Sunday Poem

DAY FOR EVASION 

The morning offers evidence of a rain you slept through,
pavement like grease soaked through a sandwich bag,

and there’s definitely a fire burning inside the metal Muppet-mouthed
industrial garbage bin open outside No Frills. The fire’s low and mangy,

like a nest where light hatches, and the air out here
smells like a dentist’s office in its busy time: overheating rubber,

periodic elements, a fresh mess of fragile membrane
cut into, pulled back—every hard, impacted thing removed.

This is a pretty good day for evasion, and you’d like to
volunteer your service for something clean and memorable,

maybe running interference for the No Frills shoppers tenderly
nosing their way past displays shocking as capped front teeth,

performing what reads as a well-considered dumb show. This course
of action has all the vision, all the hoist of a boom lift. Now seems

as good a time as any to admit: you’ve never seen something so thoroughly
as to forget its name, and more than once, the constellations have let you down.

You can feel the day’s details waiting to pitch towards you like an airbag
deploying an ultra-white, full-frontal bloom of goodness in your face.

The fire in the bin is still brooding.
You’d like to tell someone its meaning isn’t lost on you.

From Failure to Thrive (ECW, 2014) by Suzannah Showler 

Failure to Thrive by Suzannah Showler © 2014 by ECW Press. Used with permission from the publisher.

Sunday Poem

LIGATURE (&)

At some point we blur and blend, make a shape of life,
stop defining the end of our skin by where
others begin, just the touch of two not enough.

I'm not sure I knew this when I first noticed those
conjugal conjunctions, phonemes bled to one,
marks in those spaces that seem to want to say, More.

We crossed at and, at et, then began to mesh,
body and meaning, consecutive letters bent
from sound to grapheme to print strike to &. 

Work, quiet symbols, what we wrap in on our selves,
an almost infinity, or infinity's
shape, almost. Two come one, struggling to stay bound.

 From Whiteout (ECW, 2012) by George Murray.

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.