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Thank you for visiting our blog. As of autumn 2021, this site will no longer be updated. For information about the magazine, the outreach program, how to submit, or anything else, find us as vallummag.com! In the meantime, enjoy poems of the weeks past below!
21 Thursday Oct 2021
Posted in Poem of the Week
How not to speak, how to not speak, this oscillation is missing in the phrase “how to avoid speaking” that is the English title of Derrida’s essay. The curious presence of the word avoid in this title of a talk first given in English in Jerusalem. (How the young poet waking from a coma in Montreal after the random accident, asked: Do you know where you are? said: Jerusalem.) In English, an avoidance, whereas in French an oscillatory structure is at work: “comment ne pas – parler” exists along with “comment – ne pas parler.” How can we not – speak? How can we not–speak?
Or perhaps in the English there is a nearly hidden reverberation: how to a-void speaking? How to unvoid it, remove its void. While trying to stay far from what will not ever stay far from us, for it adheres to us. So that we can’t just ignore or abandon speech, we must a-void it.
In translating Wilson Bueno, there is a reverberatory relation of three languages: Portuguese, Castilian, Guaraní, across a colonial border in western Brazil.
I am creating a translation in English-with-French-and-Guaraní that perhaps no one will read.
Something unreadable, un-avoidable, un-a-voidable. And its relation to sea: a river is also the sea, infolded.
The book will “succeed” even if no one reads it. Because it will exist in the structure of English, as risk. Paraguayan Sea. Sea in a country with no shore but yes its rivers give unto the sea, lay claim to sea, and reach inward from sea’s exteriority
inscribing the risk directly into the structure.
for Odile Cisneros and Valeria Lima
Erín Moure’s translation of Lupe Gómez, Camouflage (Circumference, 2019) was a 2020 Best Translated Book Award finalist. Recent translations are Uxío Novoneyra’s The Uplands: Book of the Courel and other poems (Veliz Books, 2020), Chantal Neveu’s This Radiant Life (Book*hug, 2020) and The Face of the Quartzes by Chus Pato (Veliz Books, 2021). Moure’s most recent poetry is The Elements (Anansi, 2019). She lives and works in Montréal.
This poem was originally published in Vallum issue 14:1 Evolution. It was later published in The Elements (House of Anansi, 2019). The later version is what appears above.
Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.
14 Thursday Oct 2021
Posted in Poem of the Week
not the house. not abandoned. not the drapes. shivering. not the stale air.
chill. not the stairs. creaky. not the shadows. dark.
not the barn. not the dust. not the hooves stamping. not the smell of leather.
not the alley. not the doorway. not the stench. not the debris. echo.
not the shed. sliver. not the shovel. not the coil of rope. not the malevolence.
not the seashore. not the fog. not the damp. not the rush of waves.
not the forest. not the rustling. not the twigs crackling underfoot. not the bright eyes
in the dusk.
not the lake. ice. not the drifts. not the wind. not the howling.
not the whispers. not the knowledge. the sigh.
Marjorie Poor is a publications editor for Manitoba Education, the editor of Prairie books NOW, and a fiction editor at Prairie Fire. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Fire, Vallum, Contemporary Verse 2, and at Theatre by the River’s annual fundraiser, Wine & Words. She lives in Winnipeg.
This poem was originally published in Vallum issue 16:2 Fear.
Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.
07 Thursday Oct 2021
Posted in Poem of the Week
Dark works its way into the house, my life.
It turns on its lamp, using my hand.
Leases my thoughts for several hours.
Rents out my peace of mind
to panic.
It seems I’m under contract
to write out my fears.
It requires no signature,
only blood.
Here is the pen,
a sheet of paper,
the words provided by the dark to illuminate
just how short
I fall
of redemption.
My fingers grip tight around the pen,
as if fearing to let something
unclench its jaws.
And this is where you, reader, can choose not to look.
As I ready to let it all out on paper.
First, cover your mouth, or close your eyes.
My wrists will be
the last to open.
Kevin Irie is a Japanese-Canadian poet whose poetry has appeared in Canada, England, the States, and Australia, and been translated into Spanish, French, and Japanese. His book, Angel Blood: The Tess Poems (Frontenac House, 2004) was nominated for the ReLit Award. His book, Viewing Tom Tomson: A Minority Report (Frontenac House, 2012), was a finalist for the Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award and the Toronto Book Award. “Night Fear” is part of his new book, The Tantramar Re-Vision (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021) which was picked by the CBC as one of the Spring Poetry Books for 2021 and by Quill and Quire Magazine as part of its 2021 Summer Reading Guide. He lives in Toronto.
This poem was originally published in Vallum issue 16:2 Fear.
Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.
30 Thursday Sep 2021
Posted in Poem of the Week
Driving from Perth south to Margaret River,
late in a warm and velvet evening
my friend pulled off the road
onto a dirt track where we bumped and swayed.
A fenced-off field on one side,
rows of vines on the other.
I turned to ask where we were going.
‘Wait’ he said.
Slowly onward some minutes more.
slow rocking in the dim glow from a moonless sky.
He cut the engine. ‘Wait.’
We sat in silence, the vine rows black on dark.
‘We can get out now.’
Electric insect noises, horses snuffling nearby, smell of manure.
‘Look up,’ he said.
A smear of muted colours spread across the sky
bright, clear, benumbing, our Milky Way
as this city boy had never seen it.
From the viewing platform of our remote planet,
a billion stars spread out below me.
‘The centre of our galaxy is there,’ he pointed,
his finger tip blacked out stars, nebulae, galaxies.
He seemed to know his way around.
I looked inward at that blurred and bulging glow,
for a moment fearing I might stumble,
fall forward down into that central light
and on and on into the black hole at its heart.
Kieran Egan lives in Vancouver. His first poetry collection, Amplified Silence, was published by Silver Bow Publishing in 2021. His chapbook, Among the branches, was published by Alfred Gustav Press, Vancouver, (2019). A novel, Tenure, (a combination of comic campus thriller) was published by NeWest Press, 2021. He was shortlisted for the Times Literary Supplement Mick Imlah prize in 2017, and the Acumen International Poetry Competition, 2020, and his poems have appeared in the Canadian magazines Event, Canadian Literature, Quills, Literary Review of Canada, Dalhousie Review, Grain, Qwerty, Antigonish Review, Vallum, Canadian Quarterly, Ekphrastic Review, Spadina Literary Review, Pace, English Bay Review, Prairie Fire, and in many US and UK magazines.
This poem was originally published in Vallum issue 17:2 Space.
Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.
23 Thursday Sep 2021
Posted in Poem of the Week
Outside of Kantian space and time, do you miss dancing
in dusty basements where sex was once phenomenal?
How sunlight threads in morning frost, breath pluming
in knots between you and the snow-marbled fields?
When depression knocks, do the dead hide inside
poems, in the corridors between stanzas, curling fetal
in a b’s womb? (Are you here, now?) When the dead speak,
do words signify perfectly with presence? Does each
sentence sound like a symphony? Or appear in the mind’s
eye in 4k imagery? Have you ever walked across the surface
of a star? Are they as lonely as they look in my city sky?
Do you dream of microwaves beeping? Or reading Kafka
whose words are black scars? What do the dead think about
after the afterglow, if no one’s breathing? Don’t you miss
feeling, feeling, feeling? And failing, the soul search that
follows, from which you promise yourself to be reborn?
Yusuf Saadi‘s first collection, Pluviophile, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. He currently lives in Montreal. http://www.yusufsaadiwriter.wordpress.com.
This poem was originally published in Vallum issue 17:1 Home.
Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.
06 Monday Sep 2021
Posted in Poem of the Week
I devoted my life to her after I saw her sleep.
When she sleeps, she still hears everything—
the planes of her face shift as I speak to her,
but her replies seem all rote or nonsense.
When she sleeps she is like God and I am too
simple for illumination. My words sink like shells,
small petrified sea blossoms, into her conscience as
deep as the ocean. Still I stream to her hand.
If a seraph should ask me how I feel about her or
how I feel about God, my answers would hardly differ—
I could pray to both of them with the same words:
I am iris and anemone,
changing blood into petals to catch your rain.
You are the almond, the algae, the elephant calf,
too vast a variance to be more knowable than a secret.
My ardour is only a flower’s covenant with a sycamore.
Your love is the limitless patience that a continent can have for a leaf.
When she sleeps, I run my fingers over the spines in our
bookcase and hear the dead letters quaking, waiting to
be revived. I know that she will wake. I know that one day
God will turn to look at me. There is correspondence that will
not be lost on the way and if it does not arrive today it will surely
arrive tomorrow. There are happenings that are inevitable and
upon which the present entirely depends. We have fields of vision
but there are also fields beyond vision and there are those so
great that they fill all of the fields over and under completely, existing
mostly out of sight. Still we always know them a little. They are
implied by every persistence in an inhospitable place. I learned this when
I lived alone and my coat grew softer about me with age but hidden itches
multiplied in the fabric of my hours. The world was incomprehensible with
errors of transcription that I could never find. My deeds were shrinking lines
bordered on all sides by deafening margins. I was less than a dog then, for
dogs at least will be mourned. Yet that is when I was surest of her, most certain
of God and of that which must come. I knew them as some plants know water—
not because I had seen rain, but because were it not for the lake sleeping
deep in the aquifer, my leaves would have long ago turned to dust.
Jade Wallace‘s poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Canadian Literature, This Magazine, Hermine Annual, and elsewhere. They are the reviews editor for CAROUSEL and the author of several chapbooks, most recently the collaborative A Trip to the ZZOO (Collusion Books, 2020) and A Barely Concealed Design (Puddles of Sky Press, 2020), under the moniker MA|DE. Stay in touch: jadewallace.ca.
This poem was originally published in Vallum issue 17:1 Home.
Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.
30 Monday Aug 2021
Posted in Poem of the Week
chapel street shifts pitch deep winter;
its edges, sharper its scents brighter, brittle
like peppermint ……………. or bone
.
where fever …. bush frozen
berry holly reaches its thorns to bristle
my fingers with its bitter tang
…………………………………. where deep—
.
beneath …. permafrost and
rust and dirty snow slush lies … me
…….. covered, cold in remnants of
an old white school song
.
…………………………………. our home
and native land ……………. haunting
my memory of spring.
Ellen Chang-Richardson (she/her) is an award-winning poet of Taiwanese and Cambodian Chinese (or Chinese Cambodian) descent. As the daughter of a survivor of the Cambodian genocide, she’s still trying to figure that second part out. The author of three poetry chapbooks, including snap, pop, performance (Gap Riot Press), her writing has appeared in Room, third coast magazine, and Watch Your Head, among others. She currently lives and works on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg. Find her online at https://ehjchang.com.
(Author photo by Manahil Bandukwala)
This poem was originally published in Vallum issue 18:1 Invisibility.
Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.
23 Monday Aug 2021
Posted in Poem of the Week
A gold sequin dress isn’t any use in a fire. I scribble down every cypher
I gathered about you. There is no kindness in letting you know
when the world unclasps, emptying its prayer palms of us, our preordained
survival. Did you expect me to carry a gun? asks the body
of the lake. Like something broken loose, you’re there, stalking shore
in your thrifted aviator jacket. Triassic schools of sturgeon thrash
the silt, under the shade of absent reeds. Migratory fowls land in arrows
of feather, viscera. The rust that blood turns. Water becomes a blip
at the center. Water is an end. Kitten, you call, what colours survive
behind our cloudscape now? To no one in particular, to the me inside this
blue-ceilinged kitchen. I wish I could recollect you with gentler hands
than nostalgia. How it behaves as the aggressor, coercing renewal
from depleted sediment. It’s golden, I tell the you who left, and aflame
with newborn constellations. What you’d read there isn’t my guess.
Lauren Turner is a disabled poet and essayist. Her chapbook, We’re Not Going to Do Better Next Time, was published by knife | fork | book in March 2018, and her full-length debut, The Only Card in a Deck of Knives, came out with Wolsak & Wynn in August 2020. Her work has appeared in Grain, Arc Magazine, PRISM International, Poetry is Dead, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Maynard, The Puritan, BAD NUDES, canthius, and elsewhere. She won the 2018 Short Grain Contest, was a finalist for carte blanche’s 2017 3Macs Prize, and made the longlist for Room Magazine’s 2019 creative non-fiction contest. She lives in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal on the unceded land of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation.
This poem was originally published in Vallum issue 18:1 Invisibility.
Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.
16 Monday Aug 2021
Posted in Poem of the Week
The girl from high school—not my high school—had long straight hair
and a foxy face and her body, a cylinder, with slightly wider hips,
was perfect for the sheath dresses she wore.
Vee was a Circassian, famous beauties in their day, well-prized as slaves,
her mother a refugee from Turkey, never marry a Muslim, she said.
But that is not her, in the corner of the cafe, perched on the couch,
with the man who—no point describing him—he is white and a man—
they are so useless, men—this is a belief amongst a hundred thousand
misogynerds—men are useless, superficial, external, mere repositories
of ambitious semen, driven to produce and build wealth and
enact feats of strength, and if not that to rape—but the woman who isn’t Vee—
because her name was Vee—the girl in high school—not my school—my
friend’s girl—not my best friend—the girl who worshipped me—brought
signs to my It’s Academic games—told everyone I was the smartest
person she knew—-the girl I imagined as my slave, purchased from—
But it’s not that girl in the corner of the cafe. My girl, Vee—the one I never owned—
she is a foreign correspondent based in Belgrade—but this girl
I do not know—this girl is nothing—just some white man’s possession—
Oh but now I remember, Vee texted the other day and said she’d loved my book:
“I always knew you’d grow up and do something amazing.”
Naomi Kanakia is the author of two young adult novels, out from HarperTeen and Little, Brown. Her poetry has appeared in American Journal of Poetry, Antigonish, and Soundings East. Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Gulf Coast, F&SF, The Indiana Review, Lightspeed, and others. She holds an MFA from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and lives in San Francisco with her wife and one year old daughter.
This poem was originally published in Vallum issue 18:1 Invisibility.
Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.
Vallum: Contemporary Poetry 