Vallum Poem of the Week: “Mosquée de Paris” by Shadab Zeest Hashsmi

 

Mosquée de Paris

Ablution water,
opal
on a worshipper’s
slipper left by the doorstep:
She will travel far
and return before its sparkle has dropped.

Gold and ink on parchment
dyed blue
speaks of duty to the window and the wayfarer.

Light caught on pink marble
swirls into an open ear.

Eggs in outstretched hands
of an old woman in Kabul
For the widows of New York
The American author takes them trembling
Insha’Allah

If there were no kindness
conversation would be useless,
Rumi says. His guides:
A goldsmith, a desert wanderer, a scribe,

Stitched to silence,
you and I wander the same places,
wearing zipped shoes.

 

Shadab Zeest Hashmi is the author of poetry collections Kohl and Chalk and Baker of Tarifa. Her latest work, Ghazal Cosmopolitan, is a book of essays and poems exploring the culture and craft of the ghazal form and has been praised by poet Marilyn Hacker as “a marvelous interweaving of poetry, scholarship, literary criticism and memoir.” Winner of the San Diego Book Award for poetry, the Nazim Hikmet Prize and multiple Pushcart nominations, Zeest Hashmi’s poetry has been translated into Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu, and has appeared in anthologies and journals worldwide, most recently in McSweeney’s In the Shape of a Human Body I am Visiting the Earth. She has taught in the MFA program at San Diego State University as a writer-in-residence and her work has been included in the Language Arts curriculum for grades 7-12 (Asian American and Pacific Islander women poets) as well as college courses in Creative Writing and the Humanities.

To view other content published in this issue, 9:1, please visit Vallum’s website.

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!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

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Vallum Poem of the Week: “Ragged” by Ricki Cummings

 

Ragged

 Our sentence is up.

Grant Morrison, The Invisibles

This is a working prototype

of 4D printing—printing in the fourth

dimension. Printing spacetime. Writing

in the past so               Future You

   can hold it in your hand.

We asked for spacetime as filament,

like ABS or PLA extruded to

anywhere, anywhen.

We said: Get on it, science!

We said: Get on it, magick!

See who gets there first.

Instead we have ink.

It’s the accidental happenstance

of the universe            poking through.

God from the machine.

Printing an object, an idea,

where and when you want it

is a little           far off,             but this is a start.

The best evidence we have against

time travel, against printing in            4D,

is that we are still here,

that time and memory and ideas

and people       still exist, that we

haven’t written ourselves

out of the past.

 

Ricki Cummings is writer currently living in Chicago. Their work has been published in Vallum, Calibanonline, Solstice Literary Magazine, and Columbia Poetry Review, and has been shortlisted for Vallum’s Award for Poetry. They have just received their MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago.

To view other content published in this issue, 14:1, please visit Vallum’s website.

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!

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Vallum Poem of the Week: “Leap Day Birthday” by Adam Scheffler

 

Leap Day Birthday

Today, a bright one in February,
sun made it down almost the whole way
into the courtyard. Knucklebones of tiny trees.
Arc of shadow on brick and glass
as something enormous comes near, and
decides to withdraw, peering out of the
vertiginous blue, as it does sometimes.
No, the off-years are better,
the feeling something’s special, different, but the clue only
no worry that it means anything
that it will be solved, going from prologue
to epilogue all at once, a better marker this
absence, this instant of midnight which ingests
a day’s vanishing, this invisible hummingbird,
which alights on my life for an instant and is gone.

 

Adam Scheffler grew up in California, received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his PhD in English from Harvard. His first book of poems – A Dog’s Life – was selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of the 2016 Jacar Press Book Contest. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Yale Review, The American Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, Rattle, Plume, Barrow Street, Antioch Review, Sewanee Review, Verse Daily, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and many other venues. He teaches in the Harvard College Writing Program.

To view other content published in this issue, 13:1, please visit Vallum’s website.

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!

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Vallum Poem of the Week: “No Paradise Here” by Mary Ann Moore

No Paradise Here

In the refuse pile behind the taverna, what is discarded and forgotten,
a snake appears from beneath a flattened cardboard box.
No paradise here, where tomatoes rot, geraniums spring from rusted olive oil tins.
The snake had green eyes like yours I tell my mother later.

I dream of fire and a horned devil; snakes around my feet of stone.

In Herakleion, cats under the small blue chair and at my feet,
I sit at a table eating calamari and squash blossoms surrounded by women
calling ourselves Minoan priestesses, cats on our heads,
snakes spiralling skyward in each of our hands.

I dream of bulrushes in water, priestesses wearing long skirts,
snake-entwined.

I cannot describe the shedding of my conventions,
what is underneath,
what is revealed in the alchemical transformation.
What clings ferociously to my naked skin.

I dream a skin casing hanging from a tree.

 

Mary Ann Moore is a poet and writer from Vancouver Island, B.C. whose work has appeared in literary journals, anthologies,
and several chapbooks edited by Patrick Lane. Her collection of poetry is entitled Fishing for Mermaids (Leaf Press). Mary Ann
has been leading women’s writing circles for over twenty years and offers a mentoring program called Writing Home: A Whole Life
Practice. She writes a blog at apoetsnanaimo.ca.

To view other content published in this issue, 11:1, please visit Vallum’s website.

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!

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Vallum Poem of the Week: “String Quartet” by Jan Zwicky

 

String Quartet

What was it that you heard
half a century ago, transfixed there
at the top of the stairs, the evening
pink above suburban rooftops, the radio
left playing by the homework
on your desk? How did you know,
you who knew nothing
of Europe, or deafness, or love,
that someone finally was telling the truth?

 

Jan Zwicky has published ten collections of poetry, including Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, Forge, and, most recently, The Long Walk. The Experience of Meaning is due to be released in May 2019. Zwicky grew up on the prairies, was educated at the Universities of Calgary and Toronto, and currently lives on the west coast of Canada.

To view other content published in this issue, 13:2, please visit Vallum’s website.

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!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “A Scar” by Edward Dewar

 

A Scar

Gwendolyn MacEwan had it right.
It’s easy to brag about a scar.

Only the owner knows the flinty
edge, the possible savagery

of the knife, the Shakespearean
history. Therefore, go ahead

and brag, make a myth or become
an outlaw, but it’s never ordinary.

Was it an accident or self-defence?
The audience will never know,

only the poet and the assassin.
Was there violence, a discovery

or a calm acceptance? Was
a surgeon involved, sutures

or staples? Was there a shiver
along your spine or a cut

so white-hot that a Spartan
would deem it worthy.

It’s a code of honour,
an ancient runes made flesh,

a catalogue
of recklessness and beauty.

 

Edward Dewar is retired and working on his first manuscript. His poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, The Antigonish Review, The Nashwaak Review and The Dalhousie Review.

To view other content published in this issue, 13:2, please visit Vallum’s website.

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!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Tr-lating Wilson Bueno” by Erín Moure

TR-LATING WILSON BUENO

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 accident, when 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” 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.

 

Erín Mouré is a poet and translator of poetry. Recent works include Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure (Wesleyan University Press, USA, 2017, ed. by Shannon Maguire), a translation of Brazilian Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea from portunhol (Nightboat, NYC, 2017, finalist for a US Best Translated Book Award ), and the memoir Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots (New Star 2017, finalist for the Mavis Gallant Award for Non-Fiction and for the City of Vancouver Book Award, to appear in 2020 in French translation by Colette St-Hilaire from Le Noroît). 2018 saw a 30th anniversary reissue of Furious (Anansi, Governor General’s Award 1988) and a regional and family history of the North and South Peace, Century in the North Peace: The Life and times of Anne and John Callison (Zat-So Productions, Montreal). This April, Erín is launching her translation of Galician poet Lupe Gómez’s Camouflage (Circumference), a co-translation with Roman Ivashkiv of Ukrainian poet Yuri Izdryk’s Smokes (Lost Horse Press), and her own The Elements (Anansi). She is currently working on two new poetryy translations: a new book translated from the Galician of Chus Pato, The Face of the Quartzes, and one from the French of Quebec poet Chantal Neveu, Radiant Life.

To view other poems published Vallum 14:1 “Evolution” please visit Vallum’s website.

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 here to buy your digital edition today!

Vallum Poem of the Week: “I Discover” by Jessica Van de Kemp

 

I Discover

(The light of a billion
bald stars

there in the dark
skull of the universe.

The moon surfaces.)

I bind the wound
with a mountain
of time.

Some say there’s a natural speed
to live and die by, a good orbit
that keeps the sky a sky
and not a cap of nitrogen, oxygen, argon.

I say there’s a god somewhere
in that smooth tunnel, a boy with a bird
and a length of string.

How quickly he installs
new stars on the ceiling.

I discover them all.

 

Jessica Van de Kemp is an award-winning teacher, poet, and PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo. In 2015, her poem “Slant of the Girl” was shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize, judged by Eavan Boland. In 2017, her play Hatching in a Cage was a finalist at the Newmarket National Play Festival. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks Daughters in the Dead Land (Kelsay Books, 2017) and Spirit Light (The Steel Chisel, 2015). You can connect with Jessica on Instagram, Twitter, and via her Website.

To view other content published in this issue, 11:2, please visit Vallum’s website.

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!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Vallum Poem of the Week: Excerpt from Ajar by Crystal Hurdle

 

Excerpt from Ajar

I
It is being built.
It will be beautiful.
We could live there and start again.
It is so fresh and new.

Narnian door to time and place
a transparency that leaps it
into love’s other dimension.
Always in the making is
the hope for truth and beauty
whether slippery clay
febrile wool
panacea of yeast and flour
or wood, glass.

But through the door
threshold over which to carry
a reclaimed virgin, wife
sorry for your pain.
A moon upside down
like Mary Pratt’s substance of light.
This world is incandescent
and it could be ours.

 

Crystal Hurdle teaches English and Creative Writing at Capilano University in North Vancouver, BC. In October 2007, she was Guest Poet at the International Sylvia Plath Symposium at the University of Oxford, reading from After Ted & Sylvia: Poems. Her work, poetry and prose, has been published in many journals, including Canadian Literature, The Literary Review of Canada, Event, Bogg, Vallum, Ars Medica, and The Dalhousie Review. Teacher’s Pets, a teen novel in verse, was published in 2014. Sick Witch (poems) is forthcoming from Ronsdale Press.

To view other content published in this issue, 11:1, please visit Vallum’s website.

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!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

‘Poetry for our Future!’ at Native Montreal

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great canadian giving challenge, moe clark, native montreal, poetry for our future

Until the end of June, our online donations manager, Canada Helps, is running a contest called The Great Canadian Giving Challenge!

This means that if you make a donation towards Poetry for our Future! before the end of the month, our charity will be entered to win a grand prize of $10,000 for each dollar you donate! Every dollar you donate directly through Canada Helps will count as an entry for Vallum into the draw. No amount is too small, and is gratefully appreciated! Every donation will go directly towards funding poetry and literacy outreach in our community, helping us grow the number of workshops we offer, expand outside of Montreal, and build our website as a hub and publishing resource for our workshop participants!

During the Great Canadian Giving Challenge, we’re letting you know about some of the great organizations we host literacy workshops with through our ‘Poetry for our Future!’ outreach program. #GivingChallengeCA

Meet Native Montreal!

“Native Montreal is a service center founded by Indigenous people for Indigenous people and is associated to the Regroupement des centre d’amitié autochtone du Québec and to the National Association of friendship centers. The center, which targets the urban Aboriginal population in the greater Montreal area, offers over a dozen programs and services. Native Montréal achieves its Mission by: promoting and supporting cultural development and recognition of Indigenous culture; providing high quality support and services in health and healthy lifestyle; education and personal development; social economy and economic development. Native Montreal’s vision is for holistically healthy and culturally vibrant Indigenous families, individuals and community fully participating in the urban fabric of Montreal and successfully fulfilling their life goals, all in an active spirit of reconciliation

In April, we began a new partnership with Native Montreal, with Moe Clark facilitating workshops on behalf of performing arts organization, nistamîkwan. These workshops explored themes of home, life in the city as urban indigenous people, language, safety, and included a sharing circle to bring community together. You can hear audio excerpts of some of the work they created on our Soundcloud.

Some feedback from workshop participants:

“(I learned that) everyone can write and speak their voice.”

“(I learned) That people want to reach out like me, and there are safe places with respectful people.”

You still have three more weeks to help VSEAL win $10,000 to support ‘Poetry for our Future!’ workshops! Click the link below to donate – each dollar you donate before the end of June is an entry into the contest. Every dollar counts!

Help Vallum win $10,000 for ‘Poetry for our Future!’