Train : a journal of self-isolation

Issue #8 : David Barrick Lizzie Derksen Philip Kienholz Margo LaPierre Alex Manley Ren Pike

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David Barrick’s poetry appears in The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Event, Prairie Fire, The Antigonish Review, and other literary magazines. He teaches and writes in London, Ontario, where he is Co-Director of the Poetry London reading series. His first chapbook is Incubation Chamber (Anstruther Press, 2019).

Lizzie Derksen is a writer and filmmaker from Treaty Six Territory. She is the poet through whom Aunt Rachel speaks and one of the authors of the collaborative novel Project Compass (Monto Books 2017). Her writing has appeared in PRISM International, Room, Funicular Magazine, Poetry Is Dead, The Vault, and on CBC Television. Lizzie lives in Edmonton, Alberta, where she walks her dog, hosts a multi-disciplinary salon called Open Apartment, and works on her proverbial first novel. lizziederksen.com

Philip Kienholz is a Buddhist lay monk, permaculture gardener, and architect retired from licensed practice in Manitoba and Northwest Territories. He has published a book, Display: Poems, and two chapbooks: The Third Rib Knife, and Born to Rant Coerced to Smile. Recent poetry is at Write Launch, Genre: Urban Arts, Unpsychology Magazine, Halcyone Literary Review, Burningword Literary Journal, and Whirlwind.

Margo LaPierre (www.margolapierreeditor.com) is a queer, neurodivergent Canadian poet and fiction editor. Her debut collection of poetry, Washing Off the Raccoon Eyes, was published by Guernica Editions. She is a poetry selector for Bywords Magazine and Membership Chair of the Editors Canada Ottawa-Gatineau branch.

Alex Manley is a writer living in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke, whose writing has been published by Maisonneuve magazine, Vallum, Carte Blanche, The Puritan, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day feature, and whose debut poetry collection, We Are All Just Animals & Plants, was published by Metatron Press in 2016.

Ren Pike grew up in Newfoundland. Through sheer luck, she was born into a family who understood the exceptional value of a library card. She holds degrees in Physics and Computer Science. Her poetry has been published in antilang, Orson's Review, and Juniper. When she is not writing, she wrangles data for non-profit organizations in Calgary, Canada.

FIRE INTENTIONS

Margo LaPierre




i. establish associative architecture

cat’s eye
dug pit
split work
brothers raining down
chaotic fighter
in the kitchen flickers
an ego substitute
backyard family melting
wizard stuff
spine made of tea lights
petrol beats mezcal
taking down Alexandria
contact word blood sport
zero shame in trying
tall, grand nature
pink glass fluff
books on books
combustible
cadavers
cover it
or risk
your
ash

ii. light candles when lonesome

more credible source than halogen metal reflects & throws organic gasps of orange on my clean skin there’s a couch and cat the-size-of-a-sack-o-potatoes to pillow the front door’s death drive with Cole Porter butter tendril dips, the wax, almost touching good stay good thoughts eager as Edison stay good side a skips good stay good belly and good mouth on hold

iii. research ideal temperature of cheeses

people pile up in my mind and if gratitude is a vending machine without clattery hole to dispense what use is gratitude?
to s———, who microwaved Swiss on sesame bagels your brain is Yoko’s interactive exhibit the threads taut and lagging crocheted nailed to the wall comforting, surprising and outstretched all at once with precious stones and hidden notes
to m———, who baked brie with demerara and liquor you vibrate the wool of your needles you are a maker your voice is a mug brimmed with tears you are the warm anticipated air of holidays booked from an abundance of duvets
to b———, who roasted cheddar cubes at the fire pit in my parents’ backyard, you are a novel of internal logic, a well-worn and brambled terrain of love
to j———, who delighted over blueberry goat cheese cream rotini and decided blueberry goat cheese was a thing I think of your hands first the knuckles now red from knowledge of the jungle your arms and their scars and I see you under a mountain destiny splitting apart your big love bigger than time big enough to hear my echo, a razed forest, my glossy green beginning

iv. unplug all beauty implements

gatekeepers call it hot girl summer and we hang our bellies over silk knotted belts bruise lips for beauty ruses and usher each other in from remote towns hold ego infections in empty matchboxes for emotional warfare and they tell her she’s lit

v. set the green tomato chakra aglow

gas elements installed on car hoods for import black-box master chef events held under the highway’s cement crusting off exposing steel guts hold on for mortal life in a middle-of-nowhere force-field traffic jam judges say their piece then hovercraft home to Supreme teenagers

vi. write more onion structures

yearly life gets seared into the inhabitants while their alien mothers await carbon breakdown, sifting through memory boxes of Australopithecus who discovered sunshine and rambled about it to skeptic stonebros

vii. radiate poems

in this mad heat let’s go swimming on the way back sing dripping with the voices of friends’ children verbally tick off lists slitting kissed tests to survive ceviche and Listerine combos breath and bodies comprise wonderful wavy brine particles




Margo LaPierre (www.margolapierreeditor.com) is a queer, neurodivergent Canadian poet and fiction editor. Her debut collection of poetry, Washing Off the Raccoon Eyes, was published by Guernica Editions. She is a poetry selector for Bywords Magazine and Membership Chair of the Editors Canada Ottawa-Gatineau branch.

WOOD INTENTIONS

Margo LaPierre





i. establish associative architecture

malformed idea
garden pruning fantasy
pre-verbal
emerald aura
heart-shaped vesicle
pop-rocks popsicle
magic ointment
sapling
germinate
root-cutting
caterpillar tent ablaze
grim cloud formation
outstretched hand
strange offering
visual abomination
total legacy
latent creation
unwinding
spontaneity
solid thought
double helix origins
empty shelves

ii. create autonomous lines of intention

the trajectory of an empty scotch glass / shot at husband from one’s own twanging arm after / after a long walk up stairs glass in hand / upon which curvature one’s anger falters / in direct proportion to the / lessening of distance / between the projectile and his body

iii. distinguish between lovers and rabid horses

death doesn’t come this way except slow as hair / you save the crying for the wrong audience / you hit him when you know he won’t hurt you / but then why hurt why touch at all / if not for a gentle compassion and this love / is mittens: soft, needed, ravelled and unravelling / and you startle out the cab / off the cramped bus / where are my mittens, always losing—

iv. recall schoolyard trickery

we were inducted into the pen club / then walked around with penis in blue / on forearm an introductory curse / a warning about boys mistaking our propensity / for penmanship with a passion for all wands

v. find the other women be together

you can still have bad dreams about old friends / it’s okay to be afraid and those men who barge in / when you are peaceful where you thought / there were no unlocked windows and when / the dream gets/ violent and you step up to be the villain and / all your rapists are dead now / there are meaty disconnected heads like tulips / you are terrified of the person you’ve become and / can’t say the things / you’ve done while you’re asleep / won’t even say it in the poem and / the good one sleeps beside you and / you feel like you’re not worthy now because / whose brain desired that category of justice / it’s okay to / be afraid and it’s okay / to defend yourself even if it’s after the fact

vi. get on that salve that tincture

okay so it was a sprouted need, this plant with teeth / true venus, but fuck the rage that eats us / this is a healing spell this is bream green and / foam cools and dries in lipped petals / the colour of conversation with the ones we hurt

vii. invoke capacity for growth as incantation

I am my ever-chipping manicure, moons that peek / out from under gel, expensive crescents push out / dead keratin, rejecting a body that was last week / I am my chapped lips skin that once grew skin that / once touched skin that once held breath and / blood that he once skinned I am my skim breath / I am everything off the top and what’s underneath / I am not my haircut I am my splitting hair, I am not / my boots I am not even the sum of blocks walked / on the way to and from the workplace, I am not my workplace / I am not even my work, I am the renewal of cells / membranes kissing each other on the surface / and within my body-project: tongues and speech / turning silence out into grace




Margo LaPierre (www.margolapierreeditor.com) is a queer, neurodivergent Canadian poet and fiction editor. Her debut collection of poetry, Washing Off the Raccoon Eyes, was published by Guernica Editions. She is a poetry selector for Bywords Magazine and Membership Chair of the Editors Canada Ottawa-Gatineau branch.

An interview with Margo LaPierre

Margo LaPierre (www.margolapierreeditor.com) is a queer, neurodivergent Canadian poet and fiction editor. Her debut collection of poetry, Washing Off the Raccoon Eyes, was published by Guernica Editions in 2017.

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

I read books, insatiably, as a young kid. I don’t actually have any memory of my parents reading to me, only of me reading to them in bed at night, since I learned to read early. My parents didn’t buy many toys compared to our neighbours but we had lots of books and we went to the library. Each time my dad went on a work trip he’d bring home an abridged classic for me. I don’t know if he bought them at the airport or if he had to go searching, maybe he was only ever going to one city, one bookstore. Black Beauty, Call of the Wild, and White Fang were favourites. In First Grade the teachers had us start journaling. One week, I wrote “I lost my cat. I am sad” every day, with a drawing of me crying. But scattered about that journals were days when I’d write rhyming poems with an accompanying picture. There was one about a puppet. So that was the true beginning. My dad, being in the computer biz, brought me home a bulky old laptop—the Internet had come around around and made it obsolete. When I wasn’t playing learning games like Reader Rabbit or Word Rescue, I’d transcribe stories from library books on that computer, or write my own. In Eleventh Grade, my first poem was published in the Claremont Review, a journal for young writers. I felt like I’d made it, and so did my English teacher. Oh, to be in the good graces of an English teacher. Then, from 2006–2013, my chaotic undergrad years (I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder 1 in 2008), I wrote Washing Off the Raccoon Eyes, which was published by Guernica Editions in 2017. Writing is the nucleus of my identity, along with all things literary.

You’ve published in a number of journals. How do you decide which journals to send to? 

My literary Twitter game is pretty healthy. I don’t post much but I follow tons of writers, publishers, and journals, and so I get a sense of which journals are publishing what based on their online presence, the poems they share, who’s being published by them. When I was younger, I was more focused on The Big Ones, perhaps simply because they were more visible. Now I try to keep an eye out for feminist journals, or journals that align with my interests, and I’ll send to journals that are publishing other poets in my community. But yeah, Twitter. Or I’ll go to my poetry shelf at home and flip through to the back bio pages, and get ideas/reminders there.

Have you noticed any repeated themes or repeated subject matter in your work? What are you currently working towards?

Themes of mental illness, relationships, women’s rage. The word tender as both a gentle, loving disposition but also the medium of financial negotiation. Husks, shells, things that can be cracked open by growth. When I was quite sick with bipolar a decade ago, before medication, I suffered the delusion of time being flat, of past, present, and future existing simultaneously. It turned out to be quite a dangerous delusion, and luckily I’ve not been immersed in that belief since my diagnosis, but sometimes that idea wafts over my thinking. So I like to play around with time (cause and effect) being able to go forwards or backwards, or for it to roam around as though on a tapestry laid out on the floor. When I edit others’ work, I’m often suggesting authors make their work more chronologically linear. Readers prefer it. If you want to read a story that does the concept justice, read Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (from their excellent book of short stories Stories of Your Life), which was adapted for film in Arrival. A line from Chiang’s story: “I experience past and future all at once; my consciousness becomes a half-century-long ember outside time.” My mom made me watch that movie, after being like This reminds me so much of you! I gushed tears at the end of the movie and the short story. I’m working towards better expressing concepts of perception, and at being a more conscious storyteller. I like that poems can have a simultaneity to them, as often you see the whole poem even as you read line by line.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

In a foundational way, TS Eliot—the poetry was there for me as a kid with Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and as a teenager with poems like “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” and “The Wasteland.” Rilke, Wallace Stevens, and Evelyn Lau had their influence. Sina Queyras made the biggest mark of all on my writing, and I go to her books (Lemonhound, MxT, My Ariel) when I need inspiration, or to feel nestled. Margaret Atwood was a big influence through my youth and so to exclude her name would be an erasure, from my history anyway, but I won’t mention her without also mentioning the awful things she’s done to the assault victims of UBC and those who’ve come to their aid. If you haven’t heard about it, here’s a good place to start : https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/1/17/16897404/margaret-atwood-metoo-backlash-steven-galloway-ubc-accountable.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

Hoa Nguyen, my poetry teacher at Ryerson, carved my voice from the muck. Elana Wolff, my editor at Guernica, taught me the potency of a single word within a poem. Brandon Wint, who teaches privately, nurtured my understanding that poetry can be gentle. Stuart Ross, who teaches privately, recently reanimated my dedication with the message, to my understanding, that poetry is playful and conversational even when it’s serious. My advice to poets seeking publication: contact a poet you admire to inquire about hiring them for a manuscript assessment.

You are currently one of the poetry selectors for the online journal Bywords.ca. Why do you feel this work is important, and what have you learned through the process?

Bywords was one of the first journals that published my work. Amanda Earl, the publisher, is a compelling, authentic writer and hardworking in the community. Bywords.ca is an online journal, but it also has an updated calendar of all the literary events going on in Ottawa. Bywords publishes work by newcomers as well as by veteran powerhouse poets, which is important in keeping those heavy doors open. The judging process is blind, so the poems really do speak for themselves. And perhaps being an online, regional journal, it gets far fewer submissions than, say, Arc Magazine, where I’ve recently begun volunteering also, which makes Bywords more accessible simply due to numbers. (Although Arc has a fantastic mentorship program for emerging poets to hone their craft; poet Stevie Howell is currently the program’s poet-in-residence.) And Bywords pays its poets.

In reading a wide range of both craft, voice, and content in these submissions, I’ve learned to notice extremities. It’s like if you were to look at a hundred faces superimposed onto one another, you’d likely notice two things : structure and deviation. A gorgeous poem has a strong sense of internal structure, which creates tautness and tension, purpose and direction, and often some form of transformation or inversion by the end. But it also possesses deviations : odd, granular, specific choices, often at the vocabulary or grammar level, that instantly set it apart and give it texture.

What are you currently working on?

I’m working on two full-length projects: a poetry collection and a literary fiction novel. The poetry collection is structured in form, but its content is wild and energetic, taking up the elemental to draw out perception and memory. Chaos magic and performative utterances inspired this work. You can find performative language in incantations and manifestos, participating actively in the world’s unfolding, directing its course one way or the next. Contrast with “performative wokeness” that puts on a show of virtue, often without supportive action. Performative language accomplishes action as soon as it’s set to page or breath. That transformative power makes it effective for healing but also capable of destruction.

The novel follows the formation of an unconventional family through the trials and exhilarations of a young sex worker and a bipolar transit worker. It’s told in the limited third-person perspective of its main characters, Stella and JJ. It’s set in Toronto, not far in the future. I aim to write a novel with nuanced care to show that sex workers’ work is legitimate work, that mentally ill people’s choices are legitimate choices.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

Conyer Clayton, whose debut full-length book of poetry (though she is widely published in chapbooks and journals), We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite, is forthcoming with Guernica Editions in spring 2020. Frances Boyle, whose poetry collection, This Nest White (Quattro), was just published, and by whose whimsical, arboreal poems I was enamoured during the Ottawa launch at the Manx a few days ago.