Joel Lewis

LATE NOVEMBER, STATEN ISLAND

Foggy St. George sleeps the sleep
of late morning sloth
& there go the men with boyish haircuts.
Now a cop car parks on Slosson Terrace,
idling for those possessed by hidden agendas.

“The sun never enters my dreams,” says
a woman to her daughter clutching
a Top Tomato bag as they board
a Totenville bus. A peddler hawks
mini-Ganeshas in front
of the browning field minor league stadium
in advance of an evening festival.

Big orange Ferryboat Marchi drifts into Slip 2.
Two hours before: a Mesopotamia of advancing ankles.
Now old gents eat their pizzas into relief maps of Crete
before tossing them into the harbour.

The flags atop borough hall flap
to the beat of a new round of breeze.
I’ve been out here a long time
mildly defending the honour
of minor characters & their mild situations
& now moving along in the face of need,
cattycorner from the old lighthouse depot.



Joel Lewis hails from the Newfoundland of the United States — New Jersey. He's perched on the Hudson in Hoboken trying to continue an alternative poetics tradition that ranges from Philip Freneau to Walt Whitman, Newark's Stephen Crane, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Alfred Starr Hamilton, and Joe Ceravolo. Recent books are Surrender When Leaving Coach (Hanging Loose) and North River Rundown (Accent Editions). He edited an anthology of contemporary NJ poets for Rutgers, the selected talks of Ted Berrigan, and the selected poems of Walter Lowenfels.

Souvankham Thammavongsa

AT THE FARM



I was sitting in the car counting the black flies


They had come in through the open window


There were four


One was on the rearview mirror


The other three were perched on my left hand


I heard a gunshot by the barn and thought nothing of it


We were at a farm


I saw a cow come charging forward with half its head gone


A man with an axe came running behind it




He hit it once


Once he hit it


And it fell to the ground


Everything was eaten


Its eye appeared in a soup that night


Everything was accounted for






Souvankham Thammavongsa won the 2004 ReLit prize for her first poetry book, Small Arguments. Her new book will be released in September 2013.

Andrew Faulkner

BIG SIGHS

What’s not to like? Days coast in
and then coast out on a frothy surf,
as if surfing from one foam latté
to the next was the good life.
If coasting’s got us this far, then surely
the truncated garden hose dangling
from a gas tank like a necktie
will get us the rest of the way.

Up here in the rafters—and stop me
if you’ve heard this one—I’ve staged
a small pageant to sort our various passions.
The resemblance to a smokestack is uncanny,
obnoxious, an accordion that hugs

its inner turmoil and wheezes.
What a production, music,
how it works you like a pro.
And by you I mean me,
and by me I mean I’ve tried to be good
to you in my own way, carried
you with me like a flask in your time of need.
You with your airplane heart and me,
a bad mechanic, leaving a wrench
like an extra bone in your landing gear.
You’re so cute by the light of the evening news,
fuselage scattered desperately across a stretch of asphalt
like sun-starved foreigners on a beach.
Oh, the bodies of sweat that drip from us.



Andrew Faulkner co-curates The Emergency Response Unit, a chapbook press. He is the author of the chapbooks Mean Matt and Other Shitty People and Useful Knots and How to Tie Them, which was shortlisted for the 2009 bpNichol Chapbook Award. His first full-length collection, Need Machine, will be published by Coach House Books in April 2013.

Jennifer LoveGrove

WE ARE SMALL AND SO WE THINK SMALL

A puncture in the sun’s eyelid,
one ice pick at a time. A blister
on each of our enemies’ heels.
A new ulcer we may
or may not have requested.

We create small, affordable paradises
that crumble and shift
into mousetraps, mazes,
cameras in the rafters.

All day long, sharpening the right tools,
signing the right forms, waiting cold
in the proper hallways, while
everyone else billows
their impossibly white sails.

For once, I should try something different:
light a candle, wear a dress,
crack open the windows. Stop staring
down the road. Counterfeit
shadows. The bears won’t come.

A fistful of press releases
patch the holes in the sun.
Enough with the suicide notes,
the pre-nups, the warranties.
Bring us the glockenspiels
and peppercorns.

I'll throw the curtain wide,
zip up this ball gown,
blow out this match.

A friend of a friend is having an affair
with the next door neighbour.
He has a pool. She says
she’s bored. She is often ill
and no one knows why.



Jennifer LoveGrove is the author of poetry collections The Dagger Between Her Teeth and I Should Never Have Fired the Sentinel, and is at work on a new manuscript of poetry. Her debut novel, Watch How We Walk, is forthcoming in 2013. She is currently accepting submissions for a new issue of her literary zine dig. Visit her at jenniferlovegrove.com.

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.