Peter Dubé

TO SPEAK IN TONGUES AND FASCINATE

Turn up the volume everywhere. In each and all the rooms you frequent let the sound expand of radio, the telephone, of stereos. In corridors, and corners and the cars you ride all day, each day fill all untaken space with sound, and different sounds at that: the chatter of pundits molding the world’s work, the chords and phrases of bright melodies, the hawking, squawking keen of salesmen in the agitated marketplace with names and virtues of a thousand products on their eager lips, the static laden with the possibilities of noise, the flickering fading of the signals as they course between the city’s towers and yet more. Fill every place you move through with the most unyielding of their incarnations. Stand amid them all and trace the sorrows of a failed, a fading adolescent dream, the insurrectionary ardors of a band on the globe’s more distant side, its other face, that far away demanding unknown profile. Remember dreams of revolution in a city too removed to be accounted for by you: the news, the news of things unseen. Go on with rigorous listening; absorb them all; fill every vein with it – the flowering glory of sound – and wait enfolded. Sit stirred with noise and fantasy for days until you quiver, all but covered by the pulse and until every word in the cacophony feels clear, is clear, is limpid, lucid, perfect and perfectly meaningless, is emptied utterly. And then get up and go. Go out into a ready and anticipating city filled with novel speeches you could repeat in sleep without the loss of a sole syllable, alone, such words as you’re enamoured of. Release them at the tip of tongue and hold the eagerness that comes to you, to heart. And watch. Be heard – anew.


Peter Dubé is the author of four works of fiction: Hovering World (DC Books 2002), At the Bottom of the Sky (DC Books, 2007), Subtle Bodies (Lethe Press 2010 — a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award), and, most recently, The City’s Gates (Cormorant Books, 2012). He is also the editor of the anthologies Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism (Rebel Satori, 2008), Best Gay Stories 2011, and Best Gay Stories 2012 (both from Lethe Press). Conjure, a collection of prose poems, is due out from Rebel Satori Press in 2013. Peter lives and works in Montreal. Visit www.peterdube.com.

Elyse Friedman

MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT POEM


My heart, I feel, is counting down.

Trees surge from the floor of the city. Crazy-veined. Claws.

The gas station glows. I can hear it glow.



Elyse Friedman is the author of the novels Waking Beauty and Then Again, the short-story collection Long Story Short, the poetry collection Know Your Monkey, and a heap of screenplays. She lives in Toronto.

Nick Power

BOOTLEG (A CENTO)

except for myself and an old man in the bulk food aisle
and maybe my ex-wife coming across a field
and the other woman from my dream
I’m homeless in my own home awakening on a borrowed raft
a savage pianist playing in my head

outside a cicada rends the air like a manic machine
I fear what I hear
until I peak through the keyhole
a grand opening that throws my idea of far and near out the window
it’s like that old TV game show where the announcer says ‘what the studio audience doesn’t know is…’
I don’t know, you see
I’m almost as innocent as a horse

Do I really have to go out there?

real spring accumulating
surfaces already having shapes
whales moving in pods, vast arias of love
about to be arrested for excessive public prayer

and for once I do not regret the passage of time



Nick Power has published in Descant, bywords.ca, leafpress.ca and ottawater.com. His recent chapbook, No Poems, from Battered Press is part of a series of five-line poems based on Japanese tanka. You can find more of his poetry at gesturepress.wordpress.com. Nick works as a psychotherapist in Toronto.

Sarah Burgoyne

ON FALLING IN LOVE

I have the problem of falling in love
with everyone. Even the measliest, smallest
flies have won my affectionate approval;
the artist down the street, the myriad pigeons,
the neighbour’s cat. At least the birds
have learned to skirt around the issue.
Preening, they ask, “How many times can a person
pledge her love to one being or another?”
The flies rub their hands together muttering,
“There is much work to be done.”



Sarah Burgoyne grew up in the West Coast but is currently residing in Montreal doing her MA in English and Poetry at Concordia University. She has been published in LAKE magazine and put out a small chapbook through Oak Press. She has been a featured poet in Rolla BC's Sweetwater 905 festival and her favourite animals are moths.