where is the river :: a poetry experiment

Allison Chisholm :: Four poems Janelle Cordero :: Four poems Ian Martin :: Five poems Hugh Behm-Steinberg :: From an end is the towards to Elizabeth Robinson :: Six poems Randy Prunty :: Two poems Mike Ferguson :: Three poems

Snowmelt Colours As the white clump falls off, camellias uncoil up in a spring of pink waking. The roof lets ice find cracks in this ceiling, drips down the wall melted and pissing itself into an orange bucket. It’s dirt, dusty soil turned mud slide as mountains let go, rivers overflow, and shitdark – obviously – even where blood is. On her topiary bush the eight inches of thawing V are now pierced with its greenery. Fuliginous in its leaving, all other colours blur to grey cascades. Snowmelt M470-1 sings a brighter shade of blue-pastel pale. Like foshadie from the rote of a child’s prayer, onlyapoor is a confusion of colour ontothewalls from ingress. Aristotle could have noted when the watermelon snow dissolves there are no pips. Types of Identity A birth certificate trumps Descartes every time, though extrapolating would make DT non-existent. the refuser who sucks a thumb the drifter who is lethargic about charisma the s...

try to name there are people i miss who i don’t really remember / maybe it’s my energy missing their energy / i’m not embarrassed to think this / materialism makes no sense to me / the whole world disappears all the time and i’m left with whatever is inside my head / nothing decomposes and it all means so intensely / forgive me for believing in what i can’t and won’t try to name / nervous i blush in unexpected situations like / when a stranger says hi when i’m out walking the dog / i know the formula: say hi back / smile / wave / nod / give something of myself away / but it’s like in school when you study hard for a test and you memorize the whole damn textbook but / you’re still nervous all the same / cutting out are you there / i can’t hear you / it sounds like you’re underwater / yes / honey / can you hear me / this phone cuts out sometimes / maybe i’ll call you back / maybe i’ll hang up and take a walk / then we’ll try this again / we’ll suffe...

withdrawal / withdrawing the other kids learned how to kill while you were burning honey on a hot plate, expecting results chasing omens in a corner, folding in on yourself, as if iteration were a virtue and not a hiding place an everlasting gobstopper you left a candy wrapper on the table in the front hall and it was there the next day in accordance            invert yourself reap the emptiness coat it with honey sparingly an earth torn into yourself as limited by the occurrence of raw materials taffy twirled around a claw as you grew up wrong in the wrong places, expecting sweetness to be enough, expecting the taste to last, setting up your musket, loading it with sucralose the other kids learned how to love as a form of killing as your honey burned as the seasons went sour to disappear to do so gracefully but not too eagerly (everyone is watching but not closely enough) to satisfy the fussiness ...

Integers and Dendrites Your stoned brain was right until the next feeding we all sat in anticipation like a third order neuron before synapsing in the thalamus. When you wake   you eat. Full of words and motor impulses integers and dendrites whose innervation stop short of stimulation. Credo For Stuart Abundant in your hand - a lightness of being an amazing bit of grace the bleating of goats your coming of age your middle-aged nephew a concession to an outrage your missionary zeal the origins of life a plausible suggestion the cultivation of coherence. The cheese stands alone. Thievery A dream atmosphere is achieved at the apex - stolen from a secured cargo area, disarmed by a police officer. Bitter masterminds who, guarded from birth, abscond with curiosities and wonders worth rupees and jewels, sapphire and diamonds, or at least one Canadian dollar. Putting Our House in Order Stow away your caribou skin boots a hou...

On your kindness oh is to be entered upon; take Fridays off. Speak of facts they will renew. If you drag some it won’t hurt. An audience for your spine all that flicks. A florist’s belief the poison can always come out. It’s consciousness, it stalls you back up to give it more space leave it alone it will round, don’t be the one all the time talking about. The seals are cool how you try tugging on the pipes, the pipes, the pipes with bay laurel roots tapping into areas: fostering the hours: you divide into. Dead sons inhabit living sons they explain signing or, or husked each other sparking a lot, your sparking lot, your shining satellite. Towards rebirth ok all about it now unsettle you. Each task uphills. Brown hair sky lucky lucky salvaging lift from it certainly worth loving. Be swept, drawing. A happiness, changing your name to a heatwave, still ripening one sentence is a very long sentence only that that that that what is altered will not be unbalance...

The visible succulent Red ears repeat the redness of my history. Legs smoke as they spin. A hickory cane stands in for all the trees I’ve cut on. My dream, but your house. The wild ones are shunning the willows which is fine with me because I enjoy the wispy-shaded solitude there. Like David, when I tire of giant shadows I tend to sling things. The beginning trembles were so lovely but we stepped into the north shed anyway. That was around the time you began doing those song-bird translations in your sleep. Why not tell me what they did to you, those people persons? I see your eyes darting under your eyelids. What does ‘naked to the waist’ mean? Up or down? You should never say “should” when you’re on a retreat. (Sometimes the visible world dims a bit.) Sometimes the visible world dims a bit. Sometimes it doesn’t include even a tenth of our solar system. I blame the gardener who is obviously colluding with the forest ranger. Verbatim interpretaion: I like your likenes...

Afternoon The day reclined, declined, opined.   Light on the grass.   The want of grass on the bald soil.   The shine of it.   A sign.   Simple.   What resists being defined, wanting more. Healing Simile As long as two bodies lay parallel in a bed.   As long as tea cools.   So long as the body sways to soften pain, like the body, into the body, over the body.   Respite like a preposition, sweating through it.   Like something hovering above itself, suffusing itself.   Like hands whose fingers are parallel.   Or intertwined.    Like the exhaustion of recovery, loyal, as long as it sleeps beside itself. Cipher: pain is bland, and relief fraught. The body is a mind made of clods of soil. Digging.   The columbine pulled up from its earth, roots twitching. Blue Smith Corona So it came to pass.   The carriage returning, like so, on the typewriter.   So it cl...