By Sharon Thesen

You’ll go to Banyen Books on Sunday Afternoons,

a searcher after meaning. So

much meaning, so little time! Was it to be mental or physical, your

ailment, in the end. In the end the ailment revolved

around love, mental or physical.

By Hari Alluri

Stay. Marrow me. Marrow what I am, skin too. The bones of my speech hide me from the meat my teeth have stripped.

Whatever is hungry to be eaten, offer a dustpan’s life.

By Joanne Arnott

as along the highway of tears

shoulders back

open arms

open chested

the turquoise-green Grandmother breathes

By Gary Barwin

Fish hovering above silt. Their mouths open, hoovering the almost dark.

10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. If humans are 60% water—heart 73%, lungs 83%—how many humans is that? Varicoloured humans reaching forward, displacing the river, swimming, floating in liquid sky.

Someone left a valve open.

By Derek Beaulieu

[click below to view photo poem]

By Rita Bouvier

I think words

are extensions of ourselves

not inherently moral.

deed a language

of the body

that tells the truth.

By George Elliot Clarke

I sit I taverns and stare at my fists;

I knead earth into bread, spell water into wine.

Still, nothing warms my wintry exile—neither

Prayers nor fine love, neither votes nor hard drink:

For nothing heals those saints felled in green beds,

By Wayde Compton

a voice is a box of reeping, a dream

a dicotyledon of speaking.

unlocking makes purchase by re-revealing

submarine cables. coloured, keening, sung

krakens, reeling,

role and role out a whole cracking Occident.

By Jules Arita Koostachin

walking along a path

sky darkened with clouds

a bridge lies ahead

afraid to cross

stopping myself

standing in the middle of the bridge

dirty obnoxious men

sit along the water’s edge

filthy needles sinking deep into their arms

By Joseph Dandurand

We close our eyes when

a junkie slips by us on

a freshly wetted sidewalk

as the city tries and tries

to wash away the odour

of those who sleep beside

the walls as if they await

entry back into this castle

where all the food is kept.

By Lorna Crozier

Where does that singing start, you know,

that thin sound—almost pure light?

Not the birds at false dawn or their song

when morning comes, feathered throats

warm with meaning. A different kind of music.

By Molly Cross-Blanchard

The most orgasms I ever had in one go

come over Christmas vacation

in my childhood basement bedroom:

door cracked open, sheets

peeled back, pussy

in plain view of the cat

By Sarah Dowling

Monday, May 15, Sappho, wa –

a logging chapter is closed. Those

country maidens were good riders,

flowers blooming in an old bathtub,

cows grazing in an orchard. Garments

wet as they should be. Across the dirt

By Gary Geddes

Do animals cry? she asks.

I don’t know, I say, but I think

they grieve. I’d read about a camel

that sniffed her dead offspring

for days and wouldn’t move

until they placed its pelt on her

back. Why do you ask?

By Chantal Gibson

because I charted your scalp like an atlas,

sectioned your hair to the roots with the pointy tip

of a tail comb, discovered your pink secret

at the crown, and released the ancestral sighs

of fingertips and VO5

By Julie Joosten

Love, of sometimes solitude—

the else wheres to which it passes—

a season of small fruits, a flood, a road

without balm—the where where my senses

unfold, entangling.

I’m trying to find a space big enough

for all our organs.

By Wanda John Kehewin

I ate the body of jesus christ/

washed it down with a plastic goblet of wine—

Washed it down with a plastic goblet of wine/

the sour taste of colonial violence—

The sour taste of colonial violence/

takes pew in the bottom of my gut—

By Jónína Kirton

I am rooted, but I flow.

– Virginia Woolf, Waves

I am a story within the stories of many

I am a paradox

one thing and then another

parts of a whole

that does not know itself

By Hasan Namir

It took years to heal

I tried to walk down the forest

Full of prickles, impossible

to move forward

The choice was in my hands

I had to pave the way.

By Fiona Tinwei Lam

Rolls of rice paper in the corner,

jars of soft-haired brushes,

elegant cakes of watercolour,

black inkstone at the centre.

My mother held the brush vertically,

never slant, arm and fingers poised,

distilling bird or breeze into

diligent rows of single characters.

By Daphne Marlatt

wind tree rustle rimming the park’s joyous hubbub one-block green pierced by kid cries a dad’s indulgent laugh dog bark a skimming

Frisbee someone’s mom pulls her child from hysterical play as

wind catches our blind in repeated knocking …

By Isabella Wang

In a dream the heart’s desires manifest

enough eyes to see past the forest

their tired lids archiving dust precipitating

from the cargo of an incoming train

the red guards, the arrest, date of interrogation

nailed over the family’s clay hut walls

By Canisia Lubrin

for our elders

You arrive as found blade for this tale

I will tell you no gospel you know,

No crow’s throat will belt guesses

This year sound out the life I spend

In the company of those who are all

On their way to another world

By Clea Roberts

Where the Nisutlin grew shallow

and swift, we rested our

paddles on the gunwales,

only dipping them to steer.

We watched the riverbed,

the astonishing velocity

of the round, green boulders

passing beneath us,

and the red-backed spawners

By Fred Wah

Now I know I have a heart because it’s broken

but should I fix it now to keep it strokin’ or should I

hear each piece as it is spoken and stoke heart’s heat

so hot I smell it smokin’ or could this clock made up

of parts be jokin’ that missing spark a mis-read gap

provokin’ and little sock of baby breath not chokin’

the piggy bank of words much more than tokens not

just the gossip love is always cloaked in nor all the

meaning text is usually soaked in but roast potatoes

By Adam Sol

The young man knows he’s going to die today, but he’s wrong.

The other young man figures the army is the best way to improve his life, but he’s wrong.

They both think their weapons will protect them, but they’re wrong.

They both believe their prayers will help.

Their commanders have intentions and intelligence, but they’re wrong.

We’ve heard the story before. It’s wrong.

The news will document it, but it will be wrong.

The medium, the reception, the commentary, the commercial break.

By Lisa Robertson

Yesterday I cried. It was artless and good.

Spring has its own agony, truly

It involves convolution

For the nudity of one kiss

Joy suffers measure

How tiring it is to disagree with everything!

Then we go visiting, throw our tender runners

Over forest-rim

Starlings. We are breaking into a vast derelict space.

We are the Starling scene in Sterne’s Sentimental Journey.

A caged Starling is repeating in the voice of a Child “I cannot get out.”

By Jan Zwicky

And now you know that it won’t turn out as it should,

that what you did was not enough,

that ignorance, old evil, is enforced

and willed, and loved, that it

is used to manufacture madness, that it is the aphrodisiac

of power and the crutch of lassitude, you,

By rob mclennan

1.

Whether a lake in the Kawarthas,

or this Scottish coastal town

founded as fishing village. Stumbleweed,

euphemism. Alexander I of Scotland, and

the lands of Anstruther

to William de Candela,

1225. We all fall down. This sentence

is preposterous.