Friday, May 11, 2018

Jeff Latosik



A HUMANE SPIDER REMOVAL SERVICE

– seen on a subway car ad for Go Daddy


They show up in their saffron robes,
no scheduled date, no number
you could call to offer your complaint.

Grown men and women, quiet,
you guess they wouldn’t fare well anywhere
rallied in this strange sainthood.

No gloves. No plasticky contraption.
The service uses only hands.
You may have heard it’s deadly work

in the south. One person extracts
the creature; another salvages the web
with tiny pincers that a naked eye can barely see.

Is there a windless, winterless place
to set that small world down within?
The abattoir is far from here, you’ll almost say

and all the dairy in the fridge is cage-free.
They’ll nod and closely read the trim
and cupboard corners as if the everyday were scripture.

Then, requiring nothing, they leave.
You watch them hobble on the road
now cupping their hands, the rain, the wind.

You’ve heard that recruitment happens in this moment.
Even now some people have been known
to simply up and leave to follow the service for their days.

It’s true a wife or father’s often left behind
by this sudden apostasy. Meanwhile the spiders go on
spinning their reasons from nothing.



Jeff Latosik’s latest collection of poetry is Dreampad (McClelland & Stewart, 2018). Recent work has appeared in Poetry Magazine and The Walrus and is forthcoming in The West End Phoenix. Jeff is a member of the InkWell Workshops Collective. He lives in Toronto.

Thursday, May 3, 2018

Angie Quick




WILD/WILD/WILD



That the soul requires ritual/ smoothed back breathed unconscious fur/ damped by
whispers/ would weigh a heat/ trapped scent/ that could be described as rustic/
antiquated relief/ of the body/ untamed balding limbs on the linen spread/ let weave and
wave the worth/ each thread/ with honey accusing the wound/ slips light/
It would have been the word wild/wild/wild
had 3000 years not been enough to arrive at an after-life.




Angie Quick (b. 1989, Calgary, Alberta) is a self-taught painter and poet working in London, Ontario. She is known for her large oil paintings, which explore flesh in a historical and contemporaneous manner. Her practice experiments with the nature of language and sensation within both a visual and performative context. Her work can be seen at www.everythingipromisedyouisbeingsold.com.