Sunday Poem

LOID 

Getting in’s all in the wrist,
a steadfast pitcher’s grip
when you let drop
your instrument
of admittance: Visa, ID,
thin plastic jimmy swiped
down the fissure with
a satiating swish
like perforated paper’s
creased swift rip, or the fission
of insight almost missed. 

If flicked just so—
technique tricking
mechanism—you’ll knock
back the spring bolt
to hear its plosive
click. Next, the creaky hinge,
bird call of ingress,
light’s tilted L edging
an inched open door.
You’ve made it, in or through;
what’s inside you wish you knew.

By Danny Jacobs, from Loid (Frog Hollow Press, 2016)

Sunday Poem

THIS LITTLE PIGGY 

This little piggy went to market
shrink wrapped on a mattress
of styrofoam. His friend was a real
downer, so she stayed home,
confined to the sow-shaped cell
of the side she dropped down upon.
In her last act, she came out—a closet
Houdini—by escaping the stock yard,
fodderizing her flesh and tunneling
out the gullets of her pen-mates.
“This isn’t roast beef,” effused
the unamused consumer fuming
at the smokehouse, who slid his plate
of pork belly back across the table.
He was starved. And which piggy
could have gotten by with none?
Only the forever underdone one
with its cord freshly cut, popped
like a wet pea from a flesh pod
while mom was quartered
and portioned at the slaughterhouse.
Hungerless, this little piggy lay
still for its transplant to a vacuum
-sealed womb of formaldehyde.
In high school, he and I met
at the scalpel’s tip. With my fingers
deep in the incision I had slit along
his chest, I huffed, puffed and pawed
the stick walls of his ribcage back
until they snapped. Inside, the pearly
maggot of his trachea glistened.
It wriggled it like a digit as I stroked
it with my latex-mittened finger,
riding its length like a road going
nowhere, no cry to sound us home.

By Katie Fewster-Yan, from The City Series: Fredericton 

(ed. Rebecca Salazar, Frog Hollow, 2015)  

(Photo by Kourosh Keshiri)

Sunday Poem

MERMAID 

On the black shore of Kiluea, her gills flower
and suck. A hollow forming beneath the body,
the body sinking with the tide. As if the land
wants to bury the evidence, wants to hide
the thing beneath itself, drag it under the blue.
Or at least split open the fin, give her a set of legs 

to die with. The order of things requires legs
to explain the clavicle, the bipedal spine, the flower
of her areola, shrivelling like delphiniums, blue
as the night, as the water, as the body
drying to wax. Death is so good at hiding
itself, the way a wave knocks you to land, 

how a current steals you from land.
She could have up and left, if she'd had the legs.
We can’t turn from a riptide, either. Can’t hide
when the ocean decides to own us. Death flowers
in the lung, in the pulmonary. That’s how it is with the body;
a favourite organ turns itself blue. 

At first it’s impartial, a blue
of hesitation, a hint of survival. Then the land
swallows itself dark, which is to say the body
admits it can’t walk back to the water, can’t grow legs
on demand. She is positioned like a cut flower,
photographed. Maybe she wants to hide, 

but no one wants this to be hidden.
Except the shore, the unsettled water, all that blue
shifting sand beneath body. The crowd flowers
around her, clicks and touches, while the land
tries to offer her back. Tries to fasten itself legs
to move her, to reclaim the body. 

This inexplicable body.
Long tail knotted into tail, hiding
itself as we hover in skirts, our legs
finned together. So hot we're bluing
at the seam, complaining about the land
that's offered her up like a flower. 

Some artist finned those legs together, forged us her body.
The way a man seeds flowers in rain, waiting for the hidden
to open its blue, for a reason to pause and turn awestruck to the land.

From The City Series: Vancouver (ed. Michael Prior, Frog Hollow, 2015) by Alessandra Naccarato

(Painting by Francesco.)

Sunday Poem

SUFFER THE LITTLE ONES

Bring on that horizon with its filmic infinity.

Let us not speak of one sparrow, 

for there are always at least two or three, and if I see one, 

feather-tarnished and head slumped, 

I infer the logic of its fall a posteriori. 

I saw my father falling but could not catch him, 

the tubes and the breathing mask sustaining 

and draining life from him, an arrhythmia words 

cannot have. I understand the original sin of words. 

Each day I write out my punishment on a blackboard: 

chalk and the taste of chalk and the taste of ashes, eat, for this is my bread. 

I understand this in concreto and in individuo, for inanimate is the compass 

and its measure, one leg in love and the other in argument, so I travel. 

Where are you, father, ideal of the circle and the fixed point? 

I’m leaving the city of your birth, pushpin on a map, 

and I am driving to the periphery on a long straight road. 

To either side canola and its indescribable yellow,

butter and eggs and boyhood, sunlight through a magnifying glass,

the incandescence just before the paper burns, the ant curls into its crisp inferno. 

There is nothing but pavement and canola and beyond that there is nothing 

but the limits of nothing receding into the nothing beyond that. 

Though why would I think of nothing when everything is before me 

on a dinner plate, flowering, blossoming, burgeoning—I sing to the blossoms 

and they sing again a second verse. We sing for what it comes down to,
that the flowering of yellow embellishes reproduction. 

Or so the philosopher says: organon and dialectic and the earth’s fragile soil. 

How do we plant ourselves in the thick earth?

We do not, for we are condemned to movement, to walking, to naming the things of the earth. 

But I’m not walking, I’m driving, both hands on the wheel. 

In the fields someone has named names: Canadian Oil, transgenic. 

I am arrested, for they are damned beautiful, each flower a fleck of glory.

There is a Japanese song for children in praise of canola. 

A friend of my father’s sang it to me once.

From The Critique of Pure Reason (Frog Hollow, 2013) by Ross Leckie

Sunday Poem

DRIVE

No one will find us in this city—not your valentine,
not the line of dogs he’s chained by the throat. My collar
blooms chin-high, is perfumed with lilac where you
finger buttons, parse leaves and hook a flush of green 

to my breast. Tell me you’re good. Tell me we’ll
lend our touch to the nearest MG, drive south on a
sucker bet until we run dry in the desert. There are
others who’ve come uninvited, who’ve come to free 

themselves from their slouching skin, lose their grip
and trace in a mess of coins. Here’s my loss—fist
lodged in the maw of the first guest to speak, our
honour run aground. To stay we’ll need to slap down 

the pin that adorns your jacket, bet against a snail being
able to survive the edge of a straight razor. I’ve been
told that nothing can live to know such a lean blade.
When we drive land rises and our hearts rise with it

From Epoch (Frog Hollow, 2013) by Jim Johnstone.

Sunday Poem

NEW YEAR'S DAY

Others speak. They call for time
to come meet them. We do not

speak. We rest. We look
for nothing and do not stretch

to find ourselves different
in the new year. We lie together

under wool blankets, the baby kicks
my back, pads my shoulder

with her fingers, roots for what is hidden
until she cries herself awake.

I lift my shirt, eyes closed, and offer her
my breast and she squirms into me.

My leg moves sideways to find
his warm leg. We three knot ourselves

together in sleep, content in
knowing what we’ll find when we awake.

From Homing Instinct (Frog Hollow Press, 2011) by Shoshanna Wingate

Canadian Masters

I've got a beautiful new book. Here's what's in it: twenty of John Glassco's top poems plus a 5500-word introduction that was supposed to be an essay on Glassco but turned out to also be a inquiry into oblivion, junkyards, Montreal's decline as a poetry superpower, Paris in the 30s, dandyism as an extreme sport, TISH and why fiction is truer than traditional memoir. I am indebted to the Frog Hollow team of Shane Neilson and Caryl Peters for their superhuman patience as I took my sweet time finishing this commission (four years!). Milton was right on the money: They also serve who only stand and wait.

TISH vs. Glassco

Just got word from Frog Hollow yesterday that John Glassco and the Other Montreal is back from the printers (portrait on the left is by the amazing Wesley Bates).

In an interesting bit of serendipity, I also received Frank Davey's When TISH Happens, a book about the early days of the infamous Vancouver literary movement. As it happens, I spend a fair portion of my introduction trashing debunking assessing the legacy of this group (described by me as "a cocktail of counter-cultural fedupness, mud-slinging, and political anxieties").

To read what I have to say--and I have to admit, even by my standards it's pretty incendiary--you'll have buy a copy of the Selected.

Alcuin Award Winner

I've just learned that Mark Callanan's chapbook, Sea Legend, published by Frog Hollow Press, has won an Alcuin Award for design.

The chapbook had already been shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, and also enjoys the rare honour of being completely sold out. An e-version is available here.

Signal Editions is publishing Mark's second book, Gift Horse, this Fall.

Coming Attractions

I’m nearly a month late in posting this, but I want to thank Jacob McArthur Mooney for including Mark Callanan’s upcoming book on his list of 2011 recommendations.

For anyone on the lookout for more CanPo offerings, we’ve assembled a really solid roster next year, with Asa Boxer and Linda Besner teaming up this Spring (her cover above). Anita Lahey joins Mark in the Fall.

I’ll be first in line for Julie Bruck’s Monkey Ranch, to be published by Brick (check out the Fall issue of Maisonneuve for some wonderful poems from the book). In the meantime, I’ll point poetry fans to the John Glassco biography A Gentleman of Pleasure, by Brian Busby, out in March from McGill-Queen's University Press, as well as my own selection of Glassco poems that Frog Hollow will be publishing around the same time.

Sold Out

Mark Callanan’s chapbook, Sea Legend, has sold out! Mark has (with publisher Frog Hollow's kind permission) made an electronic version available here.

When his head shrinks back to normal size, Mark will be hard at work on his second collection, due out with Signal Editions in Fall 2011.

Sea Legend

I'm a little late getting to this, but I want to congratulate Mark Callanan and the increasingly indispensable Frog Hollow Press for their good news: Mark's chapbook Sea Legend has been shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. The 2,000$ prize will be handed out on June 23rd.

Signal Editions will be publishing Mark's second book next year. Many, if not all, of the poems in the chapbook will be included in the collection. A few copies of Sea Legend, however, are still available. It's a lovely little object and really worth owning.