Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Tuesday poem #208 : Adrienne Gruber : Dämmerschlaf



birth is but a sleep and a forgetting

                                                William Wordsworth


Twilight come
find me
in the bathtub
breathing drowning
writhing trapezist
steam vultures
my head there
but not really
there
everywhere
suckled pig
naked branded
flailing blanketed
peeled cored
alone alone
window ajar
keep sweating
can’t stop
wetting
in piss vomit
oh god
my poor pussy

I don’t believe
in survival
for all women
die this babe
is mine
or monster
every inch of
my fat lacerates
iron sear
smolder
between fetal pulse
somehow I sleep
the deep of pure
loathing
my satiety spun
stomach cistern
of bile

Twilight we are high
tripping off each
other’s vibe
the way you move
your fingers
through my hair
so rad
I once sucked back
by the river
a bunny cat
hopped by
afraid I’d retch
instead spun circles
now shank cramps
thick absorption
perhaps she atrophies
canal crushed
skull dissolved
bread crumbs for
birds
I forget her
cranium when I
come to
just wrap that
old doll
in a blanket
put it to my tit
that’ll do

We don’t need drugs
to join each
other the cosmos
that terrestrial
fear is a net
catches
drunk limbs
ocean sputter
fever swallows
my climax
you tricked me
my request
don’t forget
during your rounds
don’t pass me by
every dream I have
is for you
for us
I lost control
it doesn’t matter
you never came



Adrienne Gruber is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Buoyancy Control (BookThug) and This is the Nightmare (Thistledown Press), and three chapbooks, Mimic (Leaf Press), Everything Water (Cactus Press) and Intertidal Zones (Jack Pine Press). She has been a finalist for the CBC Literary Awards, Descant’s Winston Collins Best Canadian Poem Contest and twice for ARC’s Poem of the Year Contest. Her poem Gestational Trail was awarded first prize in the Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest in 2015 and she won the bpNichol Chapbook Award for Mimic in 2012. Adrienne lives in Vancouver with her family.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Tuesday poem #207 : Brian Henderson : Words / How to perform the taste test



Everything swims upstream against the stickiness of vision
The street the house in the street the room in the house
The desk in the room the book on the desk the cut forest
The various chemistries the words in the book the desk
On which lies a book in the book and at which I am
Sitting everything is a door including the thumping
Helicopter of the grouse its wings pounding like a heart
You’ve stuck to my vision in the kitchen like the persistent
Brightness that remains once you close your eyes on the window’s
Gathering of the morning you don’t hear the helicopter you
Hear an unstartable motor one thing is always more than
One thing don’t you find words for instance a word is
A door a sound an etymology that is to say a continual
Transformation in time a reach is unique but also
Reusable for instance the word I’m thinking of bitcom
Telepathy autoimmunity chrysalis Lily Cup landfill
Tom-tom aubade ocean otter operand is probably being
Used in someone else’s sentence right now is a series
Of syllables or a single letter letter not yet mailed you
Put it in one fire and it burns green in another blue in
Another orange in another it’s knowledge that burns
To cinders when known and so forth in a secret
Solution and its invisibility rises to the surface and
Floats away though it’s addressed to you and you
Have to drink the solution that might be
Purple or teal or tea-coloured and has
A pleasantly sweet smoky finish


Brian Henderson is the author of 11 collections of poetry, including The Alphamiricon, a box of visual poetry (also on the web here), Nerve Language, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, Sharawadji, shortlisted for the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry, and [OR]. He’s at work on word swarms of liminal spaces and is a once-upon-a-time director of WLUPress.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Tuesday poem #206 : Cody-Rose Clevidence : from Poppycock & Assphodel



ORCHASTROPHE


                         “an ordinary error placed me here”





in the serotonin corridors of my wilderness                           in the neural nets are caught                           in the mackerellight & ozone of my heart in the tense muscle of a crocus                                 olfactory bulb of my acre prime sublingual rib                                                      lost in the magnum opus of my heart                                                         independent of void most utterly devoid of song             tiny hummingbird         of my eyes violet quarrel deep in the forests verbage                         of my heart redundant of crocus               redundant of dogwood & redbud                  as petals fall triumphant              so too         I am at a loss                 & will blind the cathedrals of my knowing                with the overabundant scripture of my heart                                 will salivate copiously & with abandon in the blue gloaming      I mean groaning                               of my heart in the citadel        the sap salty in the flexed limbs        the mist dripping off each leaf           called to each                                 I call to each I say “leaf”     I say “violet”     I say “mist”     I say “dogtooth violet”      I say “how can I possibly bear whatever grief will inevitably come towards me through all the corridors of my life”         I say “I will blind the cathedrals of my knowing”     I say “I will douse the careless peony”   “I will vyy earnestly & with moderate valor”     “I will curse fervently & gesticulate also”     “I will try to not drink so much”         “I will strain the verb of my being into the dim groaning”     “as too I strain my sight there”                                “I succumb henceforth & wholeheartedly”             “eventually I will get up from wherever I have laid myself down”                                      the falcons too must eat in the endless neurobiology                                                   of the forest the delicate, the careless           lichen                                     of my eyes I swallow the great creek of dusk in me              it calls up a surge in me it goes along into the dark                               it goes along into the dark



Cody-Rose Clevidence’s 1st book, BEAST FEAST, was released by Ahsahta Press in 2014.  They live in the Arkansas Ozarks w their dog, Pearl. 

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday, March 07, 2017

Tuesday poem #205 : Nyla Matuk : Transference




In Hamlet, when Laertes said, “Upon my life, Lamound”
I thought of “Dis de big one, Lamont! Lamont! Lamont! Dis de big one!
uttered in despair on TV by Sanford, in Sanford and Son.

It’s not that I wanted to think Sanford and Son looked back
on Hamlet and considered the Prince’s problems with his father,
and that those problems were trickling 
down like a sinister leak of semantics
from a bothersome furnace appendage.

Simply, I want to find out Lamound’s identity.
Did Shakespeare imagine Lamound with
a big handlebar moustache like the philosopher Nietzsche’s

twirling paternalistic member, and an overripe heart
ready to explode all over a son?
Was it not to make Lamound anxious
with an influence or a transference?
To give him his explosive heart, and then die?


Nyla Matuk is the author of Sumptuary Laws (2012), and Stranger, which appeared with Véhicule Press in 2016. Her poems have appeared in Canadian, American and U.K. journals including The New Yorker, PN Review, Ladowich, Prelude, The Walrus, and The Fiddlehead. www.nylamatuk.ca

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan