Vallum Poem of the Week: “In Singapore I Was Serbian” by Shazia Hafiz Ramji

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18:1, In Singapore I was Serbian, Poem of the Week, POTW, Shazia Hafiz Ramji

In Singapore I was Serbian 

— for Marcel

 

Clearly my face changes when I leave this country.
In Singapore my hair is matted to my head. A white man
asks if I am Serbian. I am out in the open, unaware
of air-conditioned tunnels below the city, chugging
water at every crosswalk, I see a brown woman like me
and say hi, wanting the familiar. Later with canapes
she says I have the sharp face of an invader. By the time
I get to my hotel, I have bought an ancestry test. I call
my mother who prays and my father who says it’s okay
we’re from somewhere else first and then somewhere else
again and again. On the flight home I am glad
we are all the same. Economy class forks and knives
wrapped in plastic pockets of air. I still wonder how
I could have passed for Serbian. And how I have also
passed for French three times in my life. I remember
my disbelief that day after the rave, when a man
asked to come over—earlier, someone had thought
we were brother and sister. In my bed he tells me
he is French. No, I say. He slips a passport into my palm.
Place of Birth: Toulouse, France. He looks at me the same way
I look at myself in the mirror, waiting for something to happen.

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Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s writing has been shortlisted for the 2020 Bridport Prize for International Creative Writing and nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prizes. It has appeared in Event, Best Canadian Poetry 2019, Maisonneuve, Gutter: the magazine of new Scottish and international writing, and is forthcoming in ARC Poetry Magazine. She is the author of Port of Being, a finalist for the 2019 Vancouver Book Award, BC Book Prizes, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Shazia’s fiction has recently appeared in the short film, Colour Study, available on CBC Gem. She is at work on a novel.

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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 Poem of the Week: “The Untouchables” by Moni Brar

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18:1, Moni Brar, Poem of the Week, POTW, The Untouchables

The Untouchables 

they’re at the outskirts
that smudged edge of our village
life tethered to a shanty
of flies, filth and folksong
lives and huts near collapse
for generations, they bloom
beside the lotus pond

my father doesn’t see them
his eyes no longer register
their shapes, their bodies
he steps around them
sometimes over them
maybe once on them?
he doesn’t notice the lack, the want
for food shelter clothing everything

my mother sees them when she needs
the courtyard swept
the cow dung gathered
the garden tended to
she gives them a glass of water
places it on the ground at her feet
and steps back
tells them to leave it on the shelf outside
so she doesn’t have to touch
something that has touched them

easier to avoid caste contamination
to erase their presence
to unsee what we don’t want to see

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Moni Brar is an uninvited settler on unsurrendered territories of the Treaty 7 region and the Syilx Nation. She is a Punjabi Sikh Canadian writer exploring diasporan guilt, identity, and intergenerational trauma. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in PRISM, Prairie Fire, Hart House Review, Existere, untethered, and various anthologies.

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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 Poem of the Week: “Keeping Quiet While Crossing Borders” by Simon Peter Eggertsen

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10.2, Keeping Quiet While Crossing Borders, Poem of the Week, POTW, Simon Peter Eggertsen

Keeping Quiet While Crossing Borders 

I could give all to Time except—except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There
And what I would not part with I have kept.
……………………………….— Robert Frost, “I Could Give All to Time”

The border I knew best as a child was halfway over the swinging
bridge in Provo Canyon, between Wildwood and the Sundance road,
just opposite Dr. Weight’s place. Beneath it, white-cold waters from
the diminishing glacial edges of Mt. Timpanogos fell, jumbled along
the North Fork, then moved on to mark other boundaries further
downstream. Still do. I hopped across that bridge at least once most
days in summer. Never tried to stop and guess its measure. Never
thought about who put it there for us or what we were supposed to
learn midstream, midair. Rather, I lived each crossing in adventurous
leap toward some kind of nervy limbo, rising, as the unsteady bridge
pushed back, lofted me up, away, whenever another child jumped on
the tread I was walking on—like riding the ruffle in a sheet tossed
to fit a bed. I swear I stood on air then. Imagined I was taken across
borders to parts of the world unknown to me, some nowhere, seeking
things to remember far from that small canyon’s walls. Where was I
then? I was whole there, but felt an unseen line divide me, send my
strong half forward, out and away, curious, to the twisting browncobbled
lanes, the spice sense, the sliding afternoon shadows of
Gizenga Street in Old Stone Town, Zanzibar, or the shredding and
crushing, the angry ripping apart, the ten Chinese words for death
scribbled in the night air, tracer arcs spat from rifles in Tiananmen
Square, or the medieval chalk figures, the peace of green, in the
beech-covered hills at Wandlebury near Cambridge. My other half
was held, timid, nearer home, family, savouring the firecrackers we’d
buy after we’d visited the frog pond, or the mid-day sun softening,
then melting a drop at a time, the five-cent Popsicles we bought from
Mrs. Offret at her rustic country store on Highway 189, or the moist
warmth of our breath as we sat close together, three at a time, in the
caboose of the Little Red Wing Train at Wildwood, rueing the day we
would grow too big to ride there. I have always tried to live this way,
passed over borders resolutely, though looking back over my shoulder,
then forward again, nurturing each time two views from the same
place, trying to keep quiet about the memories I carried with me as I
crossed back to safety even if someone asked where I had been, what
I had brought, even if what I remembered was thought
to be contraband, forbidden.

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Simon Peter Eggertsen was born in Kansas, raised in Utah, schooled in Virginia and England, has degrees in literature, language and law (BYU, Virginia, Cambridge).  He recently retired from a career of teaching and work in international public health and now lives in Montreal.  He came late to poetry.  His verses have been published in Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, Vallum (Canada), Atlanta Review, Ekphrasis, FreeFall (Canada), New Millennium Writings, The Antigonish Review (Canada), Weber: The Contemporary West, Dialogue and elsewhere. 

A set of four of his poems won the Irreantum Prize for Poetry (2012).  Others have either been shortlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize (Ireland, 2013, 2014, 2018), Poem of the Year (ARC, Canada, 2013), the FreeFall Poetry Prize (Canada, 2019) and the Bridport Prize (UK, 2019) or named as finalists for the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry (Nimrod, 2009), the Far Horizon Poetry Prize (Malahat, Canada, 2014), the Open Season Poetry Prize (Malahat, 2017), and the Great Blue Heron Poetry Prize (The Antigonish Review, Canada, 2018). 

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This poem was originally published in Vallum issue 10:2 Reflections.

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 Poetry Month Mini-Contest Winner: “souvenir” by Joseph A. Farina

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Featured Poem, Joseph A Farina, Mini-Contest, Poetry Month

souvenir

Wine bottle

weeps wax,

its warm taste

long decanted

On our sofa,

we flip through photographs

of tuscan hills and venetian lagoons,

skies a soft blue,

eyes alive, bottle full

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Joseph A Farina is a retired lawyer in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada. Several of his poems have been published in  Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine, Ascent, Subterranean Blue and in The Tower Poetry Magazine, Inscribed, The Windsor Review, Boxcar Poetry Revue , and appears in the anthology   Sweet Lemons: Writings with a Sicilian Accent , in the anthology  Witness  from Serengeti Press and Tamaracks: Canadian Poetry for the 21st Century . He has had poems published in the U.S. magazines Mobius, Pyramid Arts, Arabesques, Fiele-Festa, Philedelphia Poets and Memoir, as well as in Silver Birch Press’s “Me, at Seventeen” Series. He has had two books of poetry published — The Cancer Chronicles and The Ghosts of Water Street.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Shelter” by Louise Molloy

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17:1, Louise Molloy, Poem of the Week, POTW, Shelter

Shelter

 

In the cramp of the city-circle tunnel,
………… a commuter backs up against a closed door,
………… one arm crooked, hand splayed against the carriage roof,
…………  hunched within his winter coat,
………… chin tucked, eyes closed.

Across the rooftops from the kitchen window,
………… homebound traffic drones to mealtime clatter,
………… and shunted out of weariness he blinks,
………… a blue heron sits folded, a figurehead
………… on the prow of a nearby roof.

Carried within the stop and start of routines is shelter,
………… awkwardly stilled.

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Louise Molloy lives on the lands of the Boon Wurrung people in Melbourne, Australia, teaching English language and literacy courses for adults and writing for children’s magazines. Her poetry has appeared in Island, Overland, Going Down Swinging, Hecate and online in Cordite. 

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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.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “What Is It” by Rae Marie Taylor

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17:1, Poem of the Week, POTW, Rae Marie Taylor, What Is It

What Is It

 

about the voices of those we love
that makes them
……….. song

Is it our cells
that sound
beyond the child’s complaint
or with the lilt of the toy’s story
that meld
the sister’s tone with the toast and jelly

that carries and unfolds the caress
that rings in the sound of voices of
those we love

What is it
about the sound of voices of those we love
how do they ring and carry
………. song
thoughtful knowing
and response

How do we do without them?

How is it that they bring us home?

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Montreal-based poet and visual artist Rae Marie Taylor shares her life and work in Quebec and the American Southwest. She has authored and produced seven bilingual Spoken Word shows, most recently Songs of Solidarity/Chants d’amité en mouvance with Montreal musicians Pierre Tanguay and Diane Labrosse. In print, her poems have appeared in both English and French journals such as Vallum, La revue POSSIBLES, the on-line reviews Mitra and Françoise Stéreo, Les Écrits #146 and the anthology Femmes rapaillées. Her book of essays, The Land: Our Gift and Wild Hope, was finalist for the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards.

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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.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “When Water Breaks Inside” by loudvoice

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17:1, loudvoice, Poem of the Week, POTW, When Water Breaks Inside

When Water Breaks Inside

 

I thought about pouring my death chills and cold sweats down the
………. sink
my stomach said well, I guess, you think?
Because my worst memoirs defy the laws of physics

They make my body contort, stretch, distort
even against my greatest wishes
knee-deep in the wreckage, covered in soot, the sky is red
and the dust-devils are made of ash

I’ll look my people dead in the eye and into the mirror
like am I really worth this, I honestly have to ask
and I’m looking around this place, like hey, I’ve been here before in a
………. worse way

This is where people overdose
This is where the foundations of made-up minds crumble and decide
………. to take the first drink
This is where a few cousins of mine recently decided to commit
………. suicide

Even in writing this, I know I’ll sleep tonight, and do what I have to do
………. tomorrow

But I want you to wonder about my fellow indigenous men that don’t
………. leave this place
Like how the atrocities of colonialism made us be. And sealed some
………. fates, like that

***

I feel like water is pervading my eyes
Why is it so blurry?
I’m pretty sure it’s not just broken glasses
It might be years of bad habits
And continued practice
I wish I could tell you why I’m like this
My eyes are blurry
Tears are from a wellspring
Like the one my dad showed me to get water from
But now the water is pervading my eyes
It reaches up so hard
And I try my best to drink it all away—

But maybe it’s an oxymoron because it’s the cause
It’s that weak feeling in my chest
The one that makes me run
And feel unloved
I’m not even sure it makes sense
But I give it weight anyway
Like it would hold my hand in the deep dark
Or let me put my head on it to rest

They call it a dark night of the soul
Why am I here?
Why does it make my eyes water?
Why does it taste like tequila?
And why did I ask her to be my rehab?
She doesn’t deserve that

I guess I’ll wander away and hope she forgives me
I would like to wander on the moon
Because it might not be snow
It might be cold but the dark side is home
Until it’s not
Until I’m caught

It might be bright but at least it doesn’t cost a dollar
The disease festers on my heart and soul
And those things are my connection to the infinite
And that means I must promise you that I will visit those places
and bring you back things from there
It might take my life
It might not

I won’t let the dangerous spectre of that question linger any longer
………. than it has to
Because I proved it to myself once, or twice

I take my power of choice back

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loudvoice is a nêhiyawak napew (Cree man) from Ochapowace First Nation. His work has a exploratory emotional bent. He is a stage poet and hip hop artist.

Find him on Spotify. 

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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.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Speaking of Death” by Carolyn Marie Souaid

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"Speaking of Death, 17:1, Carolyn Marie Souaid, Poem of the Week, POTW

 

Speaking of Death

 

If I had my druthers I’d pick December
under a sheepskin throw.
In full view, attending to me,
a constellation of earthly possessions:
eyeglasses, ginger tea,
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.
Logs flaming in the stone hearth.
Hung from a nail, a winter scene
framed in mahogany—
horses trotting through fresh snow
or a Christmas cabin nestled in the woods,
smoke drifting sideways from the chimney.
Riches for the eyes,
and for the ears, as well:
the Great Mass in C-minor, swelling,
rising as it would from a dour cathedral.

Alternately,
I could slip away in summer sheets,
white Egyptian cotton, of preference.
Nibbling on toast
I would lie in bed, pale as a moth,
gaze longingly through the soft sheers
as sunlight fades over an English landscape—
woolly hilltops brushed with lavender,
chittering birds perched like quarter notes
on a thatched roof
before taking flight along the path of the stars.

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Carolyn Marie Souaid is the Montreal-based author of eight poetry collections and the acclaimed novel, Yasmeen Haddad Loves Joanasi Maqaittik. Her videopoem, Blood is Blood (with Endre Farkas), garnered a top prize at the 2012 Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin. Her work has appeared in The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly,  the Literary Review of Canada and elsewhere, and has been featured on CBC-Radio. In April, she will be reading at the Sierra Poetry Festival alongside Hélène Dorion, Alain Cuerrier and Endre Farkas.

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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.

 

Vallum Poem of the Week: “The Beast in the Garden” by Jim Fisher

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13:2, Jim Fisher, Poem of the Week, POTW, The Beast in the Garden

The Beast in the Garden

Pecking and pecking at the chicken-coop wire
The chicken cannot hear the chicken-keeper;
Eggs fall apart; their shells cannot hold;
Loose embryos are spilled into the world,
The bloody yolks are spilled, and everywhere
Sustainable ingredients are spoiled;
Chefs waste in the kitchen, while the birds
Scratch at scraps with passionate intensity.
Surely a food revolution is at hand;
Surely some regional cuisine is at hand.
The Seventh Cuisine! Hardly’s the joke out
When a totem out of Mutual of Omaha
Starts from nowhere—The Seventh Cougar,
Face with lion body and the tread of a feather,
Night-eyed and pitiless, ranging as the moon.
It twitches tipped ears, and before it
Flee the horns of the abundant urban deer.
The wild vanishes—but won’t disappear
When twenty hundred thousand years of terror
Shoot the hot blood when it’s our flesh stalked,
And the predator, its buck passed round at last,
Crouches behind Chez Panisse, and is shot.

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Jim Fisher first circulated “The Beast in the Garden” on handbills, following the shooting of a mountain lion around the corner from Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California in 2010. A former Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford, Fisher is a frequent contributor to the online magazine DIAGRAM, including a divination card in last year’s 20th anniversary tarot deck, 20 of DIAGRAMS.

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This poem was originally published in Vallum issue 13:2 The Wild.

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 Poem of the Week: “Remembering the Mountain Murmuring” by Yuan Changming

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15:1, Poem of the Week, Remembering the Mountain Murmuring, Yuan Changming

Remembering the Mountain Murmuring

 

Twenty minimeters of pink petals.

Twenty minimetres of stretch and reach
……………..Floral foil, twenty minimeters
…………………….Of soil, grass, dew, bush

Sitting in green meditation about

……………………The balance between yin and yang

Myriad of leaves,
……………………Falling down with mists

………..Of last night approaching—twenty minimeters

Of ethereal presence, kissing
…………………..The thick ridges—is the soul

………..The melody of equanimity?
Insects sloughing off

In chameleon-rhythms.
………..You stopped as you heard them

Twenty minimeters of dandelions rolling against
…………………..The vastness of sky and mountain

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Yuan Changming grew up in an isolated village, started to learn the English alphabet at age nineteen and published monographs on translation before leaving China. With a Canadian PhD in English, Yuan currently edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver. Credits include eleven Pushcart nominations, nine chapbooks & awards, as well as publications in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17), & BestNewPoemsOnline, among 1,809 others across 46 countries. 

 

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This poem was originally published in Vallum issue 15:1 Memory and Loss. 

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.