The poems : The poets

Dennis Cooley, rob mclennan, Linda Crosfield, Heather Cadsby, Fern G.Z. Carr, Alice Major, Mary Angela Nangini, Carol Little, Carol Rose, Stevens Taeho Han, Susan McMaster, Carmelo Militano, Rebecca Leah Păpucaru, Gillian Harding-Russell, Kelly-Anne Riess, Joe Blades, Bruce Rice, Bernadette Wagner, Penn Kemp, Rebecca Anne Banks, Peggy Fletcher, John Oughton, Jennifer Boire, Heidi Greco, Susan McCaslin, Claudia Coutu Radmore, Rosalee van Stelten, Fiona Lam, Marvyne Jenoff, Karen P. Ouellette, Rhea Tregebov, Leanne Boschman, John Brook, Peter McEwen, Melanie Marttila, Cornelia Hoogland, Madhur Anand, Anne Szumigalski, Flavia Cosma, Alison Clarke, Dina E. Cox, Tracy Hamon, Debbie Okun Hill, Ellen S. Jaffe, Colin Morton, Honey Novik, Terry Anne Carter, Janet Vickers, Audrey Ogilvie, Lori Cayer, D.C. Reid, Kath McLean, Sarah Klassen, Christine Smart, Ann Elizabeth Carson, Maurice Mierau, Patricia Anne McGoldrick, Susan Musgrave, Roger Moore, Alisa Gordaneer, Katerina Fretwell, Vivian Demuth, Carol A. Stephen, David Fraser, Lorraine Gane, Elizabeth Woods, Ron Charach, Kate Marshall Flaherty, April Bulmer, Leanne McIntosh, Pearl Pirie, Marilyn Boyle, M.E. Csamer, Bren Simmers, John B. Lee, Kim Goldberg, Steven Ross Smith, Dorothy Mohoney, Anne Swannell, Ariel Gordon, Richard McCullough, Lynn Tait, Sue Chenette.

Sue Chenette | Toronto, ON | LCP member since 2009

Making Bread Pudding in Paris

***
Sue Chenette grew up in northern Wisconsin and has made her home in Toronto since 1972. She is the author of Slender Human Weight, Guernica Editions, 2009. Her second full-length collection, The Bones of His Being, will be published by Guernica early in 2012.

Lynn Tait | Sarnia, ON | LCP member for over 10 years

Mother and Son

I remember when he held my hand,
insisted on it,
though no longer a baby
or even a toddler.
Regret the times
I insisted he walk
unfettered by my fingers,
now that I miss those cheeks
that once fit into the palm of my small hand,
fail to see why I wished his high-pitched voice,
would break into deepening tones.

Was I preparing myself
for the cut ties,
the growth that leans away. . .

Am I nothing more than a loose string
unraveling at the slightest tug,
a wayward strand of hair
pushed back in annoyance
or without much thought?

I’m tempted to shake him back into my life
like a furious snow scene trapped in glass.
At the same time, want to close my eyes,
plug my ears, wish for ignorance,

ground him when flashes of myself –
ripples in the gene pool – wash over me
in a cold shudder like an October lake;
afraid history will repeat itself . . .

afraid he will swim in a sea of delusions
reaching shore too late,
waterlogged with regret
and blaming me
for the lateness of the hour.

***
Lynn Tait is an award winning poet/photographer from Sarnia, Ontario, and has been a LCP Member for over 10 years. Her work has appeared in The Windsor Review, Quills, Contemporary Verse 2 and in over 60 anthologies.

Richard McCullough | Vancouver, BC | LCP member since 2010

***
Joining LCP in 2010, Richard McCullough is a featured international writer in www.ditchpoetry.ca and has published poetry in academic journals, literary magazines, and webzines in England, Canada and the U.S. The poet is currently pursuing an MSc in applied linguistics at Oxford University, focusing on the role of literature in language teaching. He lives with his family in Vancouver.

Ariel Gordon | Winnipeg, MB | LCP member since 2009

A year in: fireweed

First thing. You are sturdy in your sundress
your bare shoulders newel posts
shiny from every cupped hand, every corner
turned. A month into this heat wave
we all want rain. Oh & ripe tomatoes
& air conditioning & maybe a weekend
at the lake. But after two weeks away all I want
is an hour among the weeds.

It takes me two hours to find gardening gloves
& the courage. Oily bluebottle, you thrum
dissatisfaction from behind the screen door
as I set up your play pen
in a spot suitable for bare shoulders
your spot-lit marble imitations
of bare shoulders.

Next, a yellow milk crate
full of books & toys humped out
into the day; I hip-check the door shut
& your rage two-step your mewling
squawk is as foreign as familiar as falcons
hunting from skyscraper roosts
shedding pigeon scraps as commuters
shed napkins & tiny packets of salt.
Once we know they’re there, that is. Once
we’re wondered at the intersection of falcons
& cities & cell phone towers.
Eggs & turkey bacon & toast. Rye.

Forty minutes later. You are ephemeral
in your sundress as you happily crow
& jaw ripe & almost overripe
strawberries into pulp & pits
& runnels of red red drool
as I stuff weeds taller than you
into a garbage bag, each of them fireweed
after the blaze of two weeks
away & the slow burn of two summers
with you.

***

Poem from Hump (Palimpsest Press, 2010).

***
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer whose debut, Hump, won the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Le Prix Lansdowne du poesie at the 2011 Manitoba Book Awards. How to Prepare for Flooding, a collaboration with designer Julia Michaud, is forthcoming from JackPine Press in 2011. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

Dorothy Mahoney | Windsor, ON | LCP member since 2006

mending the pocket

what is inside doesn’t show
so I use brown thread on the grey lining
not knowing where the grey is
wanting to hold it all in

so I use brown thread on the grey lining
thinking about small change
wanting to hold it all in
so much of what falls is lost

thinking about small change
my son’s coat that is too large for me
so much of what falls is lost
his hands no longer fitting into mine

my son’s coat is too large for me
it sleeps heavy in my lap
his hands no longer fitting into mine
I try to mend this tear

it sleeps heavy in my lap
what is inside doesn’t show
I try to mend this tear
not  knowing where the grey is

***
Dorothy Mahoney is an Instructional Coach at Essex District High School and has two books of poetry published by Black Moss Press, as well as, two collections with her poetry group by Cranberry Tree Press.

Steven Ross Smith | Banff, AB | LCP member for years

The Man with a Nosebleed

Tilts his head back to keep life from pouring out. The body keeps its secrets mostly

under wraps but occasionally reveals a rupture, a cough, a stumble, in spontaneity

a coupling. Red, the most striking. But black’s the common wardrobe colour, worn

for sombre ceremony, casual attendance, or flung off in a heated moment, and also

on steeds that lug and bump, ubiquitous on the circling carousel. With a big whisk

she stirs the frappaccino to a froth while Zimmerman honks his nasal tone. The

vulnerability of any joint – wrist or ankle, all bones delicate – invites a kiss. The

body is an artefact, a museum and somewhere right now it’s a plastinated all-too-

real-inside-out-revealed husk on display in a gallery in a major city where panes of

glass soar high and wide. An icy towel jammed against his nose, in an auto, he reels,

races against time. “There’s a career here,” they often say when they don’t mean it,

but sometimes they do. How to know? These are the fluids you’ll need, especially

with the dust. Nothing excites more than a glimpse down a shirt, a nose for trouble.

The attendant is petite, alluringly fragile, dressed in white, but not a nurse. Numbers

jump in our heads – for instance, nine or eleven, or seventy-seven, a lucky one on a

yellow race car, or on Nicole Brossard’s white page etched with smart articulating

letters. All that ground to cover, and what’s ground in on the oval track, on the

fingered sheet, on a nostril’s breathing edge. A cold white cloth, a heart a-flutter, a

breeze’s touch, a backward lean, all do make the forehead spin.

It’ll get your attention
Like Dylan at Newport in ‘65
Wailing with Butterfield blues men

***
Steven Ross Smith has been creating and performing poetry and sound poetry for over three decades in solo collaborative and solo contexts. Fluttertongue 3: disarray, won the 2005 Saskatchewan Books Awards’ Book of the Year Award. He has published twelve books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, and has performed and been published in England, Holland, Russia, Portugal, USA, and Canada. He is currently the Director of Literary Arts at The Banff Centre.