At the College

Serpentine, the path unwinds its innocence
from building to building in flickering shade
where my students feed lazy raccoons muffins

and glazed doughnuts, as if to domesticate
the last wild things on this suburban campus,
though nothing can make the few deer unafraid

of engines, words, footfalls, the human rumpus,
or subdue the fox's wily nonchalance
and teach him not to kill anything helpless.

Here, among these fierce and sentimental students,
I stand on the edge of a world not my own,
snatching small goods from the large irrelevance

of what we do, making the old sorrows known
to children bearing their first calamities,
teaching solitudes to the newly alone,

explaining writers' exile to refugees
and notions of intrinsic worth to half-fledged
bankers, already driving smart Mercedes.

Yet they live by their hope, curiously pledged
to some afterness that will reward and bless
them for gifts that nature leaves unacknowledged

or earnest labours I grade at B or less;
they know some need of love that poets speak to,
and few can absent their hearts from every class,

however many dronings they may sleep through;
they will mark a perfect image or a phrase
and hear it years from now, wilder then and new.

Richard Greene

Richard Greene, born in Newfoundland in 1961, is the author of four books of poetry. His collection Boxing the Compass (Signal) received the Governor General's Literary Award in 2010. His most recent volume Dante's House (Signal), published in 2013, was described by George Elliott Clarke as a 'masterpiece' and by the American critic Edward Short as 'revelatory'. His poem 'You Must Remember This' won the 2015 National Magazine Award (Gold). His book Graham Greene: A Life in Letters (2007) was widely praised in the international press, as was his biography of the British poet Edith Sitwell (2011). He is now writing an authorized biography of the novelist Graham Greene. A professor of English, he served from 2012-17 as director of the MA in the Field of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto.

Something for the Tongue

Love
Chocolate
Love
Chocolate
Move mountains
Chocolate, chocolate
Questions love
Lessons love
Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, chocolate
Broken
Chocolate
Raw
Chocolate
Searching reaching melting
Chocolate
Brown
Chocolate
Dark
Chocolate
Chunky funky love
Chocolate

Da-Gwa-Nya
Da-Gwa-Nya
Kiss me kiss me kiss me
Chocolate
Hot
Chocolate
Bought
Chocolate
Bunnies chickens ducks
Chocolate
Cheeks breasts d—ks
Chocolate
Rivers of
Chocolate
Streaming
Chocolate
Everything
Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate
Midnight chocolate
Secret
Chocolate
Chips bits fingertips
Chocolate
Ohgweho-chocolate
Hodenosho-chocolate
Love chocolate
Love chocolate
Love
Chocolate chocolate chocolate
Sun chocolate
Moon chocolate
Tattooed chocolate
Tummy chocolate
Lick chocolate
Suck chocolate
Bring me
Chocolate chocolate chocolate
Gobs of chocolate
Stacks and stacks and stacks of chocolate
Chocolate chocolate chocolate chocolate
Freedom chocolate
White light right
Chocolate
Cherries berries nuts
Chocolate
Sing chocolate
Talk chocolate
Chant chant chant
Chocolate
Cast chocolate
Mask chocolate
Ancient from the past chocolate
Coco chocolate
Caca chocolate
Willy-silly-wonka
Chocolate
Spicy chocolate
Homo chocolate
Skim milk
And thick
Chocolate
Recycled chocolate
Bicycle chocolate
Environmentally friendly
Chocolate

Rock chocolate
Hard chocolate
Great big c---k
Chocolate
Swiss chocolate Spanish chocolate
Cross the border at night chocolate
Exotic chocolate
Rich chocolate
Big sugar Daddy
Chocolate
Mama chocolate
Get down
Chocolate
Pass around
Chocolate chocolate chocolate
Love chocolate
Love chocolate
Eat
Chocolate
Chocolate
Chocolate
Love
Chocolate
Eat
Chocolate
Love
Chocolate
Chocolate
Chocolate

Janet Rogers

Janet Rogers is a Mohawk/Tuscarora writer from the Six Nations territory living on the traditional territories of the Songhees and Esquimalt peoples on Vancouver Island. Totem Poles and Railroads is Janet's fifth poetry collection developed during her term as UNBC's 2015/2016 Writer in Residence and OCAD's NIGIG Visiting Artist Residency in 2016.

Voice, sound and audio textures are an important part of Janet's poetry recordings and she can be heard hosting her radio program Native Waves Radio on CFUV FM and introducing the six-part radio documentary NDNs on the Airwaves, which she also produced.

Whether she is delivering a spirited spoken word presentation or letting the poetry speak for itself in her performance and media art, her impactful messaging is balanced by her soothing vocal tones producing a multi-faceted poetry experience reflective of the broad capacity of this artist.

a readymade dictionary.

Alone. Of heart failure. Of internal bleeding and liver damage. After drowning himself in the sludge of the Seine. After losing grip on the slate of the roof, two weeks after la fête nationale. Of intestinal breakdown and abdominal swelling. Upon severing the ulnar artery after dismal sales and a lack of readership. From cancer. Of a heart attack. Four years after his wife. From bronchial congestion. From a perforated ulcer. At home. After being run over by a laundry van. From heart failure. From lung cancer. From heart failure. In Tel Aviv. After a cerebral hemorrhage. From liver cancer. From post-operative cardiac arrhythmia. After complications from surgery. Of Parkinson’s Disease. From AIDS. After a stroke. After a stroke. From lung cancer. From non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. After a heart attack. From prostate cancer. From breast cancer. After a heart attack. Of old age. Of chronic lymphocytic leukemia. From complications from liver surgery. At home. From liver failure. From pancreatic cancer. From pneumonia. Alone in a garden. After complications from cancer. From heart failure. From prostate cancer. After a week in the hospital. From pneumonia. After a long illness. After a stroke. From cancer. Of natural causes. From pancreatic cancer. Of natural causes, alone.

Derek Beaulieu

Derek Beaulieu is the author of 18 books of poetry, prose and criticism. His most recent volume, a, A Novel will be published July 2017 by Paris’ Jean Boite Editions. He can be found online at www.derekbeaulieu.wordpress.com. Derek Beaulieu was the 2014-2016 Poet Laureate of Calgary.

This poem is selfish –

It cares about me
more than it cares about you

and here we are

But at least
it cares about me —
gives me voice
wants to know me

I don’t trust it, though:

Poems are the worst
whistleblowers —
the worst lovers—

Who knows what it will say
behind my back?

I don’t trust me, either

What if
I am a poem
in my fists?

What if I don’t know
what I want this poem
to do?

What if this poem
is not selfish
after all

but doesn’t know
how to end?

Ending a poem
is not ending a poem’s life

though, I am killing it —
making it about me

while all it wants
is to be
about you

Poets are suicide bombers:
Poets are poems

I accuse this poem
of treason—

yet capital punishment
is no longer
in the headlines

This poem is selfish,
though —

It begins and ends
where it wants

tells its own story
not ours

cares about poetry
more than it cares about
any of us

It holds us hostage
to its dreamless
dreams

knowing that nightmares
are immortal

Bänoo Zan

Bänoo Zan is a poet, translator, teacher, editor and poetry curator, with more than 120 published poems and poetry-related pieces as well as three books. Song of Phoenix: Life and Works of Sylvia Plath, was reprinted in Iran in 2010. Songs of Exile her first poetry collection, was released in 2016 in Canada by Guernica Editions. It was shortlisted for Gerald Lampert Memorial Award by the League of Canadian Poets in 2017. Letters to My Father, her second poetry book, was published in 2017 by Piquant Press in Canada. She is the founder of Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night), Toronto’s most diverse poetry reading and open mic series. It is a brave space that bridges the gap between communities of poets from different ethnicities, nationalities, religions (or lack thereof), ages, genders, sexual orientations, disabilities, poetic styles, voices and visions.

29. Plaza Domingo
29.1

Sunday afternoon ukulele busk,
in utero in the metro underground:
a strung out white woman expat
with a pretty face deep throating
her index finger in a dark corner;
her shirt sleeve dotted with blood
poppies, under a patterned quilt
poncho with torn nylons; where
the foot traffic is light, until there’s
no light.
29.1.2
The oases of station, café de olla
on a charcoal steel grill on the corner
outside the station, where I was, still
the satorialist, so that I see it in shin
splints, sunshafts of dust in shutter
flash, the sun in a steel glint
of yard sprinkler’s, erogenous zones,
shoehorns, mass produced artisan
facemasks & prescription bottle caps.

At an altar encased in plateglass,
where the saint was, will have been,
out-in front where the taxi’s station.
I was, in the shaded stairwell with a toy
sitar, selling shoehorns, dildos,
miscellaneous rubberized kitchen
utensils, doorjambs, 2nd hand beards,
beads of cow bone, or horse bone,
or the bones of a rototilled lake bed.
Welcome to our surveillance clinic
here is the number you are
no longer going to need the ecstasies
of skepticism, try these pills
instead of getting pierced you’ll get
peace I promise. Do you like to watch?
I mean, well meaningly, that is is
a pretty common way to use the word
that. Kin 183

¹ The way to take it for what it is is to take it for something else.
² Ayotzinapa, the 43.

Stephen Brown

Stephen Brown is a Canadian poet living in Mexico City. His recent work investigates the spatial (inter)textualities of psychogeographic urban life on the mind-body of both the city and its occupants. His poems have been translated into Spanish and Romanian, and have recently appeared in Canadian Literature, The Indiana Review, Geist, Vallum, Prism, Exile Literary Quarterly and are forthcoming in Arc Poetry Magazine and Hotel Amerika. He teaches, behind the wall, in the Modern Languages and Cultural Management program at Universidad Anahuac in Mexico City.

Alejandra

La pornai, in her one room installational
Gesamtkunstwerk, doing beads,
the stationed oddities of her 48 kilos of sweaty
anorixic perversity. Follow the blown words of Christ
in the bleached sands of her sandalprints,
for she has etched in the phrase: ‘s í g a m e.’ ¹

In the same blouse of black etamine
she hangs from wall to wall in her front dooryard,
an art-school chalk and charcoal of her
eating edamame in black etamine above her bathroom
wall cistern, also albaca, banana leaf;
Canteloupe Island in kef, with a Crosley turntable.

I follow her thru la fayuca in blinking light,
limp palm and plantain in corner limbo
between hammocks walled in with stacked blocks,
of asphodel, that greeny flower; obese market
women open-legged on wood stools fanning themselves
with leaves in the kaffir lime of tarped shade.

Day for night, a series of sounds in parenthesis,
so that it all sounds like music.
Or from when you begin
to listen to hear
until you no longer
hear what you’re
listening to.

A beaded curtain above a block half wall
separates watermelon Man on her suitcase Crosley
from her bed, where she sits cross-legged
in gestalt, her hair hung over a kitchen cutting board.
The tips snow white in the wet cake,² and caked.

¹ ‘f o l l o w m e’
² Herb Alpert & Tijuana Brass – A Taste of Honey (1965)

Stephen Brown

Stephen Brown is a Canadian poet living in Mexico City. His recent work investigates the spatial (inter)textualities of psychogeographic urban life on the mind-body of both the city and its occupants. His poems have been translated into Spanish and Romanian, and have recently appeared in Canadian Literature, The Indiana Review, Geist, Vallum, Prism, Exile Literary Quarterly and are forthcoming in Arc Poetry Magazine and Hotel Amerika. He teaches, behind the wall, in the Modern Languages and Cultural Management program at Universidad Anahuac in Mexico City.

Detroit Zoo bathroom 1977

“Hey, Nigger, Where’d you get that kid?”
Pale as an anaemic and holding hands with a goddess,
I learned the word racist, in the grip of my grandmother.
Bronzed like a Queen of the Huron, mixed-breed, multi-lingual,
lady of St. Clair lake, she tanned dark as curses.
Me, bleached to blend in Prairie snow, white like a winter hare,
hadn’t yet moulted into my golden summer skin. Photoperiodism
not yet complete. Call it too much Anglo-breeding
with fair-haired men. Call it what you will,
call it nights in my teenage years
asking my brown eyes and black hair: why?
Only one Mattel Barbie coloured like me, unglamorously named Skipper.
Skip her. Where is my blonde hair, my sun-in, my glacial eyes?
I check the box on the government forms: Caucasian. No box
for colonized, for the 1/16^th bred. Just the double helix of my DNA,
my ability to sun-brown, and my own green-eyed children
of the voyageur, river visions still caught in their irises.
We’re born out of a long ago season.
Everyone is sure of place and race. Blood and semen
mixed in dirt and cervix, convex and enchanted by muskrat’s eerie smile,
dark truth furred and matted, stroked by a river paddle.
Let that long tooth bite now in the land of the race riots,
negro, and redskin, the underground railroad,
and the Indian village.
Let the name Pontiac take new form and hit the road,
the righteous mile where judgement and boundary blurs,
especially on matters
on the composition of blood, bone, and relations.

Micheline Maylor

Dr. Micheline Maylor is Poet Laureate of Calgary. Her collection Little Wildheart (2017) was short-listed for the Robert Kroetsch award for experimental poetry is with U of A Press (2017). She teaches at Mount Royal University. She was the Calgary Public Library Author in Residence in the fall of 2016. She serves as poetry editor at Frontenac House Press. She serves as the Past-president and co-founder of Freefall Literary Society and remains a consulting editor.

Declaration of a Halfrican Nation

hazel's so definitive. is the window
half open or half closed? is a black
rose natural? is it indigenous to this
coast? my grammar teacher said a semicolon
is just a gutless colon; yellow. coconuts
get eaten from the inside, the sweetness
and light from the milk and the flesh, not
the husk, so skull-like. one
friend said she's white except
for having this brown skin and sometimes
she forgets it until a mirror shatters
that conclusion casting blackward glances sideways,
askance processions of belonging, possession. mirrors walk
on two legs too sometimes, saying hello to you cause
you are brown
as we pass. what is britannia
to me? one three continents removed
from the scenes my mothers loved,
misty grove, english rose,
what is britannia to me?
ain't no negroes on the tv shows we
produced in playground theatres; now
there's so many on screen a white acquaintance of mine
thought the us population was half
black! one drop rules aside and all
things being equal, I'd say that signifies
an inexorable triumph of mlk's dream. we number
a dozen percent, in fact, south
of the border; in canada, I really couldn't
begin to guess our numbers crunching
through the snow on shoes of woven
koya. black hippies; black punk rockers;
black goths with white masks literally
multiply like flesh-eating bacteria on the west coast. racism
is a disease, the ministry decrees to me in my bus seat
from an ad, and I could add
that this is just the latest stage in race management. canada all
in a rush to recruit more brown whites; entrepreneurs
only, no more slaves or railroad builders,
iron chinks or tempered niggers. the wages
of empire have yet to be spilled. oka. all
I halfta do is spell it and the settled snow shivers. one settler,
one bullet, south africans sang, palestinians sing; the tune
is boomin. is the mention
of bullets too american? the best way
anyone ever referred to me as mixed-race was a jamaican
woman who said, I notice you're touched. to
me sounded like she meant by the hand of god
(or the god of hands), and not the tar brush. made me
feel like a motherless child a long, long way
from my home. feel like history got me
by the throat. sometimes I feel like frantz fanon's ghost
is kickin back with a coke and rum having
a good chuckle at all this, stirring in the tears, his work
done, lounging with the spirits. oh, all
my fellow mixed sisters and brothers let us mount
an offensive for our state. surely something
can be put together from the tracts, manifestoes, autobiographies,
ten point programs, constitutions, and historical
claims. I know more than enough who've expressed
an interest in dying on the wire just for the victory
of being an agreed-upon proper noun

Wayde Compton

Wayde Compton is the author of two books of poetry, 49^th Parallel Psalm (Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize finalist) and Performance Bond. He also edited the anthology Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature. His non-fiction book After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region was shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award, and his first work of fiction, The Outer Harbour, won the City of Vancouver Book Award. Wayde is the director of the Writer's Studio and the Southbank Writer's Program at Simon Fraser University Continuing Studies. He lives in Vancouver.

Shakespeare
If Shakespeare and Marlowe were like Tupac and Biggie.

This is the story
Of a little nigga named Shakespeare
Born in a town
In the middle of nowhere

No one would have thought
That such beautiful language
Could come out of the ghetto
And a yard filled with garbage

But no one knows who
The Gods choose to favour
And so poets come
In all colours and flavours

The gift of these Gods
Can be strange and capricious
But when Shakespeare spoke
Man, his words were delicious!

He knew the whole dictionary
He had beats in his bonnet
His mind was visionary
And he thought in sonnets

His friends hit the mic
But they was just amateurs
Our boy spit his rhymes
In iambic pentameters

Some couldn’t hear
And some got offended
And some covered their ears
When his words descended

They thought the only poems
Were locked up in the libraries
And written by dead men
In towers of ivory

And some thought his rhymes
Must have happened by accident
Because he wore baggy clothes
And he spoke with an accent

But some opened their hearts
And they listened to Shakespeare
And they heard true words
Like they came from the Creator

He went away to the city
With some pens and some paper
The only other thing in his backpack
Was a spare pair of underwear

Man, the city was huge!
And the scene was dope
There was this ill little club
By the name of The Globe

But the gift of the Gods
Can be strange and suspicious
It don’t always end well
When a brother gets ambitious

And a whole crew of criminals
Would try to steal him silent
They was lying in wait
To get their hands on his talent

There was pimps and drug dealers
And leeches and agents
Waiting to pounce
When he came down off the stage

Cuz he shone like a lamp!
And his talent was huge
Some thought it was only good
If it could be used

The big game in town
Was this brother named Marlowe
With a diamond grill
And a big sun afro

Two poets in town?
People thought it impossible
At least one of those poets
Would end up in hospital

And some thought that poets
Should never grow old
And turn into ashes
What was once made of gold

And the gift of the Gods
Can be strange and malicious
They can punish a poet
Who goes against their wishes

Damn it was tough.
It never was easy.
In a world like that
I don’t know how he succeeded

And who would have thought
That such beautiful language
Could come out of a world
So filled up with anger?

The human heart
Was aching and broke
But you felt it expand
When Shakespeare spoke

He knew the whole world
And he spoke true things
And everyone who listened
Was turned into kings

Well, I think he died broke
People stole his vision
One of my boys told me
He saw him in prison

And the poetry Gods
Can be strange and suspicious
But the ones that they love
Always get their forgiveness

I don’t know if y’all remember
He used to be illin
You should have heard him
I think his first name was William

He was born nowhere special,
When he died he was dead
But the rhymes spun like planets
All night in his head.

El Jones

El Jones is a poet, educator, and activist. She was Halifax's fifth Poet Laureate from 2013-2015. El is a two-time national poetry slam champion. She hosts Black Power Hour, a radio show on CKDU 88.1 that centres the creative work of prisoners and is dedicated to prison abolition and advocacy for prisoners in her life and writing. She writes Saturday Morning File for the Halifax Examiner, described as &ldqup;scathingly brilliant” news commentary on local Halifax events. Her book, Live from the Afrikan Resistance! was released by Roseway Publishing in 2014. She teaches Sociology/Criminology, English, Women's Studies and Creative Writing in universities around Halifax.

It’s not the three living rooms
or the mezzanine room
between the first and second floors,
or the shared garden you crossed
to go to your grandparents' house
to have supper with them,
till your grandfather,
pulling his pocket watch out,
observed, ‘c'est l’heure’,
and you went home to bed.

Or how your grandmother
couldn’t stand to be alone
in that big house after he died
and finally moved
to be closer to her children.

It’s not any of those things.
It’s how you sound
when you tell it.
Like a swan,
your head up,
all white
and clean.

Paul Zemokhol

Paul Zemokhol is the author of the chapbooks Apocrypha and No Hope, No Help, No Tea. This poem is in honour of his mother, the late Simone Marie Zemokhol (nee Ghalioungui), b. 1934 in Cairo, Egypt - d. 2016 in Montreal. Her stories, part genealogy and part history, in(form) the book and the author.

I’m not sure I should be writing this,
maybe I should have called instead. Poetry
is an oral art after all. What I want to say is
I’ve been obsessing, wondering if
you really care about us. My poetics
have been searching for a meaningful
relationship for years and I’m still
not convinced about your level of interest.

Sure, on occasion, you gaze deeply
into those inspired opening phrases
I anguish over and, from time to time you hang
on my every word because I wowed you with a long leggy line
or a low-cut stanza revealed
my    caesura.

Sometimes my voice feels too one-sided
As if I’m in a dramatic monologue without
much feedback. Despite adjusting my verse,
taking it up to a haiku, letting it down
to epic style, and asking myself
should my theme be blunt or layered,
it’s always the quick read with you.

Do I spend too much time setting
the mood or creating suggestive allusions?
Because I’ve been careful not
to overdo it—there’s nothing worse
than becoming a pathetic fallacy.

Not to beat a dead horse but
there’s also the matter of attention
to basics—lacy cuts that fashion transparent
meaning, internal rhymes so artful
they need a slow read to fully peak.
Finally, there’s the fit form I keep
inside all that free verse.

How about staying
between the covers a little longer?

Giovanna Riccio

Giovanna Riccio is a Toronto poet whose work has appeared in newspapers, journals, magazines, and a number of anthologies. She is the author of the chapbook, Vittorio (Lyricalmyrical Press, 2010) and Strong Bread, (Quattro Books, 2011). Her poems have been translated into Romanian, Slovenian and Italian. She is a former co-organizer of The Not So Nice Italian Girls reading Series and is presently a member of the team that hosts the monthly Sheb-e Sh’er poetry night.

This declaration of possibilities,
it is the way of metaphors,
weighing reforestation like antlers.

Such verbs,
this bush camp's sweat,
hewing out of solid wood

Or being up at five in the morning
and preparing to take
the woodpecker by surprise.

All sound without fury—
I am hardly at rest
by Trapper Lake

Believe it or not--
as I am pigeon-holed
a prairie poet by Revenue Canada.

I am prouder yet of my heritage,
and those who came and listened,
the Lakehead University scholars—

Who have eased the anger
out of me since the beginning,
now find me mellow

Like Suknaski's disdain
with harmonica strumming,
he being less Ukranian.

I succumb for a while—
this style being all
I am left with

Eager as I am to read on;
my dialect's best--
even as I pretend.

Cyril Dabydeen

His recent books include God's Spider/poetry (PeepalTree Press, UK), My Multi-Ethnic Friends and Other Stories (Guernica Editions, Toronto), and Beyond Sangre Grande: Caribbean Writing Today (TSAR, Toronto). Previous books include: Jogging in Havana (1992), Black Jesus and Other Stories (1996), Berbice Crossing (1997), My Brahmin Days (2000), North of the Equator (2001), Play a Song Somebody: New and Selected Short Stories (2003), Imaginary Origins: New and Selected Poems (2005), and the novels Dark Swirl (1989, rpt. 2007), The Wizard Swami ((1989, rpt. 2007), and Drums of My Flesh (2007)-- Guyana Prize winner, and nominated for the IMPAC/Dublin Prize. Cyril's work has appeared in over 60 literary magazines and anthologies. He's a former Poet Laureate of Ottawa (1984-87). He also worked for many years in social justice issues with federal and municipal governments. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Ottawa. He was born in Guyana, S. America.

1. Mating. Across Cultures

I clumsily deflower the English language
word after word
with my rough accent,
my chronic inability to remember the proper
place for modifiers
and the mysterious distinction between
"a" and "the."
Revengeful, English betrays me
when I ask for cigarettes at the convenience store
and the young sales clerk with hot chocolate-coloured skin
and the face of an angel born into the wrong race
winks at me just because
I pronounce "Hello!" in a funny way and
carry a backpack –
reminding me that ESL classes are more effective
than self-pity
and cultural differences are no biggie anymore.

My computer scolds me, "Check spelling as you type!"
even when only trying to message my landlady
who asked me–no, ordered me–to move out:
"On Wednesday," she said on Monday, "I want you gone!"
I've smeared her house with peasant smells
(who knew pork cabbage rolls could be unpalatable?)
and the chatty noise of my unnerving enthusiasm
(for almost everything all the time, damn it!).

Between the landlady and me –
seven generations of good British subjects proudly claiming
her right to kick me out (no notice)
despite cold weather and tenants’ rights.
But off I go,
a few pots and my IKEA bookshelf on my back
like an overloaded turtle shuffling from hostel to hostel,
with no language to call home.
("There" is where I’d like to be but "their" wherewithal is
always in the way.)

Still typing until the screed to the landlady shifts
into a poem
(the biggest blasphemy of all)
written in a voice borrowed from retired
public library books
bought on Amazon for almost nothing
plus shipping –
the authors, torn between the exile from the bookshelves
and the chance at a second life.

Language gets fraught and my besotted computer screen
shows clear proof of the accidental embrace
between a suspect Eastern European landed immigrant
and a centuries-old enslaving device – English
proudly conquers the globe one more time,
the miracle of a never-ending post-colonial
innocence-replacement surgery

Thank God for imperial history books and sci-modern medicine
that evaporate white guilt and renew virginity with plastic.

2. Something Borrowed, Something Black

Still typing, then crying
(so loudly that I worry that my neighbours
will call 911
to save me from "domestic abuse")
until I meet you – less, and yet more alien than me,
slightly black but not lightly black enough –
a double act of rape and enslavement.

Our words –
observing, sniffing, courting, fearing each other,
unsure,
like a young tiger and a young tigress innocently circling
each other
during their first mating season,
until my syllables copulate with yours
breaking the sound barrier between
two languages and two people without much in common –
an unlikely meeting at the crossroads of millennia
and fallen empires.

Our thoughts and accents contaminate English
like a common childhood disease
easy to ignore if not for the small discomfort
still hard to discount.
(but how can a word ignore its own accent?)
Our words twine around each other in a wet embrace,
condemning us to be forever lost
among the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico,
the temple of Diana (mind you, the real one!),
the Theatre of Dionysus,
the Great Wall,
and a few ramshackle huts on the outskirts of the Sahara,
constantly reinventing the past,
stereotyped in the present,
deflowering and revirginizing the English language,
incarcerated in its white-hot core,
the medium and the baptism for a redemption
we’re not ready for –
over and over and over.

Diana Manole

As a native Romanian writer, Diana Manole has published nine collections of poems and/or plays and has won fourteen literary awards. Since making Canada her new country, her poetry (translated from Romanian with Adam J. Sorkin or written in English) has appeared in literary magazines in Canada, the US, the UK, and South Africa. Her poems have also been translated into and published in French, German, Polish, Spanish, and Albanian, while her translations of Canadian poetry were printed in major Romanian magazines.

Field Trip
Bruce Peninsula

Greenly peninsular, with limestone cliffs--
this ancient index of waters merging,
eroded to an island relic—
the glacial fingernail of an escarpment
that raked the wind’s back
from Niagara Falls to Manitoulin Island.

Off Tobermory, silvery scrolls of waves
slap against the channel’s fossil reefs,
and shoals gurgle shipwrecks.
Time is measured by minerals
precise as a chronometer.
The centuries sink into sediments.

Fishes flash among the mussel-encrusted bones of ships
that foundered long ago :
the barque Arabia wrecked near Echo Island, 1884;
the schooner Golden West wrecked at Snake Island, 1884;
the schooner Lady Dufferin wrecked near Cabot Head, 1886…
A crayfish scuttles across a rocky pool.

What blue silences, what green solitudes!
Fish hawks coast the peninsula’s sand dunes and cedar swamps.
The headlands of its eastern shore
stand brooding over Georgian Bay.
Gulls nest on small islands spiked with pines
against the evening sky.
Evening anchors in an island’s cove.

Under this bristly crowfoot, walking fern, lady’s slipper
a dynasty of glaciers advanced and receded,
shaping the Great Lakes.
Beneath cliffs crowned with white cedars,
caves yawn like giant clams carved in limestone.

Beyond Beachy Cove
three shiny young garter snakes weave their way
along a wet grassy bluff.
Flowerpot Island’s outlandish pillars
were once caryatids that balanced the moon
on their heads.

Halfway up the peninsula
filled with yellow birches
and with black spruces,
the landscape hangs in the lake.
This is the granite perimeter
of the Precambrian Shield, encompassing
a wilderness so vast and awesome,
that its smallest rock forms a horizon
whose roots reach down to the planet’s core.

Len Gasparini

Len Gasparini is the author of sixteen books and chapbooks of poetry, including Collected Poems (2015); five short-story collections; two children's books; and a one-act play. In 1990, he was awarded the F.G. Bressani Literary Prize for poetry. Mr. Gasparini lives in Windsor, Ontario.

The Last Generation

We will be the last generation to speak
in voices foreign to everyone but ourselves.
A nation slyly swaggers its name
and we watch through windows and from the safety of newspapers,
eating the bitter fruit of the truly dispossessed.
Our homes are in the dry dirt of the missionary schools
that taught us guilt in peppermint paper and disinfectant,
that changed history to change us, turning
and turning us until we believed
we were better than our quicklimed, bloodburnt selves.
We dropped like flies in the independent sun,
through shiny-badged cracks back
into the world we fell from, over and over.
But the red stone benches are crumbling now
and the long-bladed ceiling fans stir other tales.
Our homes are in the phantom, rasping streets
mapped in yesterday’s rain and half discarded
even by us. In the sweeping maidans and foaming racetracks,
in the cinema halls with the laced names—Elite,
Globe, Majestic, New Empire—in the double-tongued
clubs and the temple walls, in the tinsel and the bhang,
in each of these we claim our stake. We carry our umbilical cords
with us, coiled in our pockets for comfort.
But at every open door, we will be asked where
we are from. We will be the last.

Ayesha Chatterjee

Born and raised in Kolkata, India, Ayesha Chatterjee has lived in England, the USA and Germany. She now resides in Toronto. Her poetry has appeared in several online and print magazines including nthposition, Autumn Sky Poetry, The Guardian online and Magma Poetry. Her first poetry collection The Clarity of Distance was published in 2011 by Calgary-based Bayeux Arts. She is currently President of the League of Canadian Poets.

BUT WHAT OF THE CITY ITSELF

For Neil Smith

In Buenos Aires in 1985, it was no longer possible to buy
anything at night for what it had cost in the morning.

So what, exactly, happened in 1848 in Paris?

Visiting Las Vegas in the mid-1960s was like visiting Rome
in the late 1940s.

By the Middle of the 1990s, large chunks of Toronto sat
expectantly waiting to be developed, reused, and recycled in
the boom that had started in the real estate industry.

Before the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, New York was
possibly the most egalitarian of any American city.

In June 1956, the city of Poznan witnessed Poland’s first
use of the mass inter-enterprise strike combined with street
demonstrations.

I had not planned on coming back to Vienna, but a lot
had happened between the summer of 1933 and the
autumn of 1934.

The Woodwards building was opened on Saturday,
September 14^th, for free housing by a small group of
housing activists and squatters from all around Vancouver.

Jeff Derksen

Jeff Derksen is a founding member of Vancouver's writer-run centre, the Kootenay School of Writing, and worked as an editor of Writing magazine. Derksen's poetry and critical writing on art, urbanism and text have been published in Europe and North America. Formerly a research fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the City University of New York, he currently works in the English Department at Simon Fraser University. He collaborates on visual art and research projects (focusing on urban issues) with the research collective Urban Subjects. Derksen's Down Time won the 1991 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award at the BC Book Prizes. A selection from Dwell — "Host Nation, Host Society" — was nominated for inclusion in The Gertrude Stein Anthology of Innovative North American Poetry: 1993.

Grace is the girl who cradles her knuckles, the uttered cuss,
the upper cut

against teeth

grass stains, streaks of green on a boy's jeans, he who
delivered punting kicks to the head

until his best friend jerked him away, pushed him
down against the hill

Grace is the hierarchy of girlhood that lets some girls reign, lets
one of the say, She's had enough

Grace is breath returning, and with it, spasms of pain,
the seine of it, tightening against torso

Glimmer above, stars or rivets, she can't be sure. Rivulets of
moonlight below, in mud

Murmur of cars passing overhead. Grace is knees, hands and
knees, knees and hillside

She said, “Help me. I love you”. One girl wept while her boyfriend
held her

Grace is enough, cruelty casual enough it can be called to an end
like that

Soraya Peerbaye

Her first collection of poetry, Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her poems have appeared in Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Women Poets (Mansfield Press, 2004), edited by Priscila Uppal and Rishma Dunlop, as well as the chapbook anthology Translating Horses (Baseline Press, 2015). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Peerbaye lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter.

archbishop's park
ravens on the grass
gulping down earthworms

ventilation noises
from the end of the great hall
echoes of voices

waves on the sand
soothe a child
brought back by the sea

mist over La Salle
from one shore to the other
crickets and tree frogs

at the entrance of the old monastery
mosquito welcome

ruins of a church
the young mother breastfeeding
her baby in the shade

scorching mid-August
on the doorstep of the chapel
an old woman is mopping

a bench at sunset
a mom two grandmas
baby on the lap

wind in the poplars
the shadow of an herb on the
buddha's knee

willows in the wind
on the banks of La Salle
Nepalese songs

dry grass trail
I was a horse child
galloping full speed
after all these years
I still am

Translated by Howard Scott

Bertrand Nayet publishes short stories, narratives, poems and tales. He writes plays, creates scenery, acts with Manitoban theatre troupes, draws, paints and illustrates. A founding father and secretary in perpetuity for the Collectif post-néo-rieliste, as well as the founder and director of Kukaï Rouge, Bertrand is the writer in residence at Maison Gabrielle-Roy, in Saint Boniface. His most recent works are Contes de fils et d’eaux, Sur une même écorce, Les lieux de l’amour/L’amour des lieux, and Voix.

I have agreed to be only a monster
To let you build stories
And associate them with my name
With my face

I have listened to your words
In order to understand them properly
To give them life as honestly as possible

I have become what you wanted to fear

That ignoble creature
It feels good to throw stones at

I have become that beast
So that you can avoid the mirrors
To let you embrace your egos

I have hugged your mutterings
The double-barreled words
And your inquiring looks
To allow you to sleep
So that there is always something worse in my direction

I have agree to be only your shadow
To be the ugliness that makes you pretty
To feebly parade among your lusts
So that your fingers can shine

I have run toward your demons
To make you believe in your gods

I have become the opposite
Of what I had been promised
So that you felt good
Giving me enough for a coffee

Translated by Howard Scott

Multidisciplinary artist Sébastien Bérubé hails from northwestern New Brunswick and graduated from the Edmunston campus of the University of Moncton. In 2012 he released a novel (L’œil de papier) and the following year recorded his album L’encre des saisons. His first collection of poems, Sous la boucane du moulin, was published by Les Éditions Perce-Neige in 2015.

Mid-afternoon
mid-January
mid-sky

a host of Starlings frolic
on a dull grey cloud-scape

the bird-ensemble
with wings unfurled
like black orchids in bloom

joyfully coast
back-and-forth
dance-on-air
in formation fashion
rings and hearts

over the inter-section
at Finch-and-Yonge
entertain a crowd of cars

I.B. (Bunny) Iskov is the Founder of The Ontario Poetry Society. Her work has been published in several literary journals and anthologies. She has three full collections and lots of chapbooks. In 2009, Bunny was the recipient of the inaugural R.A.V.E. Award - Recognizing Arts Vaughan Excellence, in recognition of outstanding contribution to the cultural landscape of the City of Vaughan. The award is for Art Educator / Mentor in the Literary Arts.

An early March morning and you arouse
to a shivering thermometer, whimpering to you
that outside your insulated walls the world,
drawn from darkness by the early-rising sun,
is silent and still at -34 Celsius and you are
prepared to resound your oft-repeated
and familiar theme: will this winter never end?

Even though your rational mind recognizes
the sun is so much higher in the sky, warmer now,
so strong that snow begins to melt
long before the temperature climbs above zero,
still, the intense longing for Spring seethes
inside you like unrequited love.

Two days later the mercury soars above zero
and the snow begins its wondrous mystery
of unmaking itself before your eyes, sighing
in on itself like sunken cheeks on the famished.
The hundred variant songs of water in the eaves
is an evocation that vibrates the urgent air,
setting messages astir in dormant aspens.

Glen Sorestad is a well known Saskatoon poet whose work has appeared in over 20 volumes of his poems, in over 60 anthologies and textbooks, in literary publications all over North America and in many other countries. His poetry has been translated into 7 languages to date.

Sorestad is a Member of the Order of Canada.

This is how it begins,
not with a word, but
with a single breath.

Something our bodies do, not
involuntarily, but without
the intervention of our wills.

Something our bodies do
to save us
from consciousness and death.

Still it is there—death—in that still

moment between inhalation

and exhalation, in the time between

the separate beatings of our separate hearts, in the infinitesimal time
our minds allow our bodies to be.

But, of course, it is our bodies that allow our minds to be,
for a brief time, and always, it is there
death like a bird that preys

upon another bird

in mid-flight.

one late September night i finally decided just to slip from Mom’s womb that’s how i was born because that afternoon Mom had laboured too much to be in labour she’d finished digging tout le grand champ de patates had bagged our supply for winter i was thin-skinned and skinny so skinny i was nicknamed manche à balai and i had this dread of rester stuck we lived in gumbo country and in rainy weather the rutted roads became impassable and before moving to that house on the edge of the village where there were no sidewalks and not even a streetlamp we’d had to live on the farm again for spring and summer and part of fall because after the seventh child we’d outgrown our tiny house on the other side of the tracks and when it rained for three days i saw fear build in Mom’s eyes when she looked out the window when Dad wasn’t coming back home with les commissions Mom just knew he’d stopped at the bar again and she’d busy herself try to hold it all together and she just didn’t know how long he would be and what she’d do if she ran out of formula for the baby or if one of ses p’tits got sick with a high fever and that’s when worry hung in the air like static electricity

There will be very little space despite the cold. I will stand at the source.
There will be footsteps of men. Very few beaches for new beginnings.

Very little in the way of shells and childhood.

There will be that woman. The page lines her with its foam.
There will be a few stars. On our lips, trees that crash down.

There will be a lot of words, your fall will drink from our memories.
And the icy imprint will kiss the empty dawn of our lives.

There will be very few of us. The silence will be a dream-covered house.
There will be few faces and books, too few bodies to love.

There will cliffs and remains.
There will be this nothing. This poem on my tongue that I will begin.
There will be the stone I will bring to my mouth.

In the arms of a rough sea, we will be alone.
Standing, close to the bark and the wind, like ink on snow,
legs tangled in seaweed, we will be born in silence.

Translated by Howard Scott

Marie-Belle Ouellet was born on the Gaspé Peninsula in 1978. At a very young age, she began reading and writing poetry. In 2004, she received the Arcade award for her collection of poems published under the title Nature morte. She was the first artist in residence at the Maison Félix- Leclerc in Vaudreuil in 2011, where she composed some of the poems that were published in her volume of poetry Je promets d’être là . Since 2006, she has published a number of volumes of poetry through Éditions David. Her most recent volume, Le son friable de l’étreinte , was just released.

The news is the same
Only nature explodes
The deserted park
Motionless
Not even a bird

Routine grows distant
Repeated acts
Quick movements
Time flies
Stop a little
To hear the trees
Discreet noises
Stunned by the town

Far off I see another city
That I don't know
Who is she?
Horizon or the next day

Green hands
Temper time
The mills seek abandonment
Blown by the wheat
On a glass wall
The seeds vanish in the heavy air
Cruel end
Long ago, I would have shouted
Now the silence of birds embraces me

I am in my belly
Nestled in a hollow
Sheltered from the rain
I watch the wind

The clouds drift
It's all so peaceful
But where are they going?
In search of time


translated by Howard Scott

Annick Proteau was born on April 24, 1970, in Québec City and grew up in Saint-Gabriel-de-Valcartier. At the age of 18, she moved to Québec City, where she is now raising her two daughters and pursuing a variety of endeavours. She has been employed as a health and social services aide at the CSSS de la Vieille Capitale for the past 11 years. Annick is always driving around the city for her work and when she has a moment, she writes poetry from her window on the world: her car.

The sun ventures
an approach along the curve of fruits
the morning inspects where it dips its feet
the blinds let in
the world in small doses
desires
(which have kept their composure)
reverberate deep in the bowls

the sky in its striving
burns the birds one by one
which drag it
like a sheet by the corners
seditions line the walls
memory organizes its mishmash of images
a day like any other
in which we record
the hours drained of any resilience

the street folds us into its basket
we eagerly seek
the miraculous morsels
in the hollows of our palms
small conservation of the species
will we ever finally meet up
blindly in the vastness?


translated by Howard Scott

Michel Létourneau was born in Quebec City in 1959. He has lived in the Bas-Saint-Laurent region for some ten years. He has to date published seven collections of poetry with various publishing houses. He explores themes such as childhood, hardships and the search for meaning.

With the last days of spring, my morning walk
over the Highlevel has become unsettling,
as bird carcasses now litter the roadside—
poor hapless tufts of feather and bone
that have washed into the rain-gutters,
the dark rinds of their flesh resinous,
like the catacombed holy men of Evora.

Then all at once an omen appears,
full of sudden dread, a portentous sign:
four wings beating together as one,
linked in horror like a forced coital act.
This sight was surely not meant for my eyes,
for those talon hooks have sunk deeply
into the soft crop of a shock-eyed pigeon
that flutters, spins, twists, and turns
as it is swept along the city-canyon walls
by the greater pulse of pinion and gear.

The peregrine’s scream comes so piercing
that it turns children at play to stone,
for its lone expressive syllable is honed
sharper than the gull-winged Stuka’s drop
over the war-torn ghettos of Warsaw.

This falcon then wings its way straight up
to the tall concrete of corporate tower
and high-rise urban condominium,
banking away from the abyss of erasure,
a survivor of our toxic alchemy.


Notes:

The Highlevel bridge in Edmonton crosses the North Saskatchewan river. The vertical drop from the walkway measures 164 feet.
There are currently 8 nesting pairs of peregrines in the city of Edmonton. In 1970 there was only a single nesting pair in the entire province.

D.S. Stymeist currently teaches poetics and aboriginal literature at Carleton University in Ottawa and has published poems in Prairie Fire, Steel Chisel, Ottawater, In/Words, and ByWords. His essays and reviews have appeared in journals such as Studies in English Literature, EIRC, R & R, Cahiers Elisabéthains, RQ, Mosaic, and Genre. He is the editor and founder of the micro-press, Textualis. He grew up in O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation (South Indian Lake, Manitoba) and is presently revising a collection of poetry entitled Dead Reckoning that explores the intersection of language, culture, and history.

Gone is the bitterness rounder the wine of promises
the irony of necessary reassurances slips by
his complaint whispered among the knots of yesterday
fugitive tomorrow hides from all longings
state of distraction in the incoherent succession
of paintings of wars that never stop abstracting

A whole list of imaginaries welded with burning
endless whispers
no impetus
no need to know
bodies barely begun
at the perfectly inaccessible edge of living

The autonomy of thought barely enough to thwart
the most committed plans to muddle flesh
in the name of evidence already formulated
by the erosion of breath absolutely

Plausible restructuring of time
through brief betrayals
imperfect legacy of repeated hesitation
the bare thought of his strictest frameworks
the most stubborn clichés

The disappointment of choice remains a dead-end to explore

Here is the child of the unbearable error of the heart
transparent his neck eroded by misunderstanding
white his destiny cut off from the rest
between air and shadow

So he had to be born on the threshold and voiceless
but will share new balances
expressions punctuated with accents of survival


translated by Howard Scott

Dominique Lauzon was born in Montreal in 1951. He has actively shared poetry through his work as writer, editor, proofreader and bookseller since the 1970’s. He also participates regularly in public readings. He is a member of the poetry magazine Exit. He is the author of nine anthologies, of which two have been translated to Spanish. Most recently at Écrits des Forges : Un livre une fois, published in 2006 and Lettre du Coeur et autres paysages in 2013.

I hear you coming from afar the air is full
and I opened them my ears my thoughts
leap like squirrels
chasing each other in the yard
blue-tinged in your eyes already
or greenish brownish shiny black
and on the balcony
I stacked chairs and table I saw
under a flight path
perhaps chance and my desire
will do things well will make you
jump from a plane
hanging like a smile on a face
on a damned beautiful parachute


translated by Howard Scott

Poet and novelist Martin Thibault has given writing workshops and published poetry and short story anthologies, novels and an essay on poetry (with philosopher Pierre Bertrand) with the publishing houses Le Noroît, Liber and Trois-Pistoles. His anthology Les yeux sur moi won the Jovette Bernier prize and was read in its entirety on CBC’s French-language radio network. His play Il poussera des ailes aux perchaudes was performed at La Chapelle Theatre. He is currently Montreal’s poet-in-residence.

If we had known it was going to be our last trip
we would have planned it exactly the same way.

Climbing the Spanish Steps in Rome
there was the macabre curiosity

to see how the universe settled on his cheeks
and lips in the poet’s final exhale.

Some things aren’t meant to be witnessed
by strangers -- even admirers.

When my soul begins to rattle its pineheavy limbs
it is your voice that will tease it out

your thumb and forefinger that will place coins
gently on my swollen eyelids.

Vivian Vavassis is a Montréal ex-pat who currently lives in Ottawa and calls both cities home. Her poems and essays have appeared in several issues of Arc, ottawater, PFYC, Montage, A Crystal Through Which Love Passes: Glosas for P.K. Page, and Studies in Canadian Literature, among others. Once upon a time, she co-founded and ran a little 'zine called incunabula.

if they only knew
the insistent call of mouthless voices

do they know
the so-slow ebb
of the waters of dream
and then the soul and its determination
to push back your boundless absence

do they only know
that I'm busy
holding back the last images
before an impatient wind
raises them and lets them fall
into the barbed wire of memory

it's barely the morning of your last shirt
it's barely the dawn of the first day without you

when the pain is consumed
I will return
to those places
where we went together
to gather the right breath
and a little wheat for the hungry

but little by little
I will regain my taste
for tree sap
and at daybreak
on the writing table

the pain will seem more distant
and my eye like a lamp
will add the right touch of heat

pleasure itself
will be in season
because I'll have drunk
from another world


Translation by Howard Scott

Nicole Gagné was born in Montreal, where she still resides. Between 2002 and 2006 she received several literary awards, including an honourable mention from the jury of the Prix Piché de Poésie (2002). Her poems have been published by Écrits des Forges in its anthology Poèmes du Lendemain. In 2006 her work appeared in the poetry anthology Sunday Nights Blues et autres brumes published by Éditions du Vermillon. She has also published poems in various magazines, as well as haikus in magazines and anthologies. Ms. Gagné is a member of UNEQ.

In front of a worn brick house
you choke the darknesses come from childhood
what you seek lies instead in the light
the smell of fresh bread hanging on memory
you came this far to track down the racket
to under the planks of a rotten veranda
close   so close
a child with eyes closed
hid his dreams under pajamas
between the lost tooth and a bird feather
close   so close
you open your mouth to grind the shadows
that persistence you had
in polishing bleakness like an ancient jewel


images of childhood slip through your fingers
you want to recall your street
narrow corridor clogged with doubts
the end of the street Mom is it the end of the world?
patches of sky sewn to roofs
with strips of sheet metal
the noise of the wind in the sheds
the consent of the morning
to gather pieces of light
the taste of July in the belly of strawberries
clotheslines filled with memories of the body


you can burn the rest
appeal once again
to the simplest beauty in the world


Translation by Howard Scott

Lyne Richard was born in Quebec City and spends most of her time creating literary and visual works. She has published nine books of poetry, two novels, Le bruit des oranges and Ne dites pas à ma mere que je suis vivant, with Québec Amérique, two short-story collections, Il est venu avec des anemones and Hurler sans trop faire de bruit, with QA, as well as a young adult novel, La nuit Woolf, again with QA.

Perfect feast
I expect nothing of colours
and yet

I expect nothing
patience under my arm
like an immortal loaf


This calm beast
at the table of futures
demimonde in preparation

even the clouds
their faces over the bay
packed space


Nothing lacking
the tea stays hot
like a lasting full moon
and the time to drink
painless

all the sand yesterday
left in my shoes

there is no beginning or end
my ocean back


It stays there
the sea
its surf

the white
the blue

we don't know which eternity to choose


I walk along spring
its shores
no reason for their dizziness

never the same sun
just a sketch of sky
under a pile of dead leaves


Gift
fog
lots of space between the sounds

your absence
simple clarity
without landscape


Translation by Howard Scott

Joanne Morency lives in the Gaspé region. Her fifth book, Ce bruit de disparition (Triptyque), was published in February 2014. Her first book, Miettes de moi (Triptyque 2009), won the Fondation d’entreprise L-A Finances award for best first poetry collection in Paris and the Jovette-Bernier–Ville de Rimouski award. A former psychologist, Joanne Morency is also interested in poetry as a vector of discovery and well-being, and she teaches writing workshops to that end.

I live in the heart of a lost country
yet one I've never left
I was born here I'll die here
a country that is no more
but follows me everywhere
I'd like to get out
which I couldn't do
they'd like to drive me out
which they couldn't do
sometimes it's so small
that despite its great river and its lakes
it's no bigger than a teardrop
and sometimes so huge
it goes on forever
I took possession of it at birth
proud discoverer out of my mother's womb
like a caravel
come from far beyond La Rochelle
a country like the one
I built in my childhood
on Lake Saint Pierre
among the cattails and reeds
I put down my roots
in the soil of legends
so that the tree of my life
draws the sap of poetry there
a country of summers where fire my friend
comes down from the zenith to swim with me
a country of autumns where my inner forests
sang flames of all colors
a northern country with frosty eyes
ice storm suns burning on snow
a country where big flakes of snow geese
melted into the pure air of spring
in my country we're so crazy for beauty
that meadow flowers turn into swallows
and fly off on feathers of blue fragrance
so crazy with music
the icicles on the eves
sound like a glass keyboard
under little mallets of cold
so crazy with magic
that we see trees in January
turn into great snowy owls
under their down of frost
so crazy for love
that we stroke the skin of days
and every river is a naked woman
smiling on a bed of light
no one dies in my country
at every family gathering
some of my most distant ancestors
even those from 1663
from St-François du Havre de Grâce
turn up with their instruments
and start dancing
if it happens one day
I lose my lost country
I'll become like the haggard homeless man
who on winter nights
at the end of a blind alley
among trash and garbage cans
makes his only home
a dirty cardboard box



Translation by Howard Scott

Pierre Chatillon is a writer and classical composer. He has published some forty books, including La mort rousse (published in English as Wild Red Love), L’homme aurore, L’enfance est une île and Le château de sable. He has recorded four albums: Air pour Claire, Les oiseaux, Le soleil and La victoire. In 1998, he created the literary park L’arbre de mots in Nicolet, Quebec.

• www.pierrechatillon.com