Elena E. Johnson

YOU DREAM THE SKY DARKENS

You dream the sky darkens with birds.

There’s hardly blue – everything’s
movement, flocks and flocks.

You don’t require
binoculars. Even in the shadow
of flight, you recognize

species and species and species.

As our grandfathers would have,
in this kind of dusk,

this kind of eclipse.



Elena E. Johnson’s manuscript placed second for this year’s Alfred G. Bailey Poetry Prize. Her poetry has also been nominated for the CBC Literary Awards. Work has appeared recently in The Fiddlehead, ARC, Dandelion, This Magazine, CV2, and The Literary Review of Canada, as well as in three anthologies. Elena lives in Vancouver.

Lance La Rocque

COCKED

in an age when I don’t know
what to make of it,
I detach myself
from my dick my dick
from myself
unfolding in the evening paper
set on the kitchen counter
looking like a mournful measure
ill-fitted animal trapped in its thin skin—
a package of wrinkled letters
stuffed up a translucent hide.
bulging. messages you can almost read.
like when a dreamer speaks.


Lance La Rocque lives in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and teaches at Acadia University. His poems have appeared in Industrial Sabotage, This Magazine, the chapbook The Gross Metaphysics of Meat (Proper Tales Press), and the anthology Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence (The Mercury Press). His most recent work is Vermin (BookThug).

Jaime Forsythe

INTRODUCTION TO ART HEISTS

When I drew closer to the reclining centaur,
its breath hit me, salty in the cold, clean space
where I decided to commit the most serious

crime of my short life thus far. It seemed fair
to not only touch the plaster of Paris, but
to stroke the fur and trace the embroidery,

which was easy compared to most of the dilemmas
I’d been struggling with lately. It was a matter
of acting natural. The problem was in the tease

of details: a drip of red on icy floors, a hair caught
in the light switch, the bullet hole in the wall they forgot
to spackle. I paused at a projection of clouds, faces

turning into clouds. But the sculpture was on
my side. I spotted my doppelgänger and switched
directions, altered the angle of my elbows, seeing

that a small adjustment is all it takes to get the safe
combination right. It was only your hands
shaking the first time, jarred by the half-animal

hiss of last decade’s walkie-talkies. Security
was baffled enough to lag, and the polished shoulder
fit under my arm like a dream, like the dream I had

last night where parts of the city were missing
and my clothes hung in the trees, and the streetlights
dissolved one by one, all the way home.



Jaime Forsythe lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she tutors youth, serves sushi, and writes about the arts. Her first collection of poetry, Sympathy Loophole, was published by Mansfield Press in spring 2012.

Eileen Myles

BIG VELVETY COPY

big velvety
hills or
mountains
mountains
you could pat
like a horse


Eileen Myles is the author, most recently, of Sorry Tree (Wave Books, 2007), The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (Semiotext(e), 2009), and Inferno (A Poet's Novel) (OR Books, 2010), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. Eileen lives in New York City.