Vallum Poem of the Week: “Couch Potato” by Robert Nazarene

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poem, poetry, poetry reading

 

Couch Potato

“The unexamined life
is not worth living.”
– Plato

“The overexamined life
is not worth living.”
– Nazarene

In the rainy end,

nearness begat distance.
What could be said to a woman
whose scope
measured an inch

wide
and miles deep?             Little.
(Your job, little man,
(homunculus),
is to listen).

Winnicott, Adler,
adder,                            Jung.

Come closer,     closer,
(little nightshade),

(the thought(s)
kept beating inside her, almost
like a heart -)
                                     Run!

*

Robert Nazarene founded MARGIE / The American Journal of Poetry and IntuiT House Poetry Series, where he received a publishers’ National Book Critics Circle award in poetry (2006).  His first volume of poems is CHURCH (2006). A new collection, Bird In The Street, is new in 2016.  His poems have Appeared in AGNI, Columbia, The Iowa Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Ploughshares, Plume, Salmagundi, STAND (UK) and elsewhere. He was educated at The McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.

To learn more about this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Mourning Cloak” by Jennifer Still

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poem, poetry, poetry reading

 

Mourning Cloak

*
dotted in the brinklight
of sky, pendant ragged
laciniae dangled
sound of the auscultator
scoping the
held
under

you have not come equipped
for this

sunlit bat,
for the overexposure between
the tines

flying twig in the night
where you will unlace

this forest from its skeleton
a charred vein where lighting struck
up and back to the nut-tight skull
of jackpine cones curled
deep in memory

*
seed
seed in scales
scales the vibrato
quiver under ivy

the no-weight of a touch
descends, sticks
pinlegged

the brush of my hand under your chin against the hardness where it should be soft, uncleft

not the tube of an ossified breath
not the chant that will carry me home:

bone where there shouldn’t be
bone where there shouldn’t be
bone

*
far before you are able to speak we are
tending your mouth, the silent wound (segmented abdomen
glycerin glisteny)

so private, the losing of hair, the shedding of
dream            chrysalis lidshudder,
eye

starred between-leaf blue
night aglet
a crimson bird
the voice going down without even
a click

*
the first time I saw it
the light went gluey

I knew I had seen it because it wasn’t just yours
it pulled up a chill in me that I wasn’t ready for

I let it go as quickly as
fog unrolled from a lake
or bondfast peeled from fingertips, the unique swirls of our prints

the next time we were in the emergency room and you couldn’t move
from the bed
the glue was thick and still
and you were going down in it
we all were
in through the mouth

*
when the self becomes all one hasn’t said
choice hardening in a tilt of habit

pinning the specimen, you
were the wound we were forced
to understand
you, our own gaping silences (with the heartrate of a marathon runner
you, our own drowned faces

we gathered round you as we have gathered round fires
staying longer than we planned
recognizing less and less
by the cut of the flame
ourselves. making plans making assumptions making
stories to walk home on.
stories to bring us back.

*
the choice twigs
a sky wetragging
the rays, ciliate,
whelm

it takes a raging inflammation
pancreas, thickleaf
to stop the wasting

the plot was arbitrary. any quarter-cut would do.
and the growth, you say, the growth was all in the ash.

*
amoebic
lake light
a petri dish of sky

auscultatory, omentum
with a stethoscope to a leaf
the ear tuned to the approaching

fall                       I listen for fish touching in the water.
when the choice tilts
oz. by oz.
and the weightless grips you

the foetus, shaped like an ear

and the boy, infatuated by the small, by what might fit in his

birdview, now adjusted to the hairlines of the forest, the receding
cilial twitch the wince the headrock the drool the cracked the flaked the fevered the rashed the fanned the volume the channel the dimmer switch the dinner
tray proximity to the bloodflow the hairloss the lung capacity the hydration the bed fluctation the bone density the pain threshold the morph schedule the wrist straps the length loosened the radius of wrist to slip
a word

*

Jennifer Still is a Winnipeg poet interested in multidisciplinary projects and poetic tactility. She recently served as the 2015 University of Winnipeg Carol Shields Writer-in-Residence. Her third collection, Yield Eyelid, is forthcoming in spring 2017 with BookThug Books.

To view other poems published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “18. Octane” by Michael Quilty

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poem, poetry, poetry reading

18. Octane

I am running on glass.
Carafes and flutes are overturned.
The ditch follows every curve,
every camber is a spine going up, and out.

I am running on wood, lumber.
This is where all of my weight
belongs—atop fences, facades,
within torn down barns.

Taberna. Could I give up women and men
for anything that “hums”? The flexing
of their tongues is tireless,
smooth, a sound I cannot evade.

Prisión. How many convicts escape,
bear witness, and find a way?
What spanning of captivity will make a promise
that only a reptile can slither from?
I am running on scales and rawhide,
fur coats? Fine me a more lenient skin,
a predator whose ethic doesn’t vary
or limp.

I am running on fumes. There is nothing
more to pretend, I have gone too far,
any attraction that I see
will only get lost in a search for fuel.

Irun, Spain

 

Michael Quilty‘s work has been published in several North American journals and one anthology (“Best Canadian Poetry 2013”, Tightrope Books). His author selfie, taken long before the smartphone was invented, was recently updated by his niece. He lives near the water tower in Midland, Ontario.

To view other poems published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Cailloux Incisés” by Nicole Brossard (translated by Robert Majzels and Erín Moure)

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poem, poetry, poetry reading

 

Cailloux Incisés

certains mots dit-on ne reviennent jamais
comme avant se poser sur la langue
pour se fondre en nous atune

souvent je parle court
à d’autres endroits c’est tri et replis d’images
petits outils qui font une évasion
vois-tu d’autres blessures
un autre signal d’horizon a new world
vois-tu la page blanche dans le feuillage de juillet
te manque-t-il la nuit un peu de silence
maintenant que la terre n’est plus très tendre et touche
à de vieux orages, te manque-t-il
un verbe d’avalanche une conversation sur écoute

Incised Stones

they say some words never return
as before to rest on the tongue
to melt in us à l’unisson

often I speak short
other times it’s images filed and folded
small tools that forge an escape
do you see other wounds
another signal of horizon un monde nouveau
do you see the blank page in July foliage
at night do you long for a little silence
now that earth is no longer very tender and touches
on old storms, do you miss
a verb in avalanche a conversation tapped

(Translated by Robert Majzels and Erín Moure)

*

Born in Montréal. Poet, novelist and essayist, twice Governor General winner for her poetry, Nicole Brossard has published more than forty books since 1965. Many among those books have been translated into English: Mauve Desert, Lovhers, The Blue Books, Museum of Bone and Water, Notebook of roses and civilization (trans. by Erin Moure and Robert Majzels, Shortlisted for the Griffin international poetry prize 2008), Fences in Breathing (novel) and Selections : the poetry of Nicole Brossard, University of California Press, 2009. She has cofounded and codirected the avant-garde literary magazine La Barre du Jour (1965-1975), has codirected the film Some American Feminists (1976) and coedited the well acclaimed Anthologie de la poésie des femmes au Québec, first published in 1991 then in 2003. She has also won le Grand Prix de Poésie du Festival international de Trois-Rivières in 1989 and in 1999. In 1991, she was attributed le Prix Athanase-David (the highest literary recognition in Québec). She is a member of l’Académie des lettres du Québec. She won the W.O. Mitchell 2003 Prize and the Canadian Council of Arts Molson Prize in 2006. Her work has influenced a whole generation and has been translated widely into English and Spanish and is also available in German, Italian, Japanese, Slovenian, Romanian, Catalan, Portuguese and Norwegian. In 2010, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and in 2013 chevalière de l’Ordre national du Québec. In 2013, she received le Prix international de littérature francophone Benjamin Fondane. Her most recent book translated into English are White Piano and Ardour (to come out fall 2015). Nicole Brossard lives in Montréal.

To view other poems published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Hypatia/Divided” by Lorraine Schein

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poem, poetry, poetry reading

Hypatia/Divided

That torn day—

philosopher and philosopher’s daughter.

Conic.
Breasts and bones
burning in the blood Library.

Mathematic.
Her body, a red wick.

Dismemberment.
Rememberment.

Library of morning light,
noon heat.
Volumes of rainbows.
Scrolls of sun-showers.

Murder on the cross-altar.

Brain unscrolling from head.

Body of knowledge.
Dark matter.

Pulled
from white-socket cities,
her eyes.

Sun, a yellow ellipsis—
gleams in the astrolabia.

This equation
scraped flesh raw
with sharp shells.

Male maenads.

Stripped-white bones of stars.
Her body, a red library,
spattered spine.

Sky-
scraped.

Random signals from
Alexandria’s neutron star.

Flying-apart
persecuted galaxies.

Her rend-parts scattered
in city streets.
Random as stars.

Cities are red-memory
and dream rem-
nants.

The Furies—
light-years away.

Their red
conflagration
will arrive.

Lorraine Schein is a New York writer. Her work has appeared in Gargoyle, New Letters, Hotel Amerika, Nonbinary Review, and Evil Girlfriend Media, and the anthologies Gigantic Worlds, Drawn to Marvel, and Wreckage of Reason.  Her poetry book, The Futurist’s Mistress, is available from mayapplepress.com. She used to work at Marvel Comics and is now working on a graphic novel.

To view other poems published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

 

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Waterwheel” by Elana Wolff

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poem, poetry, poetry reading

 

 

Waterwheel

A wet man loves the sea he’s knelt in,
how the salt enlists his skin
and lingers till he bathes and dresses
rinses his mouth out with water.
……………………..*
It’s 1999 again
and nature-clouds, the Sound, the slough—
submitting liminal signals.
I know not what they say exactly,
only that I am parched.
……………………..*
Rain colliding
leaves against the window: autumn blotto.
The pummelling of trees so freely
leaves me tipsy too.
……………………..*
An image comes to mind—a yard and rails,
an empty bench. A cantilever bridge
and rainy river—the voice I hear announce
its name revives me.
……………………..*
I have a new life, it’s the same life,
the same name, it’s a cognate—
as in firmament:
……………………..heavens
from which the seas were taken.

Elana Wolff‘s poems have appeared in Canada and internationally. She has published four collections of poetry with Guernica Editions, including You Speak to Me in Trees, awarded the F. G. Bressani Prize for Poetry, and Startled Night, nominated for the ReLit Poetry Award. She is also the author of Implicate Me, a collection of short essays on poems by contemporary Toronto-area poets, and co-editor, with Julie Roorda, of Poet to Poet: Poems written to poets and the stories that inspired them. A bilingual edition of Elana’s selected poems, Helleborus & Alchémille (Éditions du Noroît, 2013; translated by Stéphanie Roesler), was awarded the 2014 John Glassco Translation Prize. Elana has taught English for Academic Purposes at York University in Toronto and at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She currently divides her professional time between writing, editing, and designing and facilitating therapeutic community art courses. The collaborative first-ever translation from the Hebrew of Poems and Songs of Love by Georg Mordechai Langer—part of a G.M. Langer/Franz Kafka flipside book, A Hunger Artist and Other Stories (translated by Thor Polson)—is her latest release. Published by Guernica Editions in 2014, it is now in its second printing.

To view other poems published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Notes Towards Nine Pietas” by Moez Surani

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poem, poetry, poetry reading

 

 

Notes Towards Nine Pietas

Two large, smooth, featureless mounds of marble. Graceful and
abstracted shapes. Ideal, cool, conveying intensity, proximity despite
their gap, immutability and a transcendent serenity.

Two standard fluorescent tube lights. Christ is pink. Mary is an
unreal blue.

Sheet metal in a an enclosed space that is smooth and shining and
spotlit with so much wattage that looking at is unbearable and you
have to squint and turn away.

Flaking coal or shale.

The biggest living fruit tree available. Spread across the arms of the
lowest branches, a disconsolate and somewhat deflated rubber fish.

Planks of wood balanced precariously together without any nails.
The stigmata are holes. It can collapse once a day—clattering over
the floor—and is rebuilt each morning.

A fountain. Mary is a wide curl of wave. Christ is a jet of corroborating water.

Two empty and intersecting clues on a huge crossword. Black and white.
Numbers in the corners.

A huge pool with an anguished diving board. Many fish inside the pool.
So many lights and shards of glass on the pool floor and suspended in
the water that the fish swim in torment, danger and ecstasy.

Moez Surani’s poetry has been published internationally, including in Harper’s Magazine, The Awl, The Walrus, Best Canadian Poetry 2013 and Best Canadian Poetry 2014. He is the author of two poetry collections: Reticent Bodies and Floating Life. His third poetry book, عملية Operación Opération Operation 行动 Oперация, will be published in fall, 2016.

To view other poems published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Fan Fiction” by Aaron Kreuter

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poem, poetry, poetry reading

 

 

Fan Fiction

 

I.

Why didn’t Dumbledore do more
as the trains glided into Auschwitz?

Was he honestly too busy in his own affairs
to redirect the train tracks, turn
the showers into the safe rooms of a forest,
the chimneys into towering oak?

II.

A Tense Press Conference

What’s the Ministry of Magic’s
position on nuclear proliferation,
on off-shore drilling, on deforestation?

Does the Minister intend to keep
their commitments agreed to
in the Kyoto protocol?

Does the Wizengamut acknowledge
the existential threat of shale gas
fracking?

III.

Hopefully it’s only a matter of time
before Hermione gives some serious thought
to where the food on her plate comes from.

IV.

Even Voldemort, safe in the knowledge
of his horcruxes, anchors
on his life’s tenuous web, even he

should give heed to the remaining
untouched places on the earth,
those hedges against our ignorance,
horcruxes of a different breed,

that, once gone, no amount of will
could magic back to save us.

Aaron Kreuter is a writer of fiction and poetry currently based in Toronto, where he is pursuing a PhD in English literature at York University. His first poetry collection, Arguments For Lawn Chairs, is forthcoming from Guernica Editions. “Fan Fiction” was included in the Best Canadian Poetry 2014 anthology. Learn more at his website aaronkreuter.com.

To view other poems published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Ladder to the Moon” by X.J. Kennedy

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poem, poetry, poetry reading

 

 

Ladder to the Moon

If I had a ladder that reached to the moon
Up its millions of rungs I would go,
Up higher than ever the clouds can fly
Till the earth was a ball below.

I’d put on my warm wool winter coat
And my long scarlet scarf in case
While I climbed my ladder right up to the moon
It should start to snow in space.

I’d sidestep a couple of shooting stars
I’d stand on the steepest hill
At the top of my ladder to the moon
If only the moon stood still.

X.J. Kennedy (real name Joe) professed at Tufts University until he quit to write textbooks, including An Introduction to Poetry, now in its 13th edition and coauthored with Dana Gioia. His first book of verse was Nude Descending a Staircase (Doubleday, 1961); his latest are In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: new and selected poems (Johns Hopkins U. Press), Peeping Tom’s Cabin: comic verse (BOA), and Fits of Concision: collected poems of six or fewer lines (Grolier Poetry Book Shop). A first novel for adults, A Hoarse Half-human Cheer: an entertainment (Curtis Brown Unlimited), came out this year. He has also written twenty children’s books, most recently City Kids (Vancouver: Tradewind Books). A former poetry editor of the Paris Review, Kennedy has received the Poets’ Prize, the 2015 Jackson Poetry Prize, and the Robert Frost gold medal of the Poetry Society of America. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, with Dorothy M. Kennedy, coauthor of several books and five children.

To view other poems published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Ballad of the Gambler’s Shadow” by Sebastien Wen

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poem, poetry, poetry reading

 

Sebastien Wen – Ballad of the Gambler’s Shadow

 

Ballad of the Gambler’s Shadow

New York, 1971

In my version of a beautiful lie, my kind of reality
we lock ourselves up in some dim-lit nowhere hut
strapped to the Yukon and just make love like it’s
hard labour, ’til out bodies are honey and raw

and in the evenings we play each other’s guts out
like mind-knives doing a death-waltz in this thickness
of the black. No limit, PLO, Open Face Chinese,
Fantasy Land, Chess, Backgammon, Rummy,
we let language drip into game theory
and then stick our tongues deep in our gifts

Sometimes in the mornings you blare hot blues
on the steel harp while the sun smokes and rises hard
over the teeth of the freezing mountains
your notes twist and twitch in the wind and I watch
your neck like I’d watch the player on my left
checking out the hand the dealer gave him
on the short-stack

That’s what my beautiful lie looks like

Only problem is
I don’t you know who are
I doubt you’d even wanna move to the Yukon
you’d probably be all bitch n’ moan
about the mosquitoes and the grey food

You ask me
“Why would you ever want to leave New York anyway?”

and I admit to you that I’m just too soft for the city.
cardshark who can’t swim. I beg myself to find
the land and slip my shade. Why’d I even tell you?
Why’d I try? Why’d I even ask
if you’d come with me?

 

Sebastien Wen is a nineteen year old poet and spoken word artist based out of Vancouver. He is UBC’s 2013 slam champion. He was a member of the 2013 Calgary slam team. He has featured as a performer in numerous Canadian festivals. He studies Honours English Literature at UBC.

 

To view other poems published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website here:

http://www.vallummag.com/archives_11_1.html