(Reading Poem 16: mistyped text, Nick Flynn, perfume notes, Hesse’s Hang Up, Rimbaud, Ninjutsu Haiku from memory, Ondaatje, messenger exchange)

John Luna

Have a threat day. Pains that feel like swallowing is every morning I wake up split, missing you. Here, a small piece of light keeps opening and closing on the floor with the curtains as the earth.

Sweat as cotton-blossoms, sweat as cumin seed & coriander, sweat as onions sweating out time in the crisper. The cat, variegated as pepper up your nose, leaps nimbly off the counter; outside lawnmowers brindle the air before it has got up & got warmed. The first time my idea of absurdity or extreme feeling came through…was the best time, but it’s lost in summers now (old as in old magazines...) It [was] the most ridiculous structure… “I sat Beauty on my knees…”

A saline twang hangs around all afternoon. Mystery is a furrow set in the center of the attack truth makes in a state of benighted obscurity or liberty, undressed; unconjugated conjugal visitation. Error and romance slide & elide. It strikes you, like light slanting on a log, a roofbeam: for your eyes. Things we lost: (the) knowledge of the dead. Not yet, or not forever. Children who suffer from anxiety, depression, dysphoria, suicidal ideation, are on the frontier of a new shock... one the world has yet

to know personally; everywhere in the house this morning, a smell of paper burning, like fresh latex paint, like Habit Rouge, like Arthur Rimbaud setting down to work. It was lonely

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.