Metaphor

Cold Solace

When my mother died,

one of her honey cakes remained in the freezer.

I couldn’t bear to see it vanish,

so it waited, pardoned,

in its ice cave behind the metal trays

for two more years.

 

On my forty-first birthday

I chipped it out,

a rectangular resurrection,

hefted the dead weight in my palm.

...

Anna Belle Kaufman

Other

1

 

Men prefer an island

With its beginning ended:

Undertones of waves

Trees overbended.

 

Men prefer a road

Circling, shell-like

Convex and fossiled

Forever winding inward.

 

Men prefer a woman

Limpid in sunlight

Held as a shell

On a...

Dorothy Livesay

Nocturne for a Moving Train

The trees I’ve glimpsed from the window

of a night train were

the saddest trees.

 

They seemed about to speak,

then—

             vanished like soldiers.

 

The hostesses handed out starched linens for sleep.

Passengers bent over small icons

of sandwiches.

 

In a tall glass, a spoon...

Valzhyna Mort

Between Strangers

Stranger, who can measure the distance between us?

Distance is the rumor of a never-before-seen sea.

Distance the width of a layer of dust.

Maybe we need only strike a match

for my world to flicker in your sky,

Visible finally, and eye-to-eye.

Breachable, finally, the border between us.

What if we touched? What then?

...

Yi Lei

God the Tea Master

All the weapons we marshal to confront the day

You ask to be left by the door before entering.

The sword in its sheath must lie on the grass,

the quiver and bow hung off a branch.

Daily mind, that dons the armour of thought,

does not shed the weaponry easily; too many are the tasks

that require its particularity – its thrust-and-jab...

Sally Ito
1964

Enigma

Who I am

depends on which side of my skin

you stand on.

 

In here

it’s all neurons firing

synapses telling stories

blood tracing ancestral histories

races blending in veins

truth obscured by memory.

 

Inside is all flux and flow

stillness and storms

contradiction –

...

Andrea Thompson
1967

Eclipse

In every which way, I am living

for potential. I’ve mined cadmium

enough to roulette with Death

and Mars, bloodshot brute,

is swollen in my honour.

My function is action —

to pummel through concrete

and machete hedges,

to shear the irresolute

with only wit and lichen-rich

perfume. Allow yourself...

Jessie Jones

A Hundred and Fifty Pounds

Each adult will be allowed 150 pounds

 

and each child will be allowed 75 pounds of baggage.

 

—B.C. Security Commission, 1942

 

             after Kayla Isomura’s The Suitcase Project

 

In some, the luggage lies open

like a mouth mid-sentence.

In others, closed...

Michael Prior

Winter House

My father threw his language overboard,

a bag of kittens, waterlogged mewling:

small hard bodies.

 

My mother hung on to hers —

Wove the words like lace, an open web

over the window, light caught on the edges.

 

 

My daughter is starting to pick at language,

names at dawn – dog, star, mumma –...

Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang
1978

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride...

Naomi Shihab Nye
b. 1952

Not the Music

Not the music.

It is this other thing

I keep from all of them

that matters, inviolable.

 

I scratch in my journals,

a mouse rummaging through cupboards,

nibbling on a crust of bread, apple skins,

chewing the edges of photographs, the small

details of a life. I hoard and save,

place one thing inside...

Lorna Crozier
b. 1948

Editing the Prairie

Well, it’s too long for one thing

and very repetitive.

Remove half the fields.

Then there are far too many fences

interrupting the narrative flow.

Get some cattlemen to cut down those fences.

There’s not enough incident either,

the story is very flat.

Can’t you write in a mountain

or at least a decent-sized hill...

Don Kerr

Family Reunions

The other people quit their stone fields to come here.

They slip in from nights that even the snow abandons.

They leave ashes in their glasses

          and stains on the table.

The house is littered with bits of their hair and skin.

Bones clatter through the holes in their pockets.

 

All night long their hands scythe the air....

Karen Connelly

Spacetime

We Twitter, Tinder, Tumblr through eternity. Loquacious

text messages flit from fingertips, waves of data spill

through our skulls. Every cm2 of oxygen overflowing

with bank PINS, girls in yoga pants, the frequencies

of whale cries. Digital clouds brim with selfies and rain

videos on how to cook coconut shrimp. Sepia-filtered

...

Yusuf Saadi

Un Docteur Anglophone Traduit Les Inquiétudes De Son Patient Avec Google/An English Speaking Doctor Translates the Concerns of his Patient with Google