PEOPLE'S CHOICE
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The use of words and details that appeal to a reader’s physical senses (sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell).
On TV it looked like a high-speed photo of a milk drop
the dying leader of the Pana Wave laboratory cult smack in the
centre.
Acres of white cloth streamered his followers, who
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
After the celebrations,
people, TV channels, telephones,
the year’s recently-corrected digit
finally falls asleep.
Between the final night and the first dawn
a jagged piece of sky
An eagle egg fell into a farmer’s chicken shed
and when it hatched the farmer gave it chicken feed
even though he was the king of birds. The farmer
clipped the eaglet’s princely beak and raised him
scurried around a classroom papered with poems.
Even the ceiling, pink and orange quilts of phrase...
they introduced one another, perched on a tiny stage
to read their work, blessed their teacher who
Dad reads aloud. I follow his finger across the page.
Sometimes his finger moves past words, tracing white space.
He makes the Moon say something new every night
to his deaf son who slurs his speech.
I was a kid other kids’
parents gossiped about.
They told their children
what I was: too negative.
I get it. Fair to fear
contagion of bad attitudes,
i as in sow a muskrat tooth back into jawi as in dented pumpkin memoryi as in deflated basketball consciousnessi as in anaphoric internet parrot projection loopi as in holding uterine lining above a toilet bowl
We have no need
for scientists to
tell us things
we already
know
like the
sea is
rising
and the
water is
getting warm.
My imaginary brother speaks of our migration and history,how time pulses like the green waterin the South Saskatchewan that sputters by our home,success measured in how still he’d lie after wandering
My father’s green Pontiac
in this house
the body of a poem, still warm,
hangs on the nail of the mundane
touched to its core
like a reproach, like proof,
that i was here
and you were here
Source of echo
madman of prophecies
buffering nonsense
in absence of anything
solid as a cloud
flung
from the womb
pale pallid asteroid
belt of nanny goat
From youth I was taught that fresh meant alive
until the moment you buy it My mother
His beard: an avalanche of honey
an avalanche
of thorns. In a bar too close to the Pacific,
It was clearly understood,
there was no ownership of land,
so clearly does the land, in fact, own me.
My water from the river and my nitrogen,
a buffalo protein.
It turns out there wasn't a door, so she stood looking at the wall, and then
at the ground, and then again at the wall, and then about the sky. The sky
was doorless, which was comforting, especially at night, when she could
There's a general presumption that rhyme is an affair of
two. Most expected are, of course, end-rhymes in formal
structures—ABAB, etc., but even thinking more loosely,
Poems about night
and related poems. Paintings
about night,
sleep, death, and
I'll tell you how it was, what she remembers:
the scent of rhubarb and strawberries in the wild
where she hid and the cries of the murdered,
they do not want to die away. If possible,
I left the protection
of my plan & my
thinking. I let my self
go. Is this the hope I
thought. Light fled.
We have a world
to lose I thought.
Summer fled. The
some ekphrastic evening, this will be both criticism and poetry and
failing that fall somewhere that seems like in between. this both/
and and/ or neither/ nor machine comes in having been touched
"weeping blooms
i know she wants me
by her side in sleep. i do not really ask her to stay,
only imply she is invited. i speak
this is the growing of things birthing of skin
and bone stem and leaf this is planet
earth beneath snowlight and desert sand
We climb up the rusting ladder,
Mexican beer forced into waistbands,
and lie on the cooling roof
count our personal galaxies
far high LEDs, billboards, dreams.
Boyakka! Boyakka! Boyakka!
Shots rang out on my street today
Three Black yoots lay dead
shot inna dem head
I
some towers are made of cladding
some made of ivory
some burn in the night
some built by slaves
wind rushes through coarse hair
Do you believe in the ghosts of aunties and uncles that drive old sin-
gle-bench pickup trucks spotted with bullet-hole rust, sweetgrass and
My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
my mother found herself one late summer
afternoon lying in grass under the wild
yellow plum tree jewelled with sunlight
she was forgotten there in spring picking
rhubarb for pie & the children home from
The fish are drifting calmly in their tank
between the green reeds, lit by a white glow
that passes for the sun. Blindly, the blank
glass that holds them in displays their slow
can go to Bible study every Sunday
and swear she’s still not convinced,
but she likes to be around people who are.
We have the same conversation
every few years — I’ll ask her if she stops
a girl between two dialects
still a screen and still a searching, learns
the season of breakup
another word for spring
can come before or after
depending on where you grew up
online, back and forth
I.
Leaves, asleep under wind:
a ship for the wound.
The wound
glories in these ruinous times.
Trees growing in our own eyelashes
a lake for the wound.
The wound shows up in bridges
To Windrim or sycamore
rustle cicada or bark and to Wayne
We’re driving and the radio says mass marine extinctions within a
generation. No silence, no sirens — an unflustered inflection, then
stock markets, cryptic as Latin mass. I force myself: the interval
When my mother died,
one of her honey cakes remained in the freezer.
I couldn’t bear to see it vanish,
so it waited, pardoned,
in its ice cave behind the metal trays
for two more years.
Men prefer an island
With its beginning ended:
Undertones of waves
Trees overbended.
Men prefer a road
Circling, shell-like
Convex and fossiled
The trees I’ve glimpsed from the window
of a night train were
the saddest trees.
They seemed about to speak,
then—
i thought it was ok - i could understand the reasons
they said there might be young children or a nervous man seeing
this small piece of flesh that they weren’t quite expecting
Not the music.
It is this other thing
I keep from all of them
that matters, inviolable.
I scratch in my journals,
a mouse rummaging through cupboards,
Know him for a white man.
He walks sideways into wind
allowing the left of him
to forget what the right
knows as cold. His ears
turn into death what
Do you remember, Nancy,
when we sat in the Creole restaurant
and glanced up at the television to see students running
with their hands in the air and photographs
of two young men?
My sister is crying and crying
her tears grow to salt stormy showers
to rain and to rapids and rivers
they run to the sea to the sea.
My sister sobs softly she knows
i
Winter has landed; my boot bucks on a stone
surrounded by snow; I swear, I murmur
Oracabessa. “The rock” is what I call home,
bedtime ritual summon a stranger tonight you
linger on my laptop screen
Price depends on how the cheongsam
was made, the fabric used.
Gasp. Lift breasts with one hand.
Stuff your body inside.
If you wear this print of peonies
