Reading Poem 21 (cover of a book about Cathedrals, 3rdhand Decameron, etymology, gaming lore, leftover words, old phone conversation, magazine interview, Chauvet documentary, Wikipedia dérive, pseudonym spy fiction)

John Luna

Apples and pears ripen and fall, totally neglected but regretting rien, like some Medieval orchard visited by a disaster so vast nobody could account for what came before. This whole time I’ve been writing in kind of sweeping, terraced declines; I’ve been

getting older myself, or more properly, it has been getting older, this interspace called directing, commanding, insisting, negotiating, hustling, running, defrauding, collecting (stopping with a hiss & a click as a cliché finds its shape in the mold; leaving a squishy bit in the fabric, the soft spot under the powder-coated skin, sliced tennis-ball fuzz, ‘pop’ of the breathless tippy-top of a baby’s skull…Veil. Lily. Wound. Woods behind the house

where mastery lives, alive as fuck in the long grass. It looks like there is nowhere now I can place you: not in the earth for an oven, not in grain-saying photo developer night, fingers stirring figures in varieties of timber tasted in the teeth of an old saw.  Monitoring expressions like those of doubt or skepticism play like nature over your joy-reliving face. Scumbling up the stairs in sock feet I like the restive, haunted quality of following our ghost’s trail, her tread a fact just as dense as a bear skull

found on an altar in a cave. The psychogeography of what we are reducible to language’s milk-teeth, dead letter of our time together read in the fillings, enamel and permeable mansions of dried speech.

John Luna is a biracial writer, artist and critic, whose practice includes poetry, visual art and critical writing as well as teaching in the areas of visual art and art history. He the recipient of a 2017 BC Arts Council Project Assistance Grant for an ongoing project involving text and visual art. Publication of his written work in art criticism and poetry has appeared via Ditch, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, Canyon, Cordite, Train, Matrix, GUEST, Rattle open mic, and The Hamilton Review of Arts and Letters, among others. His first poetry collection, Listing, was released through Decoupage Publishing in 2015; a second book-length manuscript was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry in 2017. He lives in Shawnigan Lake, British Columbia.