Caroline Szpak

CONVEYOR

This is how a lawn runs
from you — it enters
every room at once.
I want to call it
a marionette but it’s cut
short and crowded, lubricated
like anything that involves air
and something heavy.
Tell yourself I never wanted you
with firm light that strikes
your teeth like a tipped glass.
Lost Muppet, I pull
every string, explain it away
— a swimming pool that packs
itself with bodies and asks
if it’s raining — it is, the downpour
can’t come to any other
conclusion. Oh, is that
what it is, does it come
with a name
it can keep
on a conveyor belt,
suffer it neither
here nor there.



Caroline Szpak was born in Istanbul; she’s lived in Poland, Toronto, Victoria, and now calls Toronto home again. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in This Magazine, subTerrain, CV2, The Maple Tree Literary Supplement, and the chapbooks Expense Account and Garland Get Your Gun (both from Horse of Operation).

Mark Laba

THE MAHJONG HEAD-BOB

A sinister warning came,
carried on the wings of
a hesitant budgie.
“Capitalist pig,” it chirped.
“You said it, toots,”
I replied, beating my face like
exfoliated meat on
the typewriter keys.
What was it to be?
A speechless couple ready to punch my ticket?
A photo of Orson Welles in his underpants plucking a chicken?
A cravat with cigar burns, lying on the side of a desert highway?
All I know is that if you weighed my despair
it would be about half a pound of flank steak,
not taking into account its
parasitic twin, Frederick, heir to a hairless mole rat fortune,
all his when he turns eighteen.
Damn him. I wear the galoshes in this body.
There’s murder in the air, as imminent as
the murder of crows darkening my breakfast nook
where I eat Cap’n Crunch and stare down the budgie.
“You should’a been a crow,” I say, between satisfying and crunchy mouthfuls.
“You should’ve been Hans Christian Anderson dying of mushroom poisoning. But instead it’s just you and your carpet sample book that you pleasure yourself with on the shores of Lake Erie and that, buster, is more than anyone needs to see.”
I looked out the window.
The sky was like a giant pinball machine.
I thought, Nobody has any business being here,
especially me,
but then again, if I were a one-armed xylophone player from Baltimore,
well, that would be a whole different story.



Mark Laba is the author of many books and chapbooks of poetry, including Dummy Spit (The Mercury Press, 2002) and Movies in the Insect Temple (Proper Tales Press, 1981). His chapbook The Mack Bolan Poems (Gesture Press, 1986) won the bpNichol Chapbook Award. He is the co-author, with Stuart Ross, of the pork-noir novel The Pig Sleeps (Contra Mundo Books, 1991), and his poems were included in the anthology Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence (The Mercury Press, 2004). You can also read his highly thought-provoking work on www.thehaltiwangerreport.blogspot.ca. Mark lives in Vancouver.

Steve Venright

REFLECTION OF A HOLE

I once saw the reflection
of a hole. So young was I then,
so resolute in my
doleful glimmering.
The grace of this lifetime
is that I have grown more
frivolous with age, have
seen all my closets repainted
a dozen times or more
by elderly boys and girls
who come unbidden
at any hour of the day,
singly or in pairs (at least once
as a trio), without my consent,
in colours I neither chose
nor knew existed.

I once saw
the reflection of a hole —
though it may have been
the shadow of a coffee spoon,
teased to breaking by
a prankster kettle
whose mirrorous convexity
caught my child-gaze
and met it unfazed,
stretching a world I
barely knew all out
of shape—like a
magician whose only
so-called trick is to
punch you in the face.
And yet, I’m pretty sure
that somewhere
there was a hole.


Steve Venright’s books include Straunge Wunder (Tortoiseshell & Black, 1996), Spiral Agitator (Coach House Books, 2000) and Floors of Enduring Beauty (Mansfield Press, 2007). Through his Torpor Vigil Industries record label, he has released such CDs as The Tubular West by Samuel Andreyev and The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor: More Outrageous Recordings of the World’s Most Renowned Sleeptalker. Steve was born in Sarnia, Canada in 1961. At 20, he crossed the plains of Southwestern Ontario, and has resided in Toronto ever since. Visit him at www.venright.com and www.torporvigil.com.

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.