FAN WU from Songs Heard on The River Styx Charon Before Breakfast Charon moves along his sloop, fern-heavy with morning sleep.He rubs his eyes then his wrists together.Standing sexless, two words — pistil, stamen — flash across his mind, illustrated like in the Grade 9 Biology textbook he once read for proof of nature’s perfect design, lovewise.An anchor tethers him to the limitless sea.Anther and pollen.Something Lacan once said occurs to him:“Love is giving something
MICHAEL E. CASTEELS 4 Poems The Cattle Business I was rousting some steers that had taken up residence in the house. I gathered a coil of rope and slung it over the pommel of my saddle. Some of these old mossyhorns had grown up here and had no wish to leave. A brindle steer lurched through the breezeway, scraping the walls with his horns. A twisty creek trickled down the front steps and pooled among
JOHN NYMAN For My African Violet Between oscillation and explosion,an iris undone, your graceful fall a flick so swift unhingedand floating: sinkable, the thrust of piling upand the flutter of a tip of a feeler frenzied wanting.Let’s sally down my list: the measurable handshakes,a close furrow (grin to a parasite), chores,a strong caress sent to a friend like you, so in a bright timeI’ll blow further on. • • • Always look at me like
BEN LADOUCEUR 461 Margueretta Street There’s the house there’s the way into the house.Hot head blood a difficult decision being responded to.We are hurting men we house and cause great woe.The moss growing by one millimetre every warm year.Harder to tell when you’re away plus I care less too.Inert things proceed no regard for human assent.God will not fail to take such a martyrdom into account.You create a fluid place it inside me leave it
CHAD CAMPBELL At the Surabaya Zoo The last eyes retreat. A shiftworkof waiting for food until morning starts, when she’s led from the brickhutch to the pens. Nearby, a bear stares brokenly at some apples.She stretches out again. Day opens. White tigers are especially rare. Lookhow white she is, how fine her tail, how black the stripes that leapbrail for violent majestic force — the titillation of a hungry shadowloping for you through a field
DANIEL SCOTT TYSDAL Inside Job – Composed on the occasion of the release of the 9/11 conspiracy theory documentary Tight Resistance The doc shocks; its evidenceis as disturbing as its claim: 9/11was not an inside job. Bush could nothave known X. The CIA could nothave orchestrated Y. The “terrorists” were notactors working from a script by Z (a rumouredOscar winner) and doctored by otherHollywood A-listers. Tight Resistance mounts a new founding alphabetto articulate the tragedy,
CARA EVANS Fractal i.nothing disappearsevery action fracturesinto a million splinters of the sameaction happening over andover there is no erasureonly variation ii.the word or is nestledin word and eachword is a thresholdthe breath or the storythe sound or the sign the word more is truncatedand trapped withinmemory memorycannot exceed or replicatetwists vainly towarddoubling redoubling redoing all wholes are completed by lack Fractalappeared in CAROUSEL 35 (2015) — buy it here
EDUARDO C. CORRAL + JIM JOHNSTONE Alternating Landscapes (Sonoran Desert / High Park) I roll into a high shoulder stand, allknees and elbows —saguaro. • Forget the beautifulmoments: the theatre drenched with rain a fox swinging its cutlass between the sunand sun- glassed eyes • Dust devil, tattered sail. Stray tenderness stay. • My gaze is directedby counterweights that mount like a bruise: birch, hickory,basewood. • To escape the rain I leap into a book. Terra-cotta warriors, gunpowder, a buck: its antlers the Chinese character for deer. •
ROBIN RICHARDSON We’re Just Beasts with Big Brains Tipsy on the stoop beside a stone dog, faithful as the hurricane that claimed his face. It’s okay. The sidewalk’s arching orangetowards a chanting patch of shrubbery; it chants your name. Or does it state the ways of gods, or god, or something worse?I have misread myself for years: open as an infant crow below the worm. At my feet some German Shepherd, older than his owner, begsto
MATT RADER Lunar New Year’s Day, Year of the Snake – for Eduardo C. Corral The cross steepling St. George’s is so empty.Meanwhile, vultures cycloneTheir shadows motherfucking slowly.Meanwhile, five bisonSkulls on the barn wall sport oneOr two small black annuitiesTerminating where their brainsWould be.Meanwhile, fingerprints, Charybdis, drains. Again,All good fortune is wealth,All ill fortune the ouroboros of luck feedingItself itself.St. George’s is so lonely eveningsAfter the Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Lunar New Year’s Day, Year of
KIM FU Lifecycle of the Mole-Woman: Infancy as a Human I’ve seen this waist-high grassand weeping tree before, in a drugstore frameand a Bollywood movie, the trunk a pivot pointfor coquettish hide and seek. On the coverof Vanity Fair it had a swing,just two ropes and a plank, a girl levitatingon the tip of her coccyx. Poofy virginalwhite dress, elegant lipstick slash, Cubist chin,she had it all. Someone proposed here,votive candles in a heart, a
MATTHEW WALSH Scenes of a Sunday Dinner on Musquodobit Road They got the meat and pataytas, so all’s right wit the world.Even them cans a vegetables are smilin’. Father’s comin’ upfrom the harbour, he was wit the boys steamin’ them laubsters in the microwave on the backa Reed’s truck. Salt water sweetens em just fine.That rural rum went to his eyes, right red they were,just beamin’, but he’s temptin purgatory, comin’ through her doorlike that,
NYLA MATUK On Distance and Heartbreak Gift of grey from Man Ray,my heart was the shape of Australia.If p, then q. Incalculably wide marginalia.Plain, upside, down under, safe as houses. I didn’t trust the data accounts,the ville fourmillante’s thousand mounts.And that old dissonant airbus in the distance.It smarted like a barrier reef of a wound. On Distance and Heartbreakappeared in CAROUSEL 33 (2014) — buy it here
MICHAEL PRIOR Everything looking different, the night’s time took me so I wandered a twisting a dive, the bends transforming me,embolisms like diamonds hanging in darkness,tissue turning grey, then clear, then fracturedwith streams of white — the wings of a fly,six legs perched upon warm skinlistening to the decompressionof meaning, unfurling iridescentin my hand. Everything looking different, the night’s time took meappeared in CAROUSEL 32 (2014) — buy it here
NATALIE MORRILL Mrs. Fannie Winthrop, upon discovering that her husband is an octopus But she decides she mustn’t let him thinkit puts her off. She won’t throw the coversoff the thing, won’t draw undue attention, she,to his way of slithering gellish out their front doorMonday to Friday, radio twittering, him wavinghis hat — “Nice day, Fannie”: his gripslicked rope, the hat a Knox. She bought it for him, she remembers: his birthday, three years ago.Reservations
CASSIDY MCFADZEAN The Living Skies Struck Us Dead Most of this is coffee and metaphors,and mornings waking up in the dark.When lightning hit the gable,it shook our bed, made the radioshort out, left our fingers tingling,and when I asked you to touch my skinI almost thought I’d see sparks,almost thought we’d both be singed. But others felt it too, the dark cloudabove our houses. We were not alonein thinking light had left its tracesof ozone
Catriona Wright My Roommate is in love and can’t disguise it.Cara loitering on his lips,a tickle at the back of his throatbegging to be coughed out. When I pour milk into cerealI learn that Cara is lactose intolerant.When the radio begins to blare Wagner,he tells me Cara studied Germanat University. The strawberries he eatsare the colour of Cara’s favourite dress.The birds sing in Cara’s soprano rangeand Cara’s skin is soft as the butterhe spreads on
TERRY TROWBRIDGE Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen Puberty is the moment a man becomes beautiful.He wakes up stronger than he was when he fell asleepif he bothered to sleep at all.With a lightning-fast attention to detailsand muscles that never tire or fail to promise victory,when every setback is temporary, every thought is assuredby a galvanized body that conforms to the shape of growing, hardening manhood.Except for Jimmy Olsen. If he had a psychoanalyst, the verdict would
JANET HEPBURN Somei-Yushino Sakura (flowering cherry tree) I sit beneath a canopy of lace — exquisite, delicate veil of tissue paper circles Translucent white like the faces of porcelain dolls, faintest blush on cheek A warming wind plucks petals loose to float — confetti dots tickle spring-bare arms before frosting the lawn in cherry blossom fondant Somei-Yushino Sakura (flowering cherry tree)appeared in CAROUSEL 30 (2013) — buy it here
KATIE JORDON Waitress I see the same labourers every morning on my wayto work, they use yellow gloves that remind me of something other than yellow gloves. I want to say canaries,but there is nothing sweet or wild about them. I wear black and carry plates, glasses — full or blanked —for most of the day. An occasional, strange hand placed on my hip, the small of my back; their coins in my apron sing