I WONDER IF I WILL EVER MANAGE TO WRITE A GOOD POEM ABOUT HEAT DEATH

This trajectory is all on us for inability 
to fact check or read critically.
The sparring kangaroos were dancing 
with rain-joy, we said.
That’s fighting, said the scientist, 
old photo. Those kangaroos are ash by now.
Pictures of koalas in renal failure
foregoing their fear of us 
to lap water from the road were deemed 
“cute.” No, no, said the scientist, it’s not cute. 
That creature is dying.
We’d moved on. Wombats shepherd 
other critters into their burrows! Stewards of the underbush!
Not quite right, said the scientist, wombat burrows are enormous. 
Most likely the wombat was hiding in another chamber.
Too busy anthropomorphizing, we’d already created a hashtag. 
#WombatEmpathy will save us!
 
I asked ryan what comes next,
            and he said,
          either the complete transformation
            of existing relationships
            or the heat death of the
            planet. One of those.
 
My heart’s on relationships, and kangaroos, and scientists.
No time for settler logic.
No atheists in burrows, friend.
No one is coming to save us.

I ❤️  ALBERTA’S ENERGY

take the elevator to my second-floor
apartment bust out the biodiesel 
firmware use medical grade plastic 
bottles for my saline nasal 
rinse gotta keep those 
mucus membranes clean for u 
and the dust bowl, babe, gotta 
run that old car all up and down 
this city’s sprawl I try to keep warm 
through frigid prairie winters feel appropriate 
guilt at the plastic produce bags I bring home 
from the grocery store 
/ forget the mesh ones 
every time / I’ve gone full enemy of the state assault vehicle
applied to be the next poet-in-residence for carbon capture 
(mass species death, but make it fashion)
everything you see is development 
gently falling leaves in the inner city: development
Enoch Sales heritage home fire: development 
empty condo tower on empty condo tower: 
the firing of 5,000 Albertan nurses in the year 
2019 / 9 dead from fires in South Wales since Monday
now 17
now 24, meanwhile 
we’re bursting out the seams over here:
Montana, Drake, East Village, Tuscany
new history razed for imported ideas
another thundering swing 
from settler colonialism’s long neoliberal tail
clearing a path for the rule of the patch
by the patch for the patch
for the capitalist overlord bosses of our demise,
for the dinosaurs who never left us

Nikki Reimer (she/her) is a carbon-based life form of Ukrainian and Russian Mennonite descent who lives on the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta. She may or may not be undead. She writes poetry, essays and criticism, yells on the internet, and makes digital art. Published books are My Heart is a Rose Manhattan, DOWNVERSE and [sic].

KING TIDE

The boardwalks scuttled like diving reef schooners –
a walkable Galilee if anyone dared, but each jogger rears
to higher ground. I’ve lost my son a half-second here
or there before I pulled him up, his lips like planks,
in tubs and pools and once a mirror lake – the obsidian
endless kind that really ends abruptly in roots and husks
and carcasses and muck. This country’s full of them.
All summer we swim bellies up, avoid anoxic thoughts.
 
The joggers, any other day, linger at the point
just long enough to catch their breath and contemplate
an app, perhaps the sun. Yes, there it is, afloat. My son,
I need to know what you thought of water when it first,
again, surrounded you. Your eyes were wide. You didn’t
make a sound. Not one thing was born or died.

THE SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE OF THIS WORLD

​The successful people of this world
are always busy. They work all day
then come home and need to do something
so they cook the dinner, wash the car, cut the grass.
 
It's because of the successful people
that we have water restrictions:
this side of the street on even days,
that side on odd.
 
They like that kind of thing: schedules,
they are usually big fans of schedules,
and when they have free time in theirs
they spend it composing new schedules.
 
When they take medication
they always put it in one of those plastic things
that divides the pills up by days.
In conclusion:
 
the successful people of this world
are busy and efficient, their actions
are their own rewards, and a green lawn
during a heat wave is their poem.


"The Successful People of the World" previously appeared in The Other Side of Ourselves (Cormorant Books, 2011). 

FORECASTS
​
​it is how  our footsteps alter              the flurries
how we move through the breeze
 
                                                          in the boughs of our hope.
 
when time stops           in the sideways glance
you will find me                         in the missed heartbeat
 
see me                 in the many moons of your longing
and furies.
 
                    in the place where words        fail us
with a sharp               astute  parlance            and
 
war is upon us and        the sun sets black
                                                               under the yoke of
 
                            a darkening century
             
again
                            we are going nowhere          fast.
 
                                                in storms and tornados
of prognosis and forecasts
 
                             over a horizon of planted crosses
 the weather turns     passive aggressive on us.
 
and there is no way  we can say                     such things
                                                                      about the weather
 
as we forget how to move through              the elements
that we are.   
 
it’s up to       you and I               what we’ll do
in this tortured           oil-spilled         winter.
 
                                          where                 even in sleep
loneliness             alters us                re-interprets us
                                                                                      holds us
hostage.         
 
                           how     I even begin to smile at people
in my dreams.
 
how a little bit of light brings nuance to the shutter
in  the prolonged exposure photography         of  grief
 
where the struggling light   shreds            
the clouds of our sorrow
                                                   into the rags of tomorrow
 
and
of course       
              you will also find me here    waiting
                                                                                     for spring.
 
​

YOU HAVE TO LOVE THEM ENOUGH TO LET THEM BE WILD

That’s what Steve said
                about the mustangs
                              up on Pryor Mountain –
 
 
no sugar cubes, no carrots
                no coaxing, stroking, gentling
                              no whispering
 
 
no ropes, no tires, no pick up trucks
                no dust storm swing low choppers
                               no Judas horse
 
 
no gathering, no holding pens
                no PZP, no freeze brand
                              no breaking in, no putting down
 
 
no auction block, no slaughterhouse
                no flank strap, no fast track
                              no stockyard, no consignment
 
 
no snaffles, bridles, saddles, spurs
                no blankets, shoes or blinders
                              no rodeo, no latigo, no cincha
 
 
no clipping, combing, currying
                no conchos, braids or bells
                              no ranches, no reata
 
 
no binder twine for breech births
                no ligatures, no doctoring
                              of tears & rends & bites
 
 
no vaccination,  no inoculation
                no sterilization
                               no intervention
 
just bales & bales
                of air
                             seep water, galleta grass
 
 
the animal vegetable mineral
                earth
                              exacting, punishing, available

Kathleen McCracken is the author of eight collections of poetry including Blue Light, Bay and College (Penumbra Press, 1991), which was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Poetry. A bilingual English/Portuguese edition of her poetry entitled Double Self Portrait with Mirror: New and Selected Poems, and featuring a preface by Medbh McGuckian, was published by the Brazilian press Editora Ex Machina in 2016. She is the recipient of several distinguished poetry prizes in Canada and Ireland, and has held Ontario Arts Council, Poetry Ireland and Northern Ireland Arts Council awards. Kathleen is currently Lecturer in Creative Writing and Contemporary Literature at Ulster University, Northern Ireland.

MANY NIGHTS AGO

The flowers outside my window do not cry anymore.
 
When the war first began, and the weeds took over, they danced about; 
​stretching their roots—perhaps to see how long they could endure it.
That and the shrieking kept me up at night,
 
but that was many nights ago.
Now they fall in line—silently, with heads hung—single file.
 
The only sound I hear, is the “tap, tap, tap” on my windowpane.




"Many Nights Ago" first appeared in Kelvin High School’s literary anthology, Stream (2018).

Jessie Taylor is an avid over-thinker. She loves red lipstick, latkes and fresh cherries in July. She is studying at the University of Manitoba.

SELECTIONS FROM THIS REAL


assuming that nothing is neither created nor destroyed; that there is nothing new under the sun; that everything is ‘one,’[1] as Parmenides said; that the consistency we feel as ‘real,’ is, and the inconsistency that rises up as interference interruption eruption disruption of our days is not not consistency but simply the insignificant pebble[2] flipped up by the tire from the side of the road as we swerve against the torrent;[3]
 
that an individual is born into this consistency, which is the continuum of time; that time must have started somewhere; that we are edited product of this time and closed off from genesis, dulled and sagging as we are, brittle and horny, spinning and passive and overcome by all manner of natural disasters and essentially as dumb as the pebble, as mother earth wounded by ice age, mitochondria and hypochondria, polar thaws, geological faults and a sunken Atlantis;
 
assuming all that, I would propose that:
 
in these end of days, the only thing with perspective is this angel,[4] whose wings are tangled in it, scorched by it, thrown from it, advancing backwards into our future as she does, so that she can’t warn us; until it’s too late.
 
as if disaster were inevitable. measure it.

 
 
 
assuming that it was a dark and stormy night when the world began; that it was the storm of chaos out of which mankind was formed, and assuming that
 
the weather[5] wraps us in its warmth, wet blankets of summer storms; high winds and thunder eclipsing night, exciting us in their grandeur so that we take cover on the porch, or are forced inside with expletives about eaves troughs or weeping tiles, we may assume also that
 
there is weather that is inside us, seasonal disorders in the unstable system of corpus. the tormented tidal waves of loving badly. Oh my. the manic storms of depression or heaven’s wrath. Oh God.
 
we measure how our body is barometer or weathervane. riddled with nerves translating the advancing gale as migraine. vertigo in the wind. a weak heart in humid tremors. oedema of the mind, signalling the countdown to apocalypse. such nature I can’t weather anymore.
 
storm rising; storm landing. storm in a teapot and storm dancing. or the storm that comes through the night in your dreams: wheels of fire spinning across heaven’s blue skies. waking with the thought that the wheels [6] were silent.
 

 
her theory is that prayers solve everything. you think about the weather and go all dialectic on her.
 
the end approaches. it encroaches. it creeps up from behind.[7] we are blown into it and say we have no choice. but after centuries of feeling it approach and pass, come and go, waiting for the dawn that comes, miraculous, we discover we are weaving the end into ourselves: the eddy of the residue of that first blast is in us.[8]
 
assuming that we are as captive as the angel, we are propelled, storm first, into ourselves, and there encounter
 
apocalypse. a theory.
 

Notes
​
[1] “Only one story of a path remains, that it is” (Parmenides, fragment 8.1).

[2] “mire and clay” (Sefer Yetzirah 1:11).

[3] “chaos and void” (SY 1:11).

[4] “But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in [the angel’s] wings” (Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 395).

[5] “rush to his saying like a whirlwind” (SY 1:6).

[6] “The chayot running and returning” (Ezekiel 1:24).

[7] “the end is embedded in the beginning” (SY 1:1).

[8] “formed substance out of chaos” (SY 2:6).


This Real, Pedlar Press, 2017. Published with permission of the author. ​

Concetta Principe is a writer of poetry and creative non-fiction, and scholarship on trauma and literature. Her recent collection, This Real (Pedlar Press 2017) was long-listed for the League of Canadian Poet’s Raymond Souster Award. Her creative non-fiction project, "Stars Need Counting: Essays on Suicide" is coming out with Gordon Hill Press in the spring of 2021. ​ Her work has appeared in Canadian and American journals including The Malahat Review, The Capilano Review, experiment-o, and Hamilton Arts and Literature. She teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Trent University, Durham, and York University.

DEAR PRINCE OF MELTING ICECAPS,

Bliss has escaped me.
I went down to our beaches.
The oil-sheened, the skinless salmon, the dead
algae, the greasy rocks.
We are in a state. A State.
The moist bliss empty, the air chemical.
The rat on the roof (the political).
 
The call was internal, societal--
I stood up from a gold chair
in the dank back room of a bank;
you climbed out from under thousands of pennies
piled in a cellar.
 
We were recently human,
we endeavoured to cycle, we wanted to juggle,
we had only just learned how to play.
 
The State blew out our candles
and we were in a gorgeous dark,
directing foot and bike traffic to the bridge.
 
I have ten headlamps, community,
and you have this hunch
we might get along, get along.
 
The sea coughs up cell phones
as we build our boats.
A kind rat with a human face helps me
carve the oars.
I vaguely remember
a polar bear's story, the fluff
of myth.
 
Is it the red sky or the sea?
 
We hesitate.

 Jen Currin was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes. She did her schooling at Bard College (B.A.), Arizona State (M.F.A.) and Simon Fraser University (M.A.). She lives and works on unceded Coast Salish territories (New Westminster, Surrey, and Vancouver, B.C.), where she teaches in the Creative Writing and ACP Departments at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Jen’s first collection of stories, Hider/Seeker (Anvil Press, 2018), was one of The Globe and Mail‘s top 100 books of 2018. She has also published four collections of poetry: The Sleep of Four Cities (Anvil Press, 2005); Hagiography (Coach House, 2008); The Inquisition Yours (Coach House, 2010), which won the 2011 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and was shortlisted for the 2011 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (B.C. Book Prizes), the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry, and the ReLit Award; and School (Coach House, 2014), which was a finalist for the 2015 ReLit Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize and the Pat Lowther Award. Her chapbook The Ends was published by Nomados in 2013. Jen was a member of the editorial collective for The Enpipe Line: 70,000 Kilometers of Poetry Produced in Resistance to the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline Proposal (Creekstone Press, 2012).

DESCENDANTS
 
The dinosaurs that didn’t die went slamming into windows, dazzled by the colour of a gold. Instead of flight, they had their houses built on tree tops, over many single blades of grass; they learned to run on fossils of their dead. They lived and learned the many things they thought they had to learn; how to upright, how to sit down, how eventually to crawl. The sun still happened. The water happened. The ice that once had happened didn’t happen anymore. Instead of crawling, the dinosaurs that didn’t lay down without a lullaby and watched a world they made through glass. They saw but thought they didn’t, the edges of the birds whose songs were stuck inside a bottle, the make-believe of golden eggs.




​

UPON DISCOVERING SILICONE IMPLANTS DO NOT BURN AT 1500 ºF
 
All the women I have been have been a beautiful shedding of rat snake confused
where her tail ends another bites where the woman ends the Barbie plastic takes
a thousand years to decompose; the leather jacket made for a boy I wore
when everyone forgot it was skin,
 
now down to hide the reason people don't like rats; they eat their shit. It won't
look good on Food TV. Most days I try to breathe human, speak human to men
producing plastics, men producing sedatives making fishes fearless,
men who say they want to get to know
 
the inside of an oyster will sever adductors to force her from her shell will cut
the legs off lady bugs when they were boys they didn't know why
the short-tailed cricket eats her wings. I speak human
while they touch
 
the me that is fake pearls made from cotton and crumbs that glitter
while vacuuming someone else's floor, the me who is dollar store
trophy expendable, botox blocked from genuine signal
paralysed
 
reliving the men how a cockroach scuttles for seemingly random
escape reliving the men as apid stinger lodged in the jaw
grinding my teeth while I sleep, the moment
my mind became an ant
 
marching in circles. All the women I have had to be have been
quiet inside a boardroom watching Predator on casual Fridays,
quiet inside a game of Twister, wrong hand on red
beautiful in lips
 
sewed up, frog legs stuffed in the back of a cab watching
drunk for cobras between my knees. The amygdala says
orange is the colour of fear. I am spending my life
in someone else's fake tan
 
as though all the women I have had to become have forgotten
U.V. In a thousand years all that's left of me will be all
those liners on maxi-pads with wings; in a thousand years
I want none of this
 
to have to matter to all the women I will not be
who after me are issued wings like the short-tailed
cricket; I want the matter of synthetic fibres
to disintegrate,
return to earth.


"Upon Discovering Silicone Implants Do Not Burn At 1500 ºF" previously published in RiddleFence, Issue 32, Spring 2019. 

COSTAL ROAD PROJECT, MUMBAI
 
 
                  A                                                       solitary
                                                     polyp
                                                                                of a coral
                            blooms silently
                                                                                           in space.
 
 
                          Zoanthids
                                                                            carpet
                                   the barks                                     of trees
                                                                       like a fresh
                                               field                                     of lichen.
 
 
                       Out of the
                                                  tetrapods,
                                                                                    a bush of sea sponge
                                                                          falls
                                                                                                                      like musk roses.
 
 
Shyly, 
                                            the barnacles
                                                                                                      unfurl
                                                             like onions on
                                            chopping                    boards.
 
 
                In the dream             of a Koli fisherwoman,
                                                                                                                        her son
                           tars   
                                                the road                       with
                                                                       brittle
                                                                 stars.

Kunjana Parashar is a poet living in Mumbai. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, UCity Review, MORIA, Bengaluru Review, 45th Parallel, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @wolfwasp.  ​

DRONES
 
Debris skirting breakers for miles –
tub ring murk, shells suckered
to trash and kelp like surf store
necklaces. Grand Bend backwash.
 
Scolded not to wade, children
wearing bucket hats fill cups
with mussel remains, raising
each lumpy haul to the sun,
the glint of marble shards.
Toss them back in with a plop.
 
By the docks, suburban fishermen
curse the clear water driving
walleyes deeper. Muttering
about the crowds, rip cording
their motor boats, spraying 
white fans against the waves.
 
Under the pier, a teen wings in his drone
to film locals with paint scrapers
stripping shells from wooden legs.
They yell get lost. He calls back
it’s footage for a school project 
on damage from invasive species.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My artistic practice concerns a critical examination of human relationships with the natural world and how ecosystems are changing in the anthropocene. I spend time researching ecosystems and the connections within them, particularly via site visits and consultation with scientists and lay experts. My multidisciplinary practice involves collecting materials following ethical foraging practices (plants,
feathers, bones, fungi and lichen specimens, for example) from natural environments, or accessing museum collections for use as raw material in making work, and as reference material.
 
These large-scale still life images are produced using a high-resolution scanner as my camera: specimens collected during site visits are arranged on the glass, in groupings that serve to illustrate connections in Canadian ecosystems that may not be immediately apparent to a casual observer. The images are elegiac, dark, mourning, representing not contemporary specimens but rather, recontextualized, some last remaining pieces of a fragmented world, floating in the void.

​The concepts that I seek to explore with my work – encouraging a sense of wonder, interest, and respectful stewardship with regards to the natural environment – are becoming more and more relevant. It is with increasing unease that I observe developments in human behavior at home and abroad, at the individual and institutional level, that impact negatively on the continued functioning of the complex ecosystems that we humans are part of. I feel that one of my roles as an artist is to interpret events around me and draw attention to matters of political, social, and environmental importance, and so my artistic practice aims to cultivate a deep attention to the details and intricacies of natural ecosystems, and to examine human relationships with the natural world. My pieces attempt to frame the work of plants and animals in terms that are easier for humans to understand, and potentially empathize or identify with. I hope to inspire a sense of wonder or fascination, and encourage the viewer to consider the energy and resources that go into the constant cycle of building and decay in complex environments and ecosystems.

Julya Hajnoczky was born in Calgary and raised by hippie parents, surrounded by unruly houseplants, bookishness and art supplies, with CBC radio playing softly, constantly, in the background. It was inevitable, then, that she would grow up to be an artist. She holds a BA in French from the University of Calgary and a BDes in photography from the Alberta College of Art + Design. Her multidisciplinary practice includes digital and analog photography, fibre art, and book and paper sculpture, and seeks to ask questions and inspire curiosity about the complex relationships between humans and the natural world. Her most recent adventures, supported by grants from the Calgary Arts Development Authority and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, involved building a mobile natural history collection laboratory (a combination tiny camper and workspace, the Al Fresco Science Machine), and exploring the many ecosystems of Western
Canada, from Alberta’s Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, to the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve in BC and Wood Buffalo National Park, NWT. If she's not in her home studio working on something tiny, she's out in the forest working on something big. See more of Julya’s work at obscura-lucida.com

ENDGAME
 
 
I’ll rent a basement without Wi-Fi or windows
where my typewriter’s keys evoke the nights
our rain was still gentle. And we’ll have a black cat
named Samuel Bucket. One night, you scream Fuck it
and reconnect the Ethernet to scour the hookup-lands
in which I found you. In response I recount yesterday’s
rumours (kids saying Lima was prey to another monster
storm). The death toll, charities, they’re prolly making
rounds now on CBC, CNN, BBC— and god knows
the death or missing tolls tonight in some other coastal
town. Instead, unplug, ignore the screams above our
bedroom without windows. Board my craft Calypso: let’s
float on this flooded earth where Odysseus abandoned
you. Isn’t that when history began, so many years ago?

TRANSLATIONS OF CORMORANTS

One of the delightful things about drawing is the looking – in drawing you give attention to details that are often otherwise missed – like the space around a bird. 

This video belongs to a poem I wrote for the sculptor and hunter Billy Gauthier who I listened to at a symposium in 2020 at Toronto’s Power Plant. He was one of the speakers in a group of Indigenous artists and scientists from the Arctic and Amazon, come together to talk about climate change. It was an incredible conversation to listen to. Billy, in particular, inspired me deeply. And continues to. Here is Billy.

Through this past spring and summer double-breasted cormorants have become my companions, especially those belonging to a colony on the Humber River near home. They glide above our kayaks in the early morning, skimming the surface of the Leading Sea (also known as Lake Ontario). We've marvelled at their nests, hooked beaks, bright green eyes. The adult bird is a deep grey and brown but the youngsters have downy white chests. They are called gaagaagiishib in Ojibwe and they've been here a long time. 

The cormorant is a conservation success story – their population was close to making the endangered list some time ago and now they are thriving. Unfortunately there is a lot of misinformation about them, mostly that they're a nuisance and a threat to fish. These are unfounded claims. Distressingly, their future is again in jeopardy. From Sept 15 - December 31st of 2020, the Ontario government has approved their long slaughter. People now have permission to kill up to 15 of these birds a day to "control" their numbers.

Toronto visual artist, conservationist and activist, Cole Swanson is currently hard at work to challenge this. You can read about his efforts (along with Gail Fraser, professor of environmental and urban change at York University) and the research behind his efforts here.

For those of you interested in the film-making process: My partner, Paul Esposti, photographed the cormorants in flight; I used Paul’s photos to draw stills with ink and pencil on vellum (about 90 drawings!). We then photographed each drawing, and Paul turned them into an animation, created the sound design and edited. This is our first attempt at animation, and we’re just getting started. Paul and I both feel like these birds are our neighbours and teachers. We made the film thinking about how much might be resolved in our world if we could learn to care for a cormorant, for the sky and space around a soaring bird.

Paul David Esposti is a photographer and videographer who does his best to listen to birds. One of the ways he listens is through looking closely. Paul's photographed birds from Costa Rica to the Salish Sea and he especially likes photographing them near his home in Etobicoke, Ontario. You can find out more about Paul and see his photographs at pauldavidesposti.com

Jessica Joy Hiemstra is a designer and visual artist who does her best to listen to birds. One of the ways she listens is through drawing. She's also written several books of award-winning poetry, most recently, The Holy Nothing (2016) with Pedlar Press. You can find out more about Jessica here: jessicahiemstra.ca.

 OBLIVION
A Response to Don McKay
 
Not no thing, but our
fear of obliteration treats
naming as an end.
 
What species can conceive
of nothingness?
Shield moraines pines beechleaves magpies honeybees snowfleas cells
do not tolerate a void.
Man might be the unintended side-effect,
the by-product of nature, since
humans sense absence,
which does not exist.
 
The air, no longer a divine canopy,
still teems with molecules, chemicals, atoms,
and yet,
man persists in declaring nothingness.
 
This is a lonely species.
 
Perhaps the origins of dwellings,
man sectioning himself off, started with the walls
of his body filled with isolation where
there is none.
 
Perhaps he believes
he has the right
to name the space between things,
can perceive the end of all things.
 
He precepts
and nothing
is
worth his preconceived notice;
he notices nothingness and
does not see anything of note.
 
But his species dies,
man ceases, and the death rattle
betrays that
he does not know what nothing he will be.
 

GREEN CAME INTO MY LIFE THROUGH A HOLE IN THE CEILING
​
I was gestating the mountainside, as my father sustained betwixtment.
 
the curvature of the earth was cone-like, before
 
we ruled out old age—the lips hung like gravity failing.
 
in the sun had a hedgegarden, if I groomed a mine-swallower,
 
I, the tongues of hummingbirds animated,
 
had a burglar alarm; only
dogs spoke in a variety of dialects,
 
their mouths corned.
 
out of my shoulder, a man unable to reach low-hanging fruit, a palmful of water.

*

Tom Prime is a PhD student in English at Western University. He has an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Victoria (Specializing in Poetry). He has a BA at Western University. He has been published in Carousel, Ditch, Fjords Review, The Northern Testicle, The Rusty Toque, and Vallum. His first chapbook, A Strange Hospital, was published on Proper Tales Press. His latest chapbook Gravitynipplemilkplanet Anthroposcenesters, was published on above/ground press. His collaborative collection of poems written with Gary Barwin, A Cemetery for Holes, is available from Gordon Hill Press. 

 EXTINCTION CHRONICLES


1662
In 1662, the crew of Volkert Evertsz’s ship was marooned on Mauritius.
 
Spotting a plump bird, he grabbed the bird by its left leg. The captured bird let out a cry which attracted more of the birds. The entire flock was taken and subsequently eaten by the stranded Dutchmen.
 
Five days later, the crew was picked up by a passing ship, leaving behind the well-gnawed bones of the last documented sighting of the Dodo.
 
1800
In 1800, the Giant African Snail was imported to Mauritius by Governor General François Louis Magallon de la Morlière as a potential food source. From there, it spread eastward: to Calcutta in 1847 by W. H. Benson; to Ceylon in 1900 by Oliver Collett; to Taiwan in 1932 by Kumaichi Shimojo; and to the Caroline Islands by Junki Miyahira and Palau Island by Shoichi Nishimara in 1938. By 1967, it had reached as far as Tahiti.
 
It soon became apparent that the Giant African Snail was, in truth, an agricultural pest, so the predatory Rosy Wolfsnail was introduced to many South Pacific islands as a method of biological control. Instead of preying upon the Giant African Snail, however, the Rosy Wolfsnail preferred endemic tree snails to devastating effect. Since its introduction to Tahiti, for example, 71 of that island’s 76 species of Partula snails have become extinct.
 
1826
In 1826, the HMS Wellington made port in Lahaina, Maui. Sailors, rinsing out water barrels in a local stream, introduced mosquitoes to the Hawai’ian islands. The introduction in turn allowed for the spreading of avian pox and avian malaria.
 
As a result, the Oahu Thrush, the Oahu O’o, the Oahu ’Akialoa, the Kioea, the Oahu Nukupu’u, the Lesser Koa Finch, the Ula-ai-hawane, the Oahu ’Akepa, the Lanai ’Akialoa, the Kona Grosbeak, the Hawai’i ’Akialoa, the Greater Koa Finch, the Hawai’i Mamo, the Greater ’Amakihi, the Black Mamo, the Lanai Hookbill, the Laysan Millerbird, the Laysan Honeycreeper, the Lanai Thrush, the Hawai’i O’o, the Lanai Creeper, the Laysan Rail, and the Bishop’s O’o were all extirpated from the islands.
 
1840
In the mid 1840s, the three Icelandic sailors Sigurdur Ísleifsson, Ketill Ketilsson, and Jón Brandsson were asked to collect a few Great Auk specimens for the Danish natural history collector, Carl Siemsen.
 
On the 3rd or 4th of June, 1844, the three sailors arrived at Edley Island. There, Brandsson and Ísleifsson each strangled a bird. There being no other birds about, Ketilsson crushed an egg under his boot.
 
These were the last of the Great Auks.
 
1894
In 1894, David Lyall was appointed assistant lightkeeper on the recently inhabited Stephens Island. In June of that year, Lyall’s cat, Tibbles, started to bring him carcasses of a previously unknown bird, the soon-to-be-named Stephens Island Wren.
 
By 1895, Tibbles had hunted the Wren to extinction.
 
1900
On March 24, 1900, Press Clay Southworth saw a bird eating corn in his family’s barnyard. Unfamiliar with the strange bird, the 14 year old shot and killed it.
 
Several years after the shooting, the state museum in Ohio determined that this was the last authenticated record of a Passenger Pigeon in the wild.
 
1902
The Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore is legendary, primarily for the Singapore Sling, first concocted there by Ngiam Tong Boon in 1815.
 
Less well known is the Billiard Room where, in 1902, Charles McGowan Phillips, the hotel’s general manager, shot a tiger which had sought refuge under a billiard table. It was reported that, in the process, Mr. Phillips ruined his coat. Not reported, however, was that the tiger was the last on the island.
 
1918
By the end of the nineteenth century, settlers had managed to exterminate only four species of bird endemic to Lord Howe Island: the White Gallinule, the White-throated Pigeon, the Red-fronted Parakeet, and the Tasman Booby.
 
In 1918, the Makambo, mastered by Captain ‘Stinger’ Rothery, ran aground on Ned’s Beach, allowing black rats to invade the island. These rats managed to exterminate the Vinous-tinted Thrush, the Robust White-eye, the Silver Eye, the Tasman Starling, the Grey Fantail, and the Lord Howe Gerygone. In addition to these outright extinctions, the rats also extirpated the local populations of the Kermadec Petrel, Little Shearwater, White-bellied Storm-Petrel, and Pycroft’s Petrel.
 
In the 1920s, the Masked Owl was introduced in an attempt to control the rats. The owl managed to exterminate the endemic Boobook Owl, but not the rats.
 
1936
The Thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian Tiger and Ka-Nunnah, was one of the few marsupial predators.
 
In 1824, Thylacine discovered that sheep were easy prey. This resulted in a private bounty being established by the Van Diemen’s Land Company in 1830. The VDLC bounty was supplemented by a government sponsored one in 1888. The government bounty was cancelled in 1912, while the VDLC bounty persisted another two years.
 
In the summer of 1936, the Thylacine was proclaimed a protected species by the Tasmanian Government. Alas, the last Thylacine (named Benjamin) had already died of exposure at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart on September 7th of that year.
 
1943
In 1943, one of the last refuges for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Louisiana was slated for logging by the Chicago Mill Lumber Company.
 
Asked by the Audubon Society to aid in setting aside a preserve for the bird, James F. Griswold (chairman of Chicago Mill’s board) responded by saying, “We are just money-grubbers. We are not concerned, as are you folks, with ethical considerations.”
 
The last confirmed sighting of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Louisiana was in April of 1944.
 
1954
At one point, Lake Victoria contained well over 500 unique species of Furu, also known as Cichlid.
 
In August of 1954, J. Ofula Amaras (a Kenyan fisheries officer) introduced Nile Perch into the lake by means of a bucket. This was done with official sanction in the interest of increasing the value of local fisheries.
 
For 30 years, the Nile Perch (a voracious predator) co-existed with other fish, having a relatively benign effect on the local ecology. In the early 1980s, however, a slight increase in the number of Furu led to a population explosion amongst the Nile Perch. Within a few years, over 90% of the total species of Lake Victoria Furu had been eaten into extinction.
 
1964
Prometheus was a Bristlecone Pine located on Wheeler Peak in Nevada.
 
In 1964, Donald Currey, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, was conducting field research on the climate of the Little Ice Age. In the course of his research, he attempted to core-sample Prometheus. After breaking his only increment borer (a $200 drill bit), Currey, with the permission of Donald Cox (a forest Service District Ranger), cut the tree down.
 
Subsequent analysis showed that Prometheus was almost 5,000 years old, making it the oldest living known organism at the time.
 
1997
On January 20, 1997, Grant Hadwin swam across the Yakoun River on Haida Gwaii. A former forester, Hadwin had decided to make a statement protesting the exploitation of old growth trees on the Haida Gwaii archipelago.
 
Once across the river, he made a series of deep cuts into the trunk of Kiidk’yaas, a striking 300-year-old Sitka Spruce that due to a genetic mutation had golden (rather than green) needles. Kiidk’yaas was a culturally significant tree to the local Haida.
 
Two days later, Kiidk’yaas toppled in a winter storm.
 
2006
Sometime in 2006, onboard a research dredger off the coast of Iceland, James Scourse did what he has done hundreds, if not thousands, of times before: he threw a small Ocean Quahog clam into an onboard freezer, preserving it for later study.
 
On that very same day, Ming the Clam did something that hadn’t occured even once in its 507 years: it froze to death.
 
2014
Lafarge, a multinational construction company, owns the mineral rights to Guning Kanthan, a limestone hill in peninsular Malaysia. As is the practice of the company, they are in the process of razing the hill to procure limestone used to manufacture cement.
 
The north side of Guning Kanthan is also the exclusive home of six species of snails. The most famous of the six measures a mere 3 mm in length and was, in July of 2014, named Charopa lafargei in honour of the company that will drive it to extinction.
 
2016
Late October, 2016, gardener Paul Rees of Widnes, England, found a peculiar Earthworm in his garden. Named Dave by Paul’s stepson George, the worm, at 40 centimetres, was twice as long and over five times heavier than the average Earthworm. In fact, it is thought that Dave is the largest worm ever recorded.
 
In the interest of science, Rees donated Dave to the Natural History Museum. Dave was transferred to the care of Emma Sherlock, whose speciality is worms and other related animals.
 
The first thing Dr. Sherlock did, as might be expected, was to euthanize and preserve the specimen.
 
2018
On March 19, 2018, Sudan, a male Northern White Rhino, died at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy if Kenya of complications. Well loved, he is survived by Najin, his daughter, and Fatu, his grand daughter.
 
He was, as you are surely aware, the last male of his species and Najin and Fatu are the last two females.

​NYCTALOPIA

n. the inability to see in dim light
 
 
Reason drips and to me it speaks
to my radical, lost dreams it shrieks yet suits
on Wall Street they say, they say,
 
what are you doing, where are you going?
Compartmentalize these things.
 
My throat closes and wonders, when
will the cared-for things, will the weather-worn things break
from their binds, my stomach pushes my insides in two
billion knots of plastic rouge.
 
That should be enough money to buy
a roof, that should be enough money to buy
a noose, that should be enough money to //
 
Reason slips and to me it speaks
to my sweet, soft, youthful delusions it shrieks yet suits
on Wall Street they say, they say,
 
come play, come stay!
Compartmentalize your dreams.

TELL ME THESE THINGS AND I SHALL TELL YOU MINE
​
I was taught shyness,
they ask for a volunteer
 
I was taught propriety, see
women are not meant to go there
 
I was taught silence, so to
stand up for myself and other people
 
of colour means that I feel the need
to say sorry, to you. For
 
simply being, well, here.
 
Yet the world is clearer
from here. From here, from this
 
place where I happen to sit
I might just believe that I might, just be
 
a person whose skin tone does not make
me, the definition of who or
 
what I am, perceived— by you
so, here            is where you may
 
find me. Where you may, because I say, stare
into my eyes and watch me
 
as I stand up to you, calmly shore up
to you, hands clenched in
 
to fists at the insolence that you
are unaware, that you are.

​Ellen Chang-Richardson is an award-winning poet, writer and editor of Taiwanese and Cambodian-Chinese descent. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, Unlucky Fours (Anstruther Press), Assimilation Tactics (Coven Editions) and snap, pop, performance (Gap Riot Press); the founder of Little Birds Poetry; co-founder/co-curator of Riverbed Reading Series; and a member of the poetry collective VII. Her work is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, untethered magazine, third coast magazine, among others. Ellen currently lives and works on the traditional unceded territories of the Algonquin Anishinabeg First Nation (Ottawa, Ontario). www.ehjchang.com

EPITAPH
 
I should’ve known when I was born
my palm lines were light and cut short
if I walk the beach I walk the line
cadavers and shards shore against my feet
 
I saw on the news
a white man brought a snowball in court
admit into evidence our invincibility, we’ll live
I’ve been chewing on plastic since
 
too old for faith, too young to die
follow smeared geese shit on the sidewalk to Neverland
each day the red sun goes into the drying ocean and I ask:
will you come back for me?
 
is it funny or tragic?
we will all end up sharing one tombstone
here lies a monumental collection of fuck-ups
 
ask me then, oh neighboring bones
where have I been and where did
I really come from. 

Dear Tree, From Shadow
Performative Sculpture

Bijarim-ro in Jeju Island is a two-lane road connecting two nearby towns, Songdang and Gyorae. With justifications such as high traffic for tourists using this road and the convenience of transportation for the residents of Songdang, the provincial government of Jeju unilaterally pushed for the “Bijarim Road Expansion Project” in 2018. Since then, 1,000 cedar trees had been clear-cut around Bijarim-ro.

Upon hearing the news, a small group of people came out to protect the forest. Sometimes with the support of the residents, other times with the extra help from the creatures living in Bijarim-ro forest, they’ve been protecting the forest for the last three years.

I also heard the news about Bijarim-ro, but I couldn’t run out to the forest like them. Perhaps because of their sound of resistance occupying a small corner of my heart, at some point, without thinking, I was out making work with stones by rolling them around in the Bijarim cedar forest. While working there, I met the “Bijarim-ro Cedar Forest Keepers” and was invited to participate in an art event that they organized.

I send this video letter to a tree once faced the light, and to a tree facing the light right now.  

제주도 ‘비자림로’는 ‘송당’과 ‘교래’를 잇는 2차선 도로이다. 이 도로를 사용하는 관광객 교통 수요 증가와 ‘송당’ 주민들의 교통 편의를 명분으로, 제주도 도정道政은 2018년 ‘비자림로 확장공사’를 일방적으로 밀어붙였다. 결국 ‘비자림로’ 주변 삼나무 1000여 그루가 벌목되었다.

이 소식을 들은 제주 시민들은 현장으로 뛰어나와 ‘비자림로 삼나무 숲’을 지키기 위한 저항운동을 시작하였다. 때로는 시민들의 호응을 받으며, 때로는 비자림로에 사는 뭇 생명들의 힘을 빌어 3년 간 이곳을 지키고 있다.

나 또한 비자림로의 소식을 들었지만, 그들처럼 ‘비자림로 삼나무 숲’으로 달려가진 못했다. 내 마음 한 켠을 차지하고 있던 그들의 함성 때문 이었을까? 언제 부턴가 나는 작업을 한답시고 ‘비자림로 삼나무 숲’에서 돌멩이를 굴리고 있었다. 그러던 중 ‘비자림로 삼나무 숲’ 지킴이들이 진행하는 문화행사에 참여하게 되었다.

한 때 빛을 향했던 나무에게, 그리고 지금 빛을 향하고 있는 나무에게 이 영상편지를 보낸다.

고승욱/ Koh, Seung Wook

I was born and raised in Jeju Island.
For 20 years, I lived in Seoul, building my art career.
Even though I’ve been back in Jeju for over 10 years,
I’m still learning about the island and
I surprise myself for my ignorance of Jeju. 

제주도에서 나고 자랐다.
20년간 서울에서 미술활동을 했고
제주 내려온지 10년이 지나고 있다.
늦깍기 제주공부에 매달리면서
제주에 대한 자신의 무지함에 새삼 놀라고 있다.

SOUTHERN GASTRIC-BROODING FROG
Rheobatrachus silus
 
collected by David S. Liem
Australia
1972
 
adult male
38.4 mm snout to vent
 
slate-coloured
smooth, slimy skin
prominent eyes, black
with gold spots
round blunt snout
jaws close snap
 
inhabit boulder-strewn
streams, spend days
submerged
 
summer rains initiate breeding
 
females swallow
fertilized eggs, tadpoles
develop in the stomach, are birthed
through the mother’s mouth
fully-formed froglets spew forth
 
1978 summer rains late
1979 rains very late
1980 & 1981 rains late again
 
last seen in the wild December 1979
last captive frog died November 1983
Extinct


 

THE CALL OF THIS SPECIES
 
 
The grunting of a pig     a hen cackling     the bleat of a sheep
the low bellow of an ox     a cricket singing near the water
a dog’s bark     a duck quacking     young crows cawing
a delicate insect-like tinkle     a broken banjo string
a finger running over the small teeth of a comb
a squeaky door being slowly opened     a carpenter’s hammer
the tapping of paddles on the side of a canoe     a cough
a watch being wound     a nasal snarl
a low-pitched snore     two marbles being struck together
sleigh bells     the clangor of a blacksmith's shop
 
P-r-r-r-     pip-pip-pip-pip     poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo
purrrreeeek     cr, cr, cr     cre-e-e-e-e-e-p, cre-e-e-e-e-e-p
pst-pst-pst     queenk, queenk     eeek!     kraw, kraw, kraw    
jwah, jwah     ah, ah, ah, ah     krack, krack, krack     
ca-ha-ha-ac, ca-ha-ha-ac, ca-ha-ha-ac     pé-pé, pé-pé    
kle-kle-kle-klee     cran, cran, cran, c-r-r-en, c-r-r-en 
creck-creck-creck     cut-cut-cut-cut     ric-up, ric-up, ric-up
ru-u-u-ummm ru-u-u-ummm     grrruut-grrruut-grrruut-grrruut
grau, grau     gick, gick, gick, gick     tschw, tschw, tschw    
wurrk, wur-r-r-k     trint-trint     tr-r-r-onk tr-r-r-onk, tr-r-r-onk!
 
The call of this species has not been recorded



 
THREATS
 
fragmentation of forest    
clearance of cloud forest
movement of the cloud layer up the mountainside
timber harvesting    
landslides    
ice in the montane grasslands
late rains   
severe dry seasons
drought-related increases in evaporation
successive fires extending deeper into the rainforest
slash-and-burn agriculture    
cattle grazing    
illicit crops
irrigation practices    
illegal mining    
guerrilla activities
construction of a dam upstream
construction of a cable car
pesticides used in maize farming upstream    
airborne pollution
conversion of habitat into a golf course    
Las Vegas
invasion of mist flower   
introduction of the Bullfrog    
non-native trout    
safari ants    
feral pigs    
lack of genetic diversity    
heavy parasite loads    
exportation for the pet trade
stress due to handling for data collection    
over-collecting
chytridiomycosis
chytridiomycosis
chytridiomycosis
 

WALKING INTO THE OCEAN

I frequently think about walking into the ocean. My sense of obligation to the earth simply the flimsy contract of a collapsed toy ship factory. I wonder how long fish would live if no longer fugitive to keel, kellick, and angry boom chain. Giving Botox to the water, the workers of our county must have looked forward to the coolness of soil when they drowned. The last of their incense breaths fleeing from Pender Street, home between ashy pages of quiet night and negligent morning. That portion of motherland was christened Oriental Hawaii. Which part did you name me after? I watch as you twist together umbilical buoy with steaming red sausage. Squeeze blood from wet towel.
 
I get it all mixed up—the water from sausage oil, sun spots from badges of living. Tell me the difference between my bones and the bones of whale shark. Only, this nuclear explosion paints in tiny brushstrokes like iron filings. My ghost grips my neck until I can breathe again. My fear is that the ocean knows too much, would reject me too. The pomelo at the corner of our fridge untouched for months. Face torn up like sausage skin. Roof of my mouth softening, mistaken for glue. The ocean is a fable, seaweed stuck between front teeth. If we laid out our hides side by side, which of us would have more scales? And after all of it: I ride nekton back to before I walked. To find my baby-body fed. To find the coolness of soil in the ship yard’s false summer heat. Safe? A warmth I have betrayed has betrayed me.
 
Who can say if this daydream is more about walking than about water. More about the empty swing than about the drop. More about daring to steal a pillow from a sleeping giant. Unwound spool and a jar of kitchen grease, honeying frozen flies. Somehow the tea is still cold; it’s like you have forgotten who I am. What would you do if I could become a worm wedged between subduction zone boundary between us, waking up to everything, gone? The ocean is not a feeling, not a child, not a mother, not a worker, not a word. But she is still learning from contours of glass—just like we are.

​

Acknowledgement
​
"jia you" previously published in  Tributaries: ACAM undergraduate student journal 

Audio Credits

Music for "jia you": "No More Trap" by Audiobinger (CC attribution non-commercial from free music archive).
Music for "Walking into the Ocean": "through the water and rain" by soft and furious (public domain from free music archive). ​

Jane Shi is a queer Chinese settler living on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Her writing has appeared in Briarpatch Magazine, Canthius, The Malahat Review, PRISM, and Room, among others. She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land is not mined, hearts are not filched, and bodies are not violated. Find her online @pipagaopoetry.

HOME = GARBAGE
for Khalo


                looking out the window
                              from my teta’s balcony 
                at the news on my laptop
                          some days     they look the same
                        and some days they don’t
                my aunt says this is weird
                                there have never been any military tanks
                                               in zalka before
                                       three days in a row
         imagine the difference between
                             this looks weird
                                          and military men directing traffic
                                                        on a daily basis
                                  rifles slung across their shoulders
                                            waving the cars to keep going
                                                            stop, turn left
                                              cars in two lanes somehow
                                                            fitting themselves four wide
                                                                          stop, keep going, turn left

                                         this country is corrupt says my uncle
                                    this country smells like garbage
                         contracts with the garbage company left unrenewed
                                       military men pinching their noses
                                                      while directing traffic
                                                                   if we can’t manage garbage
                                                  can we do anything right?
                                                    we stop, keep going, turn left

            people sling bags of rotten garbage
                         over mountain sides
                                      over roadsides
                                                     drop garbage onto houses
                                                                     into the ocean
                                      anywhere but garbage disposal
                                                    where to dispose
                                                                  when there is nowhere

                                      four months and my uncle is hospitalized
                                                      lungs filled with pollution
                                                                    hundreds of people in the country
                                                                                                polluted
                                                                       


                                       beirut protesters push
                      industrial garbage bins
                                     into the middle of the road
                                                  try pretending that doesn’t exist
                                                  aimed at government officials
                                                                refusing press
                                                                              people start to move them   
                                                                       most people drive around them
                                                                                           an obstacle course
                                                                                                         in preserving ignorance
                                                                                  let us press our ignorance deeper
                                                              throw bags over the shoulders of refugees
                                                                            this country is too small
                                                                                         as though that’s the only problem
                                                                                         religion into garbage
                                                                                                         brown sludge building



     when it’s too hot to stay inside
                    my family heads to the beach
                                    stops at a checkpoint
                                            on the way up the mountains
                                     the military man with a rifle
                                         across his shoulders barely looks
                                                   wipes sweat off his brow
                    bored, nods, motions us forward
                                   the privilege of christianity
          there are hundreds of military checkpoints
                                                   in this tiny country
                    hundreds of bored military men
                                  stop, keep going, shmel
                                         there are thousands of palestinians
                                                 in refugee camps in this country
                              stop, undocumented, prohibited
                                                                movement hindered
                                                       by checkpoints in and out
                                          stop, undocumented, prohibited



I don’t live in zalka anymore
                             but every year I visit
                    the garbage keeps growing
                           downtown beirut skyscrapers
                                           hiding the garbage
                                 close the back windows
                                          or we’ll smell garbage
                     speeding on the only highway in lebanon
                                              past garbage piles in flames
                          taller than the gas station beside it
                                          my uncle’s lungs filled with garbage
             this country is corrupt, says my uncle
                           and I ask him why he’s still here
                                               it’s home, he says, his nose plugged
                                   my family came back 18 years ago
                                         this is home, they say
                                                      lungs filled with garbage

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a queer Arab poet living in Tio’tia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory (Montreal). Their work has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, GUTS, the Shade Journal, Arc Poetry Magazine, Room Magazine, and elsewhere. They were longlisted for the CBC poetry prize in 2019. knot  body, a collection of creative non-fiction and poetry will be published September 2020 by Metatron Press, and The Good Arabs, a poetry collection, will be published in Fall 2021 with Metonymy Press. You can find them on Instagram and Twitter @theonlyelitareq. 

ANTI-APOCALYPSE

no nuclear winter
no ice age
no superbug
no second coming
no robot revolution
 
a pear tree
buckthorn
plastic bags
a river
turtles
 
 

"Anti-Apocalypse" previously published in Bad Animals (Insominac Press, 2018)
 

Tom Cull teaches creative writing at Western University and was the Poet Laureate for the City of London from 2016-2018. Tom’s first collection of poems, Bad Animals, was published in 2018 by Insomniac Press. His work has appeared in such journals as the Rusty Toque, Long Con, and the New Quarterly; his poem “After Rivers” was included in the anthology Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (MSU Press, 2019). Tom is the director of Antler River Rally, a grass roots environmental group he co-founded in 2012 with his partner Miriam Love. ARR works to protect and restore Deshkan Ziibi  (Thames River). 

AVIAN ODES—CANADA GOOSE
 
The chill, glassy mist just then
Dissolving into hints of sultriness
Echoed with jubilant honks,
Avian position-signalling on high,
Pulling my gaze up to your magnificent
Flying V’s northward bound
Flinging joyful vernal greetings.
 
Come the ordained crisp autumn day
The calls echoed again off frosted fields
As your arrow formations streamed south,
Bidding farewell until spring warmth
Once more crept in.
 
Winter past was deep, consistent;
Now it staggers all around,
Reeling under humanity’s blows,
Glistening white morphs
To sulky brown mud,
Defiantly open water
Supplants sparkling ice.
Eminently flexible,
A few goose homebodies
Spawned many more of you that
Seize what’s on offer, spurn the effort
And trade glorious flight for ungainly
Waddling about and strolls through traffic,
Expropriating luscious, manicured turf,
Cheerfully crapping all over your squattage;
Soaring nobility mutated to a
Grey-brown-black wingéd pest
Herded off the cathedral greensward
By a bellowing leaf blower;
Target practice for a skulking
Archer in a London park;
Clubbing victim of a sportsman
Whose putt was ruined by an
Inopportune anserine klaxon.
 
Undaunted, you multiply and toddle on,
Once a belovéd seasonal herald,
Now flocks of Cassandras trumpeting
Warnings, flaunting consequences,
Announcing a battle joined.

Jennifer Wenn is a trans-identified writer and speaker from London, Ontario.   Her first poetry chapbook, A Song of Milestones, has been published by Harmonia Press (an imprint of Beliveau Books).  She has also written From Adversity to Accomplishment, a family and social history; and published poetry in Beliveau Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Open Minds Quarterly, Tuck Magazine, Synaeresis, Big Pond Rumours, the League of Canadian Poets Fresh Voices, Wordsfestzine, and the anthology Things That Matter.  She is also the proud parent of two adult children with a day job as a systems analyst. Jennifer Wenn's website.