Stephen Brockwell

AURORAS, BORIS, ALICE

They remembered the night
auroras felted the summer sky
with green and golden hat
ribbons the way felters do
when they make hats
not for the young
who buy lids after all
(one wonders what interior
landscapes are made visible
when one pops said lids)
but for the forsaken
for whom much saké
has been poured and into whom
many tears have been eye-dropped—
all that rice!




Stephen Brockwell has nothing to say of biographical interest. He is, however, an Ottawa poet whose most recent books are All of Us, Reticent, Here Together (Mansfield Press, 2016) and Complete Surprising Fragments of Improbable Books (Mansfield Press, 2013).

Ally Fleming

HIDE, HORIZON

If you linger at a pool
my mink heart surfaces, chirps.

Waves break against bone,
lick clefts into edifice.

Pet frenzy,
something sweet between its teeth,

wild for your glance, it wants
in fathoms.

Nabbed animal,
my million eyes:

this depth for you, now, only –
this, us –



Ally Fleming is a poet and reviewer who lives in Toronto. Her work has appeared in CAROUSEL, Canadian Medical Association Journal Blogs, This Magazine, and the chapbooks The Worst Season (Anstruther Press, 2017) and What Happened Was: He Flew (serif of nottingham editions, 2011).

Tom Cull

INVASIVE SPECIES

European green crab
Purple loosestrife
Zebra mussel
Sea lamprey
Emerald ash borer
Didymo
Gypsy moth
Sub-Saharan Zeus moss
Asian long-horned beetle
Phragmites
Karaoke
Giant hogweed
Asiatic carpe diem
Common buckthorn
Northern snakehead
Killer shrimp
Rusty crayfish
Brown spruce longhorn beetle
Mountain pine beetle
Sirex woodwasp
Dutch oven
Butternut canker
Common crested brohammer
Japanese knotweed
Garlic mustard
Dog-strangling vine
Alfalfa blotch leafminer
Stuffed crust pizza
Prussian drone operator
Eurasian witch lemming
Holy Roman trebuchet
Oriental weather loach
Asian swamp eel
African clawed frog
Spanish slug
European yellow-tailed scorpion
Red-eared slider
Water hyacinth
Gangis Kanye
Jayden
Eurasian wild boar
Burmese python
Tyrannosaurus rex
Giant African land snail
Three-sceptred monarch
Herb-crusted salmon
Panko-crusted tilapia
Tilapia
Open-concept kitchen
Spotted eastern gulch
Barrel-chested man-child
Three-steepled tree weevil
Right said Fred



Tom Cull grew up in Huron County and now resides in London, Ontario, where he teaches creative writing and serves as the city’s current Poet Laureate. His chapbook, What the Badger Said, was published in 2013. Since 2012, Tom has been the director of Thames River Rally, a grassroots environmental group that he co-founded with his partner Miriam Love, and their son, Emmett. His first full-length poetry collection, Bad Animals, is due out in spring 2018 from Insomniac Press.

Délani Valin

 

TERRARIUM

Inhale ire and exhale worry. Hot-box your bachelor suite, pray

over holy basil chamomile concoctions for the frazzled

rhizomes of your sympathetic nerves. Bury the bones

of the animals you wish you didn’t need to eat.

Medicate: rum, milk thistle, rum, repeat. Pack the wounds

with mud and try to carry on. I come in with a shovel

but I also carry the hum of a million mundane car rides,

I’m asthmatic, with jagged gravel specks embedded in my feet, pollution,

my bleak, dogged atheism. Cleanse me. And I will help you

tie the twined, dried lemon balm and lavender from the ceiling. Sow

a row of carrots in your bed sheets. Sneak in all of the endangered

arbutuses and oaks. Plant little succulents in the countertops, and feed

honey to the moss spreading across the shower walls. Filtered

water for the willows, and coffee grounds for the fig trees. Lay with me

on the dirt-covered linoleum and place your pomegranate seeds

on my tongue. Let’s turn this soil together. Look how good, how grounded.

Délani Valin studies Creative Writing at Vancouver Island University. She won the 2017 Long Poem Prize from The Malahat Review and the Lush Triumphant Literary Award for her suite of poetry, “Modern Myths.” Her writing has appeared in subTerrain, the Canadian anthology Those Who Make Us, Adbusters, Soliloquies Anthology, Portal, and elsewhere.