***
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

if you want to mend a cloth to
preserve it, you must send a thread
through a tiny hole in a needle
called an eye

if you want to replicate the world
to preserve it, you  must send photons
through a tiny hole in a box
called an aperture

if you want to replicate yourself
to preserve it, you must send sperm
through a tiny hole between your legs
called a vagina

when cloth gets old, world breaks
down, body’s gone to wormbait

all that’s left are  tiny holes
where light shines through

forming star-pricked sky for
creatures threading needles

* * *

From Ride Backwards on Dragon (Pig Squash Press).

* * *
Kim Goldberg’s 2007 collection, Ride Backwards on Dragon: a poet’s journey through Liuhebafa, was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her collection of poems about homelessness, RED ZONE, has been taught at Vancouver Island University and elsewhere. Visit her online at: http://liuhebafagirl.wordpress.com/

Jamilia lives in Santa Clara
With her mother, waits
where touristas take pictures
of the purple bouganvillea,
the church’s yellow bell-tower
for her father

who brings tourists up from Varadero
to visit the little towns,
an old sugar plantation,
the compulsory tiendas.

En route, he drops off matches,
a bar or two of soap when he can get it.
Today, he managed three baby soothers
mothers in Matanzas have been begging for.
Next week, it might be safety pins
or pens he passes through the window
as he threads the palm-thatched villages.

He takes Jamilia
for lunch with the visitors
to a bodiguita
where she can have jugo de naranja
with thee spoons of sugar
and Coca-Cola,
fish as well as rice,
and ensalada.

Today, he will buy some small thing for her
because he so much wishes
she weren’t going to cry when he leaves her
and that this
were not her only decent meal all week.

***
This poem is from Shifting (Ekstasis Editions, 2008), Anne Swannell‘s
third book of poetry.  When she isn’t writing, she paints and makes mosaics
in Victoria, BC.

I am watching the little girl
snipping milkweed leaves
to feed the fat larvae
she has brought indoors
set in the deep prison
of a brown box …
she holds in her hand
a clutch of green
a ragged bouquet of ugly
autumn withered old-veined things
a veritable gluttony
meant for the thickening of the worm
and she also insists upon
scissoring the chrysalis she finds
she has thread and glue
in the house meant for fastening
she will hang them all
like an elderly woman’s chuchka
knickknacks from the orient
bric-a-bracs from the far east
imagine the weak-winged monarch
waking in the warm corrugation
of her urban bedroom
trying the windows
fluttering between sash and curtain hem
like wind-stirred price tags

***
John B. Lee is the author of over sixty published books.  His work has appeared internationally in over 500 publications.  He is the recipient of over 70 prestigious awards for poetry.  He was appointed Poet Laureate of the City of Brantford in perpetuity in 2005 and Poet Laureate of Norfolk County 2010-2014.  The poem, “Ill Beauty” is from his most recent collection, In the Muddy Shoes of Morning, (Hidden Brook Press, 2010).