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 

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.