Vallum Chapbook Award 2021 Finalist: Pamela Porter | Finding What He Can of his Own Way Home: Elegy of Patrick Lane

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Finalist, poem, Vallum Chapbook Award 2021

What is worn is what has lived

The wild rose was full with winter birds
settled on the risen snow. Chickadee,
nuthatch, junco.

And in another house, your dying
nearly complete. And the air thickening
with snow, but the birds remained.

How the heart closes a door so silently,
nothing disturbs the quiet.

And you stood up and entered a place.
One that had been prepared for you.
And the present fell away to the past.

Winter mornings you’d wake before dawn
and in that darkness, walked to the sea
where, in silence, in unison, the mute swans

took flight, the only sound in that moment
their wings pushing the air down and down
as they rose out of sight.

And after that, you knew anyone
could rise out of sight.

.
.

.

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Pamela Porter’s work has won more than a dozen provincial, national and international awards, including the Governor General’s Award for her young adult novel The Crazy Man, as well as the Pat Lowther, Raymond Souster, and the CBC/Canada Writes shortlists. Among her 14 published books, her most recent is Likely Stories, released in 2019 from Ronsdale Press. Pamela lives near Sidney, BC with her family and a menagerie of rescued horses, dogs, and cats.

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Pamela Porter is one of the finalists for the 2021 Vallum Chapbook Award for her chapbook Finding What He Can of his Own Way Home: Elegy of Patrick Lane.

The poems in Finding What He Can of his Own Way Home: Elegy of Patrick Lane are redolent with swans and wild rose, tree frogs singing into the night, echo both the poems of Patrick Lane and the poet herself, Pamela Porter, who lives with his spirit, as those who loved him do. The poet has “risen out of sight” but those who loved him feel his presence in their lives still. These poems rise also, with passion and compassion, written with love. And what does a loved one become, after death? the flame in the candle the moth at the window, the outline of a body in a chair in the early morning, an elegy, a set of poems that continue to live in the hearts of all readers.

— Blurb by Barbara Pelman

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Whitewash” by George Elliott Clarke

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18:1, George Elliott Clarke, poem, POTW, Whitewash

Whitewash

 

White is waves bright as crinkled sunlight—or sunrise, done up in foam
White is Grevens Paerecider, Ironworks Pear Eau-de-Vie, Lunenburg County
Winery Montbeliard Pear Wine, and Belle-de-Brillet Poire-et-Cognac
White is the missing link* between Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor
White is a spic-and-span E.R. with a scatalogical surgeon wielding a shit-smeared scalpel
White is a Snow White blow job necessitating a White House snow job
White is white diamonds white gold white chocolate white weapons white Negroes*
White is white-knuckled Rasputin as brass-knuckled Vladmir Putin, barbed nipples bared
White is Pericles, Cymbeline, King Lear, The Tempest, and The Winter’s Tale
White is instinctual, improvised, spontaneous, nonchalant, accidental sex
White is Vesper, Domino, Tiffany, Kissy, Solitaire, May Day, Jinx, plus Pussy Galore
White is seagulls dissertatin, preachin, meechin, squealin, sayin diddly squat
White is shooting blanks or drawing blanks

Vallum Featured Poem: “Mr Schlesinger” by Christopher Levenson

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18:1, poem

Mr Schlesinger

 

A Jewish refugee, he probably came
just before the war to our North London suburb,
and stayed in our house for a while till the authorities
took him away to an internment camp,
maybe the Isle of Man,
as an ‘enemy alien’ alongside captured Nazis,
We never heard of him
again. All that remained were his books
stowed away in a cupboard in my brother’s bedroom
‘for the duration’;
a two volume Muret Sanders dictionary, three heavy tomes
of Bismarck’s Gedanken und Erinnerungen,
a Struwelpeter and other evidence of scholarship.
But now, with both my parents dead, untraceable,
no one left to ask. If he had stayed at home in Germany
there would have been meticulous documents, closure.

 

 

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Christopher Levenson taught English and Creative Writing at Carleton University, Ottawa, for almost thirty years, co-founded and was first editor of Arc magazine, before moving to Vancouver in 2007. He has  published twelve books of poetry, most recently,  A tattered coat upon a stick (Quattro,2017) and reviews poetry regularly for the on-line Ormsby Review. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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This poem was originally published in Vallum issue 18:1 Invisibility.

Vallum regrets that we made a copy-editing error and Christopher Levenson’s biography does not appear in the print issue of 18:1. Our sincerest apologies for unwittingly remaining too true to our issue’s theme of “Invisibility,” it was not our intension to make Levenson’s name invisible as well. We are proud to have Levenson’s poem included in our issue, and apologize once again for the error.

 

 

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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.

 

“we lost ahmaud” by Esther Johnson, Honourable Mention Winner of Vallum’s Annual Poetry Award 2020

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Award for Poetry 2020, poem, Vallum Contest, we llost ahmaud

we lost ahmaud

 

we lost ahmaud
i cried to my momma the night we lost ahmaud
it’s unfair unjust uncivil
it’s a modern day genocide
the victims are my people
why can’t we run in peace? 

we lost juice
i cried to my daddy the night we lost juice
when they made us feel lesser than since birth,
how can a black man live a life they filled with pain
instead he’s filled with codeine, addys and percs
why can’t we die in peace?

we lost breonna 
i cried to my sister the night we lost breonna
they raided the wrong home
an accident they said
“we promise we don’t condone
why can’t we live in peace?

we lost x
i cried to my brother the night we lost x
he was gonna be a dad
he spoke words of wisdom to black youth
but was assassinated young over a LV bag
why can’t we drive in peace?

we lost pop 
i cried to my cousin the night we lost pop 
we’re all we got left, but we don’t got trust
black crime they call it
so they can finally blame us
why can’t we sleep in peace? 

we lost george floyd 
i cried to my friend  last night about george floyd
4 cops, one with a knee on his nick
we protest retweet retaliate
somehow we can’t keep this system in check
why can’t we exist in peace?

we lost houdini
tonight is the night we lost houdini 
and i can’t sleep
where’s the peace?

 

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Esther Johnson is a Nigerian-Canadian student studying nursing at Howard University in Washington, DC. Esther graduated from secondary school with various academic and athletic awards and is currently a Howard University Freshman Scholar. Esther has a passion for social justice, a field in which she pulls most of her inspiration when writing poetry. Her goal is to become a nurse anesthetist and contribute to the work done to improve the experiences of black people in healthcare.

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This poem was published in the digital edition of Vallum issue 18:1, Invisibility. Available to purchase through our website.

The Vallum Award for Poetry 2021 is now open for submissions! Check out the entry requirements on our website and submit your work to be one of our next winners!

 

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Dig In” by Christina Shah

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16:2, Christina Shah, Dig In, poem, Poem of the Week

Dig In

learn to become lignin
living, but stiff
the interdependent men
will talk 
over you
at you
about you
object, topic

nascent agent

put your roots down 
and pretend;

the storms are normal

your tissues will become inflamed by
the fine salt spray
of casual abrasions

you will be scarred by lightning indignities

the fight’s a grind
each quiet ring
each arthritic old limb
a lonely, lovely victory

 

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Christina Shah was born in Ottawa, lives in Vancouver, and works in heavy industry. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals– including Arc, Vallum, The Fiddlehead, Grain, EVENT, and PRISM international. She recently completed her first full-length poetry manuscript. On hot days, you’ll find her at a good swimming hole.

 

 

 

 

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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.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Washed in the Blood” by Roberta Senechal de la Roche

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17:2, poem, Poem of the Week, POTW, Roberta Senechal de la Roche

Washed in the Blood

 

I would call you a wing,
but you might disappear into thin air,
when I am not ready, or cannot
say anything down to earth.

…………. Already you are twirling
…………. long dark hair behind your ear
…………. around your right index finger, looking
…………. outdoors at nothing in particular.

 

Thinking too much
where it starts and
where it finishes,
what it is for, or not,

When it is all in the moves,
what shakes, gets down
and dirty, but maybe
washed in the blood.

Can this really be bred in the bone,
what we put up with, taking
what is not ours, hands down
especially when no one is looking,

and what we do, or not, as though
we can’t bear it, the cut we want to make,
even of our own, leaving someone
else to stitch it all back together?

Small things must be at work here
inside, hidden, insensible
slow secret mouths whispering
the end of structure, unbalancing.

You once said you would die for the chance to,
then later said it was not that good;
one should know better
than to ask for more than others.

…………. A red bird flies from a lower branch.
…………. You turn and say the storm has torn
…………. all the ivy from the oak.

 

 

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Roberta Senechal de la Roche is an historian, sociologist, and poet of Micmac and French-Canadian descent, and was born in western Maine. She now lives in the woods outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. Her poems have appeared in the Colorado Review; Glass: A Journal of Poetry; Yemassee, and Cold Mountain Review, among others. She has two prize-winning chapbooks: Blind Flowers (Arcadia Press) and After Eden (Heartland Review Press, 2019).  A third chapbook, Winter Light, and her first book, Going Fast (2019) are published by David Robert Books.

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This poem was originally published in Vallum issue 17:2. To view other content published in this issue, look here.

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: “aubade, an airport & the seas” by Marc Perez

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17:2, Aubuade an Airport & The Seas, Marc Perez, poem, Poem of the Week

aubade, an airport & the seas

I reach for you
as though for the mugicha 

we drank 
at a seashore 
teahouse in Kamakura

while you sit
on a metal bench 

losing your voice
in separate 

spaces with a brown hand
a border agent tugs 

the pen holder with a tarsier 
perched on a palm tree 
from your suitcase

didn’t you know
you’re not allowed

unaware
I bought it for you in Bohol 
on a low tide sandbar 

where we tasted salty sea 
urchins from spiny shells 

cracked in half 

by a sunned boy
who seemed to emerge 
straight from the sea

reminding you of a folktale 
about a young fisherman & a sea turtle 

as fractures mature us 

I wish for waves 
to come 

come

crashing at the airport
to submerge & claim us another 

border 

agent who could have been 
your sister tells us you need to leave 

that you have no right
to be here go back 

to the land of daybreak

across the seas
where we were born

without me

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Marc Perez is the author of the poetry chapbook Borderlands (Anstruther Press, 2020). His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Vallum, CV2, PRISM international, TAYO, and Ricepaper.

 

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This poem was originally published in Vallum issue 17:2. To view other content published in this issue, look here.

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: “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

Tags

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

Tags

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.