanizes the science. These works are impassioned, desperate, hopeful, healing, transformative, and radical. This is a call to climate-justice action.
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THE LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Good intentions aside, Nations’ names mispronounced plough depth patronization Indigenous and foreign students invited into their halls of subtle intellectual and academic racism
These are the rules of engagement: Marking rubrics for the administrative convenience of tenured procurers feeding student wood fibre into their Colonizing breakdown mill Minds sawn, baked and kiln dried to be sorted into standardized dimensions graded, degreed and certified suited up in priestly robes to satisfy today’s commodities market.
(To the memory of the Kamloops 215 little ones) THE MUSH HOLE RUBRIC Having been administered a psychological caning and made to feel among “The Other,” in our own homeland. Citations not quite in order Not fitting into the paint by number linear boxes Regurgitating the same old same old This is how you will surely lose marks boy… Such are the metrics of compliance and obedience "Mush Hole Rubric" previously published in Mad Canada Dave Monture, Bear Clan Mohawk, is a retired part-time student who grew up on the Six Nations Reserve. He is a fourth year student in Honours Creative Writing, his second degree at Western. He has participated in readings with Writers-in-residence Margaret Christakos and Alicia Elliot. He has opened for a guest reading of Poetry London. He has contributed to recordings of the Indigenous Writers’ Circle for Radio Western. In 2019 he was a recipient of the Dr. Valio Markkanen Undergraduate Student Award of Excellence and a Head and Heart Fellowship. Most recently, he has contributed to Mad in Canada, Science, Psychiatry and Social Justice. He is a member of the Indigenous Writers’ Circle, an independent Indigenous creative voice, at Western. He is working on a novel, poetry and flash fiction. He recently returned to painting. A CITY STREET I swim thru the tunnel of stately maples on old Barclay Street where smart cars fart beneath protective leaves. A luminous green sky that forms a canopy over the grey green river of a shape shifting street. Even here their instinct is to protect. To give and give and give. Born in England Yvonne has spent the majority of her life being an actor coast to coast in Canada. She now lives in Vancouver B.C . A passionate activist since her days on the front lines of protest against logging in the Carmanah Valley on Vancouver Island in the eighties, one of the first of such successes , she believes that climate change is the most urgent issue on the planet and mourns the loss of every tree .
si'ulq, pāni she takes me deep into her people’s land this stranger turned neighbour turned friend points out antelope brush and grey sage unwavering in summer heat spear grass clings to our skin as we wade through Lamb’s Quarter pulsing the want of seeds through Tufted Vetch and Shepherd’s Purse capped with rounded clusters while red-tailed hawks scratch the clouds above into the valley marked by bloodlines where dreams were swallowed whole we skirt ponds that give life to horned grebes, wigeons, and buffleheads spot a lone merganser and a common loon too early for blue heron to break the glazed surface we revel in the silent miracle of Water si'ulq, her mother would say pāṇī, my mother would say up the notched hills to watch wild horses roam free careless and cared for from a distance I learn palomino, bay, pinto, appaloosa they twitch not for us, but for the Sun xai'ałax, her mother would pray sūraj, my mother would cry and for the Moon sokemm, her mother would ebb chand, my mother would flow she takes me deep onto forest floors I’ve not known a cathedral of soft light we count the birds naks, usil, kałis, her mother would sing ik, dō, theen, my mother would recite walk beneath the watchful gaze of red-winged blackbirds and evening grosbeak there are no willows weeping nearby just the sound of a black-capped chickadee making its way home. Originally published in Prairie Fire Literary Magazine, vol. 42, no. 1, April 2021. UNDER THE BANYAN Nani-ji told us stories, long stories and made up stories, and maybe true stories of everything she knew of everything she’s gathered and named squatting under the banyan tree great-grandfather planted by the pond where the water buffalo bathed. She was shrivelled as an overripe mango, but once smooth as a clay pot. Her hands were caked with stories, her body brimming with stories upon stories seeded from the women and women-shaped absences before her. She told stories of a mouse who was mocked for hoarding rice in a hole, a wise mouse who knew the floods were coming, the rupture and decay looming. I wonder if she was that mouse. Nani-ji: maternal grandmother in the Punjabi family Originally published in Marias at Sampaguita Magazine, May 2021. Born in rural India, Moni Brar now divides her time between the unsurrendered territories of the Treaty 7 Region and the Syilx Okanagan Nation. Her writing explores the immigrant experience, diasporic guilt, and the legacy of trauma resulting from colonization. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and she is the winner of the 2021 SAAG Art’s Writing Prize, runner-up in PRISM international’s 2021 Grouse Grind Prize, shortlisted for Arc’s 2021 Poem of the Year, and a finalist in the 2021 Alberta Magazine Awards. Her writing can be found in The Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Fire, Passages North, and Hobart, among others.
FOUR POEMS FOR TREES 1. Across this formal pleasure, horizon contours mountain range: sawmill, birdsong, lodgepole. Spilled into my voice. Declarations of heartfelt territory lost among these splintered branches. 2. Frank O’Hara’s subway, and his blade of grass. 3. Transplanting monkey puzzle. Prolonged, a coastline errant. Ponderosa. Sechelt, breeze. This sentence of foliage reflects our complexities: such clear and exposed. Abstraction, stripped excess of tree-stubble. What season of nouns. Audre Lorde: There is no separate survival. 4. Where my limbs meet yours, a poem as dense as a brick. Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent poetry titles include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), with a further poetry title, the book of smaller, forthcoming from University of Calgary Press. An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (periodicityjournal.blogspot.com) and Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com). He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. In spring 2020, he won ‘best pandemic beard’ from Coach House Books via Twitter, of which he is extremely proud (and mentions constantly). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com
THIS TITLE DOES WORK He said inspiration is like being fucked by the Gods and if that’s so then I suppose it makes sense that you’d try to decant what they’ve filled you with, to bottle its essence while the sediment settles. Ceded ground I guess but what about getting free? Form feels like a workweek: useful, but to whom? What’s being formed— a complex structure— a vessel to keep things in, worlds which want to be let out. Birds can be observed in order to be observed or collected to be caged or killed to be kept or consumed. Either way the point ceases to be witnessing the wild, turns toward capture, possession, display, moves our attention away from subject to frame— how it was gilded, by whom it was hung, what the work is worth— at which point the bird’s flown, the coop empty, a wheel untrue, thrown off Apollo’s chariot— dawn’s horses on fire, now flaming out towards dusk. SIM CITY “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John 1:1 KJV everything is narrative nature is a myth. the ancients knew that humans were last to the party and quick to call the cops when things felt out of hand (what’s it like to be bounced from the club by a flaming sword a pair of angels?) but seriously who’s to say that the flip wasn’t switched I mean the swish wasn’t phished I mean the fish wasn’t dished I mean the witch wasn’t hitched I mean the switch flipped this morning when I woke up the fog-laden dawn carried on till midday. I walked the dog and wrote this poem on my phone listening to Ethiopiques on my phone drinking a blend of Kenyan coffee paid for with my phone which is powered by cobalt mined by Congolese children en Afrique and this is how poetry has everything to do with the deep violence of colonialism is complicit innit? but anyway as I was saying who’s to say that all of this isn’t due to a toggle tripped by a demi-god— a light being, libidinous for pain, or just bored? Caleb Nichols (he/they) is a queer writer from California, occupying Tilhini, the Place of the Full Moon, the unceded territory of the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini tribe. His poetry has been featured in Hoax, Redivider, perhappened mag, DEAR Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. His poem “Ken” won an Academy of American Poets University Prize, and their chapbook “Teems///\\\Recedes” is forthcoming from Kelp Books. He tweets @seanickels.
TRASH TALK Litter begets more litter- ah, sure when litter it. I / it lit light litter along the literal littoral. The ill litter it refuse refuse and garb age. I utter a light little iteration against litter alluding to allusion, all iteration and assonance off the road, on the road and in to ash, rash, trash can. Penn Kemp. Published online. RIVER REVERY Water abounds here, with this river five times normal width for winter, flooding roads and parks. The swell carries whole trees along stampeding currents. Yellow willows drop fifty-year -old boughs in high winds. Standing waves cover our usual walking path. Climate change is certainly upon us, from eleven below to eleven above in hours, sinking back below freezing. Green begins to bury the remnants of flood, the wall of last fall’s leaves packed level against the link fence. Weird how all reverts, reverberates in spring clarity as old detritus is dredged. Penn Kemp has participated in Canadian cultural life for over 50 years, writing, editing, and publishing poetry and plays. She has published 30 books of poetry, prose and drama and 10 CDs of spoken word/Sound Opera. Penn is the League of Canadian Poets’ 40th Life Member and Spoken Word Artist (2015). Penn’s latest collection, A Near Memoir: new poems (Beliveau Books), launched on Earth Day. Her lively web presence includes Wordpress, Weebly, Facebook, and SoundCloud.
THE BENDS Polished cameo a distilled mirror steam skimmed skin of water in the oval cue The ocean has no perceptible bottom The detritus of cargo ships strewn, submerged No one dives no strolls to retrieve Don’t rise too quickly back up to the sky Animal exhalations hold the wreckage of your heart poured into a white porcelain sink, angled down A paint spattered canvas Still, breathing – oxygenated There is not enough fresh air. near, a view, a window further, distant, the port. (a churning inland sea, painted surface of nothingness) what emerges four-legged from the shore a figure-ground illusion of an ancient-creature still living, distilled breath, “Dressed Landscape for Dry Ice Studies.” The perspective of a band practice The tarry instruments, tinny, far away of amplifiers affixed to stilts Someday the body will remember Its genealogy A generation of flailing limbs A Flirtation with Rapture The Skin of Victorian buildings floating in the after-birth of rain lakes Porous Fissures lattice network The painting hand thinking in a network of gestures of the linked orbital of satellite communications layers of the ascension the numbing epidermal of embodiment cold metal needle in the simulacra the metronome of a shaking hand the surgeon, hirsute At the bottom of the painting, hand-written, The cut ice letters Here where Holy ghost prophecy carries more weight than science FREEDOM Freedom senses all the tears of a thousand windowsills The rainbow of men and women shoulder to shoulder entering hotels and shelters Rowboat sailors with buttoned oars rough coughing from lungs of a sulfur sheen Of black coal in lieu of flowers holding the skirt of the lake. A thousand monarchs rose up, lifted both sides of the sky exposed exploited roe Inlaid into monoculture rows A cascade of waterfalls and memories accompanied the rain all night Rattling on about the cusp as it danced though never unattended The flood waters rang out May the lake take you under to dream May the sky rise to meet you when you awaken. Robert Frede Kenter is a writer and visual artist, who lives with ME/FM, is widely published and exhibited and is a 2020 Pushcart nominee. Work recently in Black Bough, Burning House Press, Cypress, Talking about Strawberries, Floodlight Ed., Anthropocene, Cough. Robert is publisher of Toronto-based Ice Floe Press www.icefloepress.net & author of a recent hybrid collection, Audacity of Form (Ice Floe Press). A chapbook of VISPO, "EDEN", is forthcoming later in 2021. Robert was a feature reader in 2020 at Cheltenham Poetry Festival. Twitter: @frede_kenter
A FEW BEARS I know of a few bears bears who seem thinner than normal they’ll slap your hands the bears are getting hungry Bears who seem thinner than normal these are facts: the bears are getting hungry I'm here to show you reality These are facts: The bears have been starving I'm here to show you reality along the shorelines where grizzlies have been The bears have been starving I'm not here to point fingers along the shorelines where grizzlies have been winners and losers in climate change I’m not here to point fingers without a necropsy winners and losers in climate change if you prefer looking at life from the end Without a necropsy we’re able to observe an emaciated mother if you prefer looking at life from the end in search of berries We’re able to observe an emaciated mother they’ll slap your hands in search of berries I know of a few bears. * (Assembled from recent news articles.) UNMOORED (after Hieronymus Bosch’s painting “Ship of Fools”) It always comes down to what has been lost – a cat, a mind, a god, a compass. Sometimes a silver sack of virtue spins away. Who has not shinnied up the spar pole to carve a fat drumstick from a roast goose? Or lusted for a pancake on a string? Or raised a flask to brain a pickled sinner in a ship as oval as a duck egg or an office for a head of state? We long for guidance from the owl above, our avatar of insight or scandal (depending on the century). We pluck the cherries, stir the winey sea, let the jester with an ass’s ears keep watch as we buck and sway into a melting glacier, its teal horizon a last reminder of the butterflies and jays. Kim Goldberg is the author of eight books of poetry and nonfiction. Her latest book is Devolution (Caitlin Press, 2020), surreal poems and fables of ecopocalypse. It was described as a "ferocious collection" in the Vancouver Sun. Kim's poetry has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in North America and abroad including The Capilano Review, Literary Review of Canada, Dark Mountain, subTerrain and Riddle Fence. She chaired the Women's Eco-Poetry panel at the inaugural Cascadia Poetry Festival in Seattle. Kim holds a degree in biology and is an avid birdwatcher in Nanaimo BC. Twitter: @KimPigSquash. https://pigsquash.wordpress.com/
A LIFE “What we are engaged in when we do poetry is error, the wilful creation of error.” -Anne Carson 1 when we call error what we gain by does error become idol we give our last idle guilt a question overwhelmed by what error half billion animals in the bushfires and by quick overwhelm correction conservative estimate a billion 2 Condors trace California highways for coastal roadkill, enough to replace the megafauna. Our errors of transit replace an ancient diet. Our error is nature. Round goby in the middle of the Great Lakes food web, like strangers where your family was. Like a cormorant, you make a life of it. 3 the answer you arrive at impasse something new constant whiplash 4 Days rain in January, hardly got my big coat out. Days rain in January, ten-foot snowfall, were it cold. Days rain in January, sirens chasing, didn’t hold. Days rain in January, standing still is a route. 5 The leaves of some mass produced flowering plant look alive in all the gardens on my block. They are flat against the half-frozen earth, failing to wilt. A child calls her mom back to see a wet pile protected in a hedge’s shadow. “I found snow! Snow!” She is pointing at it, hopping. In my opinion, it is ugly. It melts as if rotting, greying from within. Soaked dry with soot. The child is better at hope than me. E Martin Nolan is a poet, essayist, editor and teacher. His first book of poems, Still Point, was published with Invisible Publishing in Fall, 2017. He teaches in the Engineering Communication Program at the University of Toronto and is a PhD Candidate in Applied Linguistics at York University. More at emartinnolan.com
LITTLE GOOSE Child, what world is this? A bee thunders past your ear, velvet. Above, geese flounder long-necked against the guillotine of sun. Emerald beetles burrow out of ash, flash effulgent. The beached arm of Ontario laps blue-green algae rippling a radiant siren song. Soft as down, the nape of your neck nests into my palm. Perhaps the end of the beginning. A gossamer thread hanging precarious across the path. Where to walk with you, somewhere that stays. The water taps its hammer hands Into the land and blooms a sinister cyano crescendo.The bees pull a magic trick, disappearing in the span of a hand’s sleight. The ash, spun in larvae, grow weak-shadowed, and the geese have forgotten where to go. See: we made you a myth, light as a feather. SPECIAL REPORT ON GLOBAL WARMING OF 1.5°C The day you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I told you a dog, did you know then the world would turn to bone? Did you picture me graduating at thirty-two, childless in a pilling polyester gown with years already chewing at my hair, a cricket in my knee, the world whipping at catastrophe? Sweating inside this spectacle, I tap the years left on my thigh: one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve years to save ourselves from ourselves. Somebody’s grandfather sobs as his heart marches across the stage. Pride quivers in the jowls of apocalyptic deadlines. Love can be, love can be unbearable. When you asked me, did you know? Jenny Berkel is a poet and singer-songwriter from rural Ontario. Her interests include investigating how a poem is a song and a song is a poem. She has released two albums (Here on a Wire and Pale Moon Kid) and has another one forthcoming. Her debut chapbook, Grease Dogs, was published in June 2021 with Baseline Press.
Citations The following quotes were paraphrased from these sources:
Mona'a Malik’s stories have appeared in The Fiddlehead, Joyland, Event, The Puritan, and Ricepaper, among other venues. She received an Arts and Letters NL award for poetry, and placed first in Carve Magazine’s 2020 Prose & Poetry Contest. Her play Sania The Destroyer was produced for Theatre New Brunswick's 50th anniversary season (2018-2019), and was a finalist for the QWF Playwriting Prize. She lives in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal on the unceded land of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation.
PRESAGES (from a Sixth Floor Apartment 1 Earth is not easy to get down to civilization is all up in the air a matter of building one thing on top of another stairways the stanzas of this poem forms in the air as though space were a convenience to slide on as though the mind were as liquid as this distance down to the earth below 2 In the cities of the damned the air is so thick the veins stand red against the eyes Grey forms of the living walk about in the fog dead dreams of investors hang like a haze in the air The rest is forced underground, flushed into rivers as though the mind did not follow it to the sea 3 We have entered a time we cannot believe in it has come upon us so late and yet so fast In any other time we might have called this the age of the soul where business is no longer a matter of property but of what properly belongs Noli me tangere is a necklace the earth wears O civilized man take your cold hand away 4 flesh of the earth blood of the sea breath of wind mind of fire come home 5 Is it a fish or psyche flops upon this beach thinking to drink the air "Presages" first published in Standing Back. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1971 Robert Hogg was born in Edmonton, Alberta, grew up in the Cariboo and Fraser Valley in British Columbia, and attended UBC during the early Sixties where he was associated with the Vancouver TISH poets and graduated with a BA in English and Creative Writing. In 1964 he hitchhiked east to Toronto, then visited Buffalo NY where Charles Olson was teaching. After spending a few months in NYC, Bob entered the graduate program at the State University of NY at Buffalo, completed a PhD and took a job teaching American and Canadian Poetry at Carleton University in Ottawa for the next 38 years. He currently resides at his farm fifty miles south of Ottawa and is working on four collections: Lamentations; The Cariboo Poems; Postcards, from America; and The Vancouver Work. His publications include: The Connexions, Berkeley: Oyez, 1966; Standing Back, Toronto: Coach House, 1972; Of Light, Toronto: Coach House, 1978; Heat Lightning, Windsor: Black Moss, 1986; There Is No Falling, Toronto: ECW, 1993; and as editor, An English Canadian Poetics, The Confederation Poets – Vol. 1, Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2009; and from Lamentations, Ottawa: above/ground, 2016. Two Cariboo poems, Ranch Days – The McIntosh from hawk/weed press in Kemptville, Ontario, and Ranch Days—for Ed Dorn from battleaxe press in Ottawa have recently been published (2019). He recently edited the April 2019 Canadian poetry issue of the Portland Maine Café Review.
WATERY HIGHWAYS HOME Roll down the car window – the song of the winter wren. The world’s sorrow is fathoms deep, is undertow – it shapes the darkness that contains us. What kind of broken are we? This winking branch-to-branch releases into light above the trees. Is it wind passing through fir needles? What is sound when nothing resists it? Deafening: container ships, cruise liners, screaming invasion, sonars, seismic air guns detonating shock waves of noise – obliterating subaquatic clan-sounds, a babbling calf trailing its mother’s four-click morse- code, the audio glue of pods on the move, on watery highways home. A wonder one orca can hear another. Where are you? Where are you? Cornelia Hoogland’s forthcoming chapbook, titled Dressed in Only a Cardigan, She Picks Up Her Tracks in the Snow, is forthcoming with Baseline Press (2021). Her latest book is Cosmic Bowling (Guernica, 2020), a collaboration with the visual artist Ted Goodden. Trailer Park Elegy and Woods Wolf Girl were finalists for national awards. Hoogland was the 2019 writer-in-residence for the Al Purdy A-Frame and the Whistler Festival. http://www.corneliahoogland.com/
Samantha Jones lives and writes in Calgary, Alberta on Treaty 7 territory, and is mixed Black Canadian and white settler. Her poetry appears in Blanket Sea, CV2, Grain, MixedMag, New Forum, Room, and elsewhere. She is currently a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of Calgary where she studies carbon dioxide cycling in rivers and the coastal Arctic Ocean. Find her on Twitter: @jones_yyc.
A DISCUSSION WITH OLD MAN WHO LIVES IN THE FOREST Old Javanese: urang [person] utan [forest], or “person of the forest” I In the treetops, I once saw my grandfather wrap a cigarette filled with cloves and cardamom. Watched him take a pull and felt the marrow thin inside my bones. The aroma, a reminder of places I intended to go, though they had receded into a room called extinction. It was odd to see him there. His beaded eyes a reminder that culture and the wild-man were not incongruent like the translations may say. Arms languid and longer than recalling. There is no need to split apart my body to search for the similarities. His flapping cheeks are shaped in apocalyptic medallions like my brothers. Ache unfurls at the vision of smiling red hairs, while I remain at the precipice of the street below. He starts a puff, did you ever stop to consider that Enkidu represents the start of the Anthropocene? II “I no longer have the four arms essential to semi-terrestrial living. If we spent eighty percent of our lives in trees, we’d ache less.” He sees irony, a corn of transcendental hypocrisy, to this fir-framed house liver, but it’s his blood. In the middle of the night, she wears solitude in the plenty of her veins and he sews the bones. Clotted with wars and grafts, cultivations serving a new purpose: pushing nutrition further into fissures too deep that only plantations exist there. Impenetrable flat cacophony incurs scarcity and violence upon the next generation of everything. She wants to fix forever, but the paws and fungi that used to cross paths for tea have already been replaced. He watches her quivering aftereffects of stitching, don’t let the palms take root like the Asphodel Fields, they make you forget of the habitats that once were. III It’s an odd sight, to see him on a mechanical contraption, peddles elucidating the enormity of his legs. Large V’s jutting out like wings of a collapsing aircraft, a spectacle not meant to be observed. A saffron-cloak and rollup in his jaw frees his arms for travel. This time, he has come to visit her. Axles and wheels a vortex to further phenomenological discussions. She wants to dream of a good place, barren from complications, but the body is hectic with museums trips and forecasts. He enters her cerebrum the way one enters a show, popcorn and candies in stuffed purses. She’s read up on Heidegger and Euripides, but the discourse isn’t enough to stop a cynical critic of a family member. In low coos he throws the mantle, every person in your time is Melinoë birthed from inherited madness, birthed from a river in the underworld. so swim through it in victory. As a Canadian, Maryam Gowralli draws inspiration from her Trinidadian-Indian and Indonesian heritage. She is an MA student in English Literature at the University of Calgary and is the Creative Nonfiction Editor for filling Station magazine. Her debut poetry collection, Citizenship in Water is forthcoming with That Painted Horse Press in 2021. You can find her works at PRISM International, The Carribean Journal and untethered magazine among others.
RESTORATION the morning sky behind my office building was a fading orange: an old painting before restoration, colors hidden behind clouds it was the type of orange I could almost taste: the cloudy memory of my Nonna’s knotted knuckles peeling oranges in the golden hour glow of lazy summertime afternoons the type of orange I could almost hear: the distant creak of my Nonna’s backyard swing’s rusting hinges I walked through the orange haze into the office, where there were no orange tastes or orange sounds just walls too white to hold anything at all when I left, the sun was long set, its morning colour, already a memory I’ll never quite restore. THE OTHER SIDE we fell in love outside legs swinging out of tree branches whispering wonderings about the ancient history of its bark, about the long-lit office building windows on the other side of the river that carried ducks and swans and geese and tissues and plastic bags and empty vodka bottles and fast food trash our first date we snuck onto the city train tracks one side overlooking the sunlight-adorned stream, the autumn leaves falling like slow tears the other side overlooking a parking lot we walked through a forest with no path beside ourselves with our discovery chattering about how more people should fall in love outside until we came upon a deer eyes wild with panic, limbs entangled in plastic Halloween decorations Cassandra is a Strategist at a marketing agency in Toronto, having graduated with an Honors Specialization in Creative Writing and a Master of Media from the University of Western Ontario. She has been published with eMpower Magazine, The Feminine Collective, Beautiful Losers Magazine, Pip Magazine, The Impressment Gang and Synaerisis Press. While studying at Western, she published a literary and arts zine to raise money to support the International Planned Parenthood Federation. She currently serves on the editorial board for Room Magazine and is always looking for new ways to connect with and serve her community through the arts. Twitter and Instagram: @cassandracervi
THE FUTURE I saw the icons of my generation trashed, pounded, run over. Sunlight, Madge, we were soaking in it. That box that held our Kisses was flat. Lifestyle came undone so that life was hanging on by the grate and style underfoot. What happened is everywhere. "The future is in plastics," said the man in The Graduate, and it is. One night last century, I dreamt I sat on a high wall, an open book on the ground and the sea rose. Be careful the book! I called. The water came anyway. What is precious and who cares and how much? To each her own footwear in the apocalypse. It’s not just the litter, it’s the latter. But some people notice. Someone took these pictures. In Australia, fire eats the houses. In Venice, someone's couch was swept into high water. Tourists looted the Vuitton store and swam away with the goods. Since Tom Waits isn't dead I call out. What am I seeing? Misery’s the river of the soul, he says. Everybody row. The young are out mopping, because there's no school when there's no school. And the old, well, it doesn’t matter how tired and dazed you are when you’re up to your knees. All you can do is wait. The tide will turn. Sunlight. The real thing. Until the next siren. Fire and water and fire and so on. Sisyphus that old trooper. Sisyphus is us. I SAID TO THE SUN, "Good morning, I love you. But please can you also go to Venice?" They are drowned from exhaustion, mopping up. 'We are down on our knees', their mayor said. And as if too much feeling added 'but only when praying.' The sun was not political. She said, "I’ve been here since the beginning but I’m not alone. The sky is my company and the ocean is riled and there is unholy steam from the ground. I should stop my breathing in California, Australia, across the Amazon they don’t want me. The earth is my mirror. Cracked and dark. Or soaked. Wherever I go, I am too much, and not enough." And the sun shone weakly. Which was not enough. Didn’t know if she was coming or going and she was both. A voice said, "remember, when your Republic really gets into trouble there is only one way out: SAY YOU'RE SORRY THEN BUILD A SPECTACULAR CHURCH, GRAND ENOUGH TO CATCH THE EYE OF THE MADONNA! It works!" I looked at the watercolor of Salute Cathedral built by plague survivors in 1631. That floor I'd stood on with its mesmeric tiles. Today, locals stream in for Festa della Madonna, light candles. If I were down to my last pennies of hope, would I fling one into a flood and make a wish? Throw a coin and see which side faces up? Look there? My eyes are open and on the sky. What we love cannot save us. The sun is down now and searing the other side. And I am writing from the present to say, "Goodnight, dear friend. I hope you find some peace tonight, though you turn and turn." THE NIGHT THE RHINOS CAME The night the rhinos came we had nowhere else to look. They were not accusatory, but trotted towards us like big dogs. One turned her face left to show us her profile, batted one eye at ours and fluttered there. To watch a three-thousand-pound animal flutter makes a great gape of awe. The children shrieked: He's looking at me! For size is often male, and scares or flatters us with its attention. But she has nothing to do with that. And trots away. If this were a dance, a dream meeting, we might bow and leave her. But someone among us here is dreaming power, will buy a rifle, run out and begin the killing, is already having nightmares, planning an illustrious future. It's still possible to love how small we are in the face of her face and our fragility. Acknowledgements "The Future” was published in “The Litter I See Project” in February 2020. The voice quoted in stanza 5 of “I Said to the Sun” is Cat Bauer’s from her blog "Venetian Cat, The Venice Blog: Venice, The Veneto and Beyond” November 23, 2013 “The Night the Rhinos Came” was commissioned for the symposium “Rhinoceros: Luxury’s Fragile Frontier” which was held in Venice, Italy in 2018 and published in the exhibition catalogue. It was also published in Canthius in 2019. In 2021, it will be included in a special issue of Luxury: History, Culture, and Consumption focused on the Venice symposium and edited by Catherine Kovesi. Ronna Bloom is a teacher, writing coach, and the author of six books of poetry. Her most recent book, The More, was published by Pedlar Press in 2017 and long listed for the City of Toronto Book Award. Her poems have been recorded by the CNIB and translated into Spanish, Bangla, and Chinese. She is currently Poet in Community at the University of Toronto and developed the first poet in residence program at Sinai Health which ran from 2012-2019. Ronna runs workshops and gives talks on poetry, spontaneity, and awareness through writing.
CARHENGE Pollok Free State, 1995 (i.m. Colin Macleod) New car smell rammed into the roadbed until it stinks of the earth’s gut: muddy leaves, wet dog, plum-cake. Lichen-rust tectonic under bonnets, engines furred. Headlight bulbs are goldfish bowls, tenantless. Doors pucker with each slam and the boot flaps like a gull-wing. Twin-exhausts are organ pipes, emptying. Everything natural, every thing resourced: we make the things that make us, moulded or vulcanised. Blacked tyres made up with stibnite. When we fire them, rubber drips from the wheel-arches like hot sugar, sweet petroarticles of faith on the tongue. We circle each instant monument, generous heretics, knowing these are ugly gods – bitter in the stomach, black in the lung.
ANIMAL TRIALS: STATEMENT FROM THE TRIAL OF THE WEEVILS OF SAINT JULIEN In the spring of 1587…some weevils were arraigned before the ecclesiastical court in St Jean-de-Maurienne for despoiling the vineyards of St Julien. John Harwood, ‘Deliver Us from Weevils’, Literary Review, August 2013 If I may speak on behalf of my sisters who, of late, have sprung bright from the soil and turned these vineyards into frail stock and failed wines; at no time did we act contrary to our creation; and, indeed, as you will know Reverend Father, your wormy books spell out in calfskin and ink, that we precede your own ape-like standing in the Great Chain of Being. God created animals first, – each creeping thing – and gave us every green herb for food. If I may be so bold: the holy vine-leaf sweetens in our grubbing mouths; the grape swells for us, juicy globes without sin. You might damn us to desist but you would do well to remember this: this trial will not bring the control you crave. Insects are on the side of the angels and we shall turn you out, even unto the grave. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS "Carhenge" first published in The Scores, then Sacrifice Zones (Red Squirrel, 2020) "Containerization" first published in Gutter, then Stitch (Tapsalteerie, 2018) "Animal Trials: Statement from the Trial of the Weevils of Saint Julien" published in Sacrifice Zones (Red Squirrel, 2020) Samuel Tongue's first collection is Sacrifice Zones (Red Squirrel, 2020) and he has published two pamphlets: Stitch (Tapsalteerie, 2018) and Hauling-Out (Eyewear, 2016). Poems have appeared in Magma, The Compass, Finished Creatures, Gutter, The Interpreter's House, Envoi and elsewhere. Samuel is Project Coordinator at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh and he lives in Glasgow. www.samueltongue.com; Twitter: @SamuelTongue
IF SATURDAY, AN EMPTY PARKING LOT If the horse fence was split-rail and I had an apple in my hand. If mom and pop grocery stores still had their ‘and.’ If I could lift out of biography into sand and compost, hand-mixed and laid in low spots in the yard. If the knock at the door was a parcel instead of a politician, if we built each day the way a spider shuttles a web, warp of anchor threads, weft of hours to hammock in. If woodstoves, whiskey, and new friends. If barefooted, weeding garden beds. If cold frames greened fall plates. If boards that shudder in gale winds held another eighty years, if Canada warms at twice the rate of other countries. If we stopped taking airplanes we’d never see our families again. If we could ride air currents with crows fingers feathered, if the small stones of deer tracks foretold the future. If we weren’t afraid. If babies were born healthy. If this body was a bubble wand held open to wind. Bren Simmers’ first book of non-fiction, Pivot Point (Gaspereau Press, 2019), is a lyrical account of a nine-day wilderness canoe journey. She is also the author of three books of poetry: If, When (Gaspereau Press, 2021), Hastings-Sunrise (Nightwood Editions, 2015), which was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award, and Night Gears (Wolsak & Wynn, 2010). A lifelong west coaster, she now lives on PEI.
SWANS 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.
Bluescape from Stephen Barrett on Vimeo. Faces In the Stones from Stephen Barrett on Vimeo.
Stephen Barrett is a writer, teacher, dad and husband. He composes poetry, writes songs and loves playing his guitar and blues harp. Winters are spent scouring used bookstores in Toronto for old volumes of poetry and summers walking the shores of Lake Huron looking for unique stones and detritus on the beach.
FAREWELL, MY SEA — poem for the Salish Sea The morning the quake hit the city I swore I’d ride full gallop into that sea never look back. I listened to Jay-Z, shoved tiny nectarines into my satchel, and fled West past the Prime Minister who stood at the corner of 4th and Trutch disguised as a Dutch milkmaid with rosy cheeks. Kits beach was furious. But I found my pony di Esperia standing in my dory and so put myself upon her and we rowed – At Howe Sound a gang of dinghies shepherded by muscular oilers slicked up around us. In their faces the coast was a Shrinky Dink. Dogs and cats galore were chucked and dunked into the floatsam. The masked activists who had lain their bodies down beneath bulldozers at Burnaby Mountain flung themselves straight as arrows off the Sea-to-Sky cliffs. Pony and I, in those first days, small in our boat, shared our raisins and stale Triscuits with pirates from Fort McMurray who stabbed each other up for their last rails. All of the city’s private property was now public, but useless, floating as it was, in shit. None of it, not the iPhones or Jaguars, the Hunter boots or toy giraffes imported from France, now bobbing maniacally in the water, mattered. We shared stories and whatever raisins were left. Alanis Obomsawin, sitting around our campfire beside Pauline Johnson, asked what colour the sky was. St. Kateri Tekakwitha, Ike and Tina, Joan of Arc, Marco Polo, Snuffaluffagus— they all came galumphing back. Buffy St. Marie. Neil Young. Louis Riel. We all sat around roasting raisins – all of us intermittently marooned on an unidentifiable Arctic island at Great Bear Lake. The sky? We hadn’t looked at it. Babies cried. Laura Secord handed out milkshakes. Georgia O’Keefe stood as still as a petroglyph, entranced by the horizon. We’d come too seldom to the ocean. We were too busy with the 21st century. But eternal return isn’t infinite. Not everyone comes back, nothing lasts. My pony refused to do the dirty work and her brackish eyes were glassy. On her way to the slaughterhouse, years ago, standing in a dark box car, despondent, she felt the sudden hospitality of a man’s arms around her neck. Turns out those arms were Nietzsche’s, crash-test dummy, beloved by thousands of boy students of philosophy the world over, lover of blood and birds and horses. When, after more Arctic transit, we moved from ice cap to ice cap and watched off the coast of Greenland the final outburst of the tide flower up and die, we stopped so that Pony could peer into the oily face of the sea. *This poem was published at New Poetry (ed. George Murray) in 2018. Previously published at New Poetry (ed. George Murray) in 2018. Gillian Jerome is the author of a book of poems, Red Nest, which was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and won the ReLit Award. She co-edited an oral history project, Hope in Shadows: Stories and Photographs from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which won the 2008 City of Vancouver Book Award. Her poems have recently appeared in GEIST, Hunger Mountain and New Poetry. She teaches literatures and writing at the University of British Columbia where she has taught full-time since 2004. She serves a teacher-mentor in the Poetry in Voice program and teaches sexual health to teenagers. Born in Ottawa and raised in Orléans, Ontario, she lives in Vancouver with her daughters, Rory and Micah Sophia, and their silver-eyed unicorn Geneviève Hugo.
WHAT 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.
BUCK She hopes no one sees her superstition built on years of evidence. Two fingers to her lips, a kiss blown in quiet embarrassment, Inherited from buck, long gone buck, bye bye buck. The rivers break and the banks crumble, at sunset, at emergency. Marney Isaac is a Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto. Her research program investigates plant-soil interactions and ecological principles that govern the structure and function of diversified agroecosystems. Dr. Isaac serves on the editorial board of applied ecology and agronomy journals and has published widely in the field of environmental science. She has also contributed to numerous non-scientific writing projects, including the uTOpia series GreenTOpia: Towards a Sustainable Toronto (Coach House Books).
www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~misaac/ @MarneyIsaac LOVELETTERS TO THE DEEP My eyes & conscience are clear. I filled my backpack with rocks & loveletters to the deep & swung it into the lake. I grew up with hardened shoreline instead of sand between my toes. Myths become less plausible every day. Mermaids pulling twist ties from their gills & kraken choking on plastic bags mistaken for squid, limbs shredded by propellers. Oil slicked wings hold no air, no matter the skies they fold into themselves. Rivers choked with plastic like my father’s arteries, dredged from the bones of sleeping giants, cling wraps the voice to my throat for a species that worships gods of convenience. I sunk a knife into a tree trunk & it bled. I tore open my calf on a rusted nail & tried to stop the sap leaking through my fingers. I raised a rifle to my shoulder, shot the expectant moon & felt the spray on my cheek. Felt the sky recoil. I set fire to the sea & built palaces of salt. Our futures have gone from picket fences to picket lines. Youth is its own burden. I explain to an old white man why having children would feel immoral, & he suggests I trust that they will fix this, as if that was not what his generation already did. Blind faith in false gods, hope an offering left at their shrines. Myths become less plausible every day. My eyes & conscience are clear. Qurat Dar (she/they) is a spoken word performer, poet, multi-genre writer, and environmental engineering student. She has had work in Augur Magazine, The Temz Review, and Anathema Magazine, among others. Qurat was a 2019 recipient of the Ron Lenyk Inspiring Youth Arts Award and is a Best of the Net finalist. She was also recently crowned the 2020 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam (CIPS) National Champion. Their debut poetry chapbook is forthcoming with Coven Editions.
Find them on Instagram: @itsnotquart and Twitter: @itsnotquart |
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