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.

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.
 

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.

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.

​
 
Citations
 
The following quotes were paraphrased from these sources:

1. “When the dinosaur-killing asteroid collided with Earth more than 65 million years ago it blasted a nearly mile-high tsunami through the Gulf of Mexico caused chaos throughout the world's oceans” Geggel, Laura. “Dinosaur-killing Asteroid Triggered Mile-high Tsunami That Spread Through Earth's Oceans.” LiveScience. 7 Jan. 2019.
2. “waves from ejecta falling back into the water” Geggel, Laura. “Dinosaur-killing Asteroid Triggered Mile-high Tsunami That Spread Through Earth's Oceans.” LiveScience. 7 Jan. 2019.
3. “on mountaintops may die out since they cannot Shift to a higher altitude” United States Environmental Protection Agency. “Climate Impacts on Forests.” 19 Jan. 2017.
4. “Slow Violence, Gender, and the Environmentalism of the Poor.” Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, by Rob Nixon, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England, 2011, p. 128. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jbsgw.8.

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/

​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.

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.

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.

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