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.

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.

Matthew Zapruder

POEM IN YOUR POCKET

Hey Jack put me in your pocket
so I can be by the blue above
all those ungrateful heads
somewhat darkly bereaved.
The sky once thought
it knew me and never will.
Please feel not quite
sorry enough to take me
out in the sun. Leave
me here where I can’t touch
the shoulders of tourists
shopping for apples. You’ll just
have to lean down and listen
to me tell my reliquary
what it almost felt like to be
a breeze. Listen. Then you can
tell everyone you’ve heard
a poem in the world.



Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon, 2010) and Sun Bear (Copper Canyon, 2014), as well as Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017), a book of prose. An associate professor in the MFA at Saint Mary’s College of California, he is also editor at large at Wave Books. He lives in Oakland, California. “Poem in Your Pocket” was written for a librarian who requested a short poem he could carry around on Poem in Your Pocket Day, April 26. On this day, Americans are instructed to “select a poem, carry it with you, and share it with others at schools, bookstores, libraries, parks, workplaces, street corners, and on social media using the hashtag #pocketpoem.”

Amelia Does

CHEAP MEDALLIONS

The milkman of Cheddar started off in business school. Lefty Orange sold
cheap colonial-style bronze medallions out of his coat lining.

One day he was outed by the mayor at a flea circus presentation at the edge
of Cheddar.

Lefty ran home and scurried under the gate, hiding outside in the doghouse,
wearing only a grey wig.

When the ninth night fell, he was back on the streets doing what he was
born to do.

Lefty was in and out of jail for four decades. One too many times and Lefty
learned a valuable lesson.

You can prowl the streets peddling delicious milk in a white uniform and
truck. But you’ll never be accepted by the bovine community. And you’ll
get all the familiar thrills of selling cheap medallions.



Amelia Does is an Ontario writer whose work has appeared in Acta Victoriana, Cineforum Italia, and Incite Journal of Experimental Media. She is the author of two chapbooks (The Yellow Piano and Baby Eat Violin), a biography (Do Not Look Away: The Life of Arthur Lipsett), a forthcoming novel (The Coming of Jarbina), and a children’s book (The Walking Tree and Other Stories).

Allison Chisholm

MY UNRAVELLING

Well, maybe I did
clamour around the subtle sense of luxury.
During the angular movement
I disfigured a Sanskrit scholar.

But maybe I didn’t
abandon the child prodigy
and the metabolic processes
like two drops of sadness
abundant on the teaspoon.

Pee break.

Our mutual decay
and your untying of my apron strings
occurs each Wednesday
or when hanging from the branches.



Allison Chisholm lives and writes in Kingston, Ontario. Her poetry has appeared in The Northern Testicle Review, the Puddles of Sky chap-poem The Dollhouse, The Week Shall Inherit The Verse, and the Proper Tales Press chapbook On the Count of One. She played glockenspiel in the Hawaiian-dream-pop band SCUB. Her photography has been exhibited in the Tiniest Gallery.

Amy Dennis

LIGHTNING

                                        i am
                                        a hushed

                                        daughter,
                                        the smaller. made
                                        in her. raised in her dark
                                        house.

                                        electric light silent, reminds
                                        i can write. overwhelming weather
                                        with swollen

                                        grip, ink
                                        rain, translate
                                        skin as sky,

                                        firefly
                                        firefly
                                        firefly





Amy Dennis received her MFA through the University of British Columbia and continued her studies at Harvard University, where she was a reader for The Harvard Summer Review. In addition to publications in England, Wales, and France, Amy’s poetry has appeared in over twenty Canadian literary journals, and in the chapbook The Complement And Antagonist Of Black (Or, The Definition Of All Visible Wavelengths) (above/ground press, 2013). She recently completed with distinction her PhD on ekphrastic poetry and new confessionalism. Amy lives in Ontario.

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).