January 22

 

rob mclennan

 

 

Cole Swensen: should something happen                   to the heart.
You:             a punctuation                    based on elevation, 

thin air. More buoyant 

than I’ve seen you                                 , lately. The composition
of a grain of sand. How mountains, 

weather, artefacts    of library archive. The needle

and the ink-stained press.  A cloud                   of campfire sparks.

I work a desire                                       for an echo

beyond laundry,      that single, unbroken sentence.

Our young ladies               reclaim two-day-old snow, the distance
of their reach                    their only measure.

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include the poetry collection the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

IN THE LINEAR

Elena Johnson

 

 

 

The train cuts through,
cuts through. Pines 

lift their boughs to the wind,
snags reveal their blackened wood. 

Flashes of birch bark
in the flickering sun. 

What hints remain, remind.

A flock of starlings
near the tracks – 

they startle,
lift suddenly upward.

Alongside
electrical wires 

crisscross, stretch taut,
hang slack. 

Above the wires,
clouds –                                                                                 

suspended
in a pattern of their own.

 

 

 

Elena Johnson is the author of Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra (Gaspereau, 2015), a collection of poems written at a remote ecology research station in the Yukon. Her poetry has been published widely, and has been set to music and performed by choirs in Vancouver and Brooklyn. The French translation of her book, Notes de terrain pour la toundra alpine (tr. Luba Markovskaia), was published in 2021 and won the John Glassco Prize. She works as an editor and writing mentor in Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish territory. She is one of the editors of Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House, 2021).

The Parking Garage Beneath Westside Pavilion

James Croal Jackson

 

 

I slept beneath the mall for some time
to avoid the burden of capitalism ha! 

if I could that would be glorious to
avoid the landlord hey look I am in 

the parking garage what garbage
all these ads for movies I do and 

do not want to see but I would
not know I did not want to see it 

until seeing that is the predicament
I do not have the cash nor the time 

to spend paying for rent give me
gunmetal cement walls six floors 

beneath the surface where I drive 
to where not even bugs venture 

there I am unbound
I fly in my dreams

 

 

 

 

James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. He has three chapbooks: Count Seeds With Me (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2022), Our Past Leaves (Kelsay Books, 2021), and The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights, 2017). He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, PA. (jamescroaljackson.com)

Dark Brain of Night

Adam Lawrence

after Charles Simic

 

This song is a perforated line in your head, a distant chainsaw or electrified fence. You perform a one-man, one-fly vaudeville act (or a scene from Breaking Bad). Somehow bring all limbs into contact with every piece of furniture in the room. Toe obliterated on the solid oak foot of a dresser. Knee lacerated after barking a file cabinet. Groin barely escaping religious conversion in its intimate brush with a pair of scissors hanging on the corner of the desk. But the (aptly named) fly is being itself, is everywhere you are not, is the dark brain of night. And before that—the furniture coexisted peacefully with the fly.

 

 

 

 

Adam Lawrence’s poetry has recently appeared in SurVision Magazine, Shot Glass Journal, and FreeFall Magazine. In his spare time, Adam dabbles in small press projects. He works as a freelance editor and writer in Florenceville-Bristol, NB, the “French Fry Capital of the World.”

Night remains interested sculptor

 

Shawn Adrian

 

 

 

Night remains interested sculptor,

                        of us, epidermal

day-glow phantoms. Underneath

the deck, dusk-loomed

               violet bells nod,

with the hush, which I can’t

identify, flowers or weeds.

Save the silhouetted.   Walk into

openness, past captivity, and

past      the want to remain

                            consolidated.

Stiff egos might crystallize,

closed. Mine (as if I could

directly know any other—

through some sort of sympathetic

resonance) feels impressionable,

prone to                   interference.

                    Trees’ creaks turn

toward a morning of level-

shimmer, among leaf veins.

I am         the interactions, their

seeking through cadence. I

can’t remember it all, or its very

     consequences.

The fragments tease me, my

narrative—my precious devices.

                Then, what happened,

an instant’s hesitation to fractals.

I’m making it up, it being our

isomorphic moment. The subtle-

ties intone my guilty privilege,

for passing behind devastation

              that’s catastrophic—

polar melts and rainwater

toxicity.       Yet, it’s cruel,

cruel in the soft ways, and

their familiarity.

What sympathies lay with

     wishing better for my

cocooned-comfortable life?

And the largest breath would

gasp after a prolonged

asphyxiation, a near-suffocation.

That morning,

                that nature compelled.

 

 

 

 

Shawn Adrian is a poet currently residing in Selkirk, Manitoba. His two poetry chapbooks are Metis head birth & one hundred heads hydra (ZED Press, 2021), and Metanoia’s Prairie (Anstruther Press, 2022).

Low under indigo,

 

Elana Wolff

 

 

hull of the day.
Two across Formica sitting
underneath a metal ceiling
lit by pinpoint stars.
The land outside is incognito ~
eddy in the rattle of a storm.
Trees along the track
are great galoots
in grubby habits,
grabbing at the glass
in mad abandon.
Before the wind
they’d stood aloof,
at attention,
dutiful—
simply watching trains
and passing wildlife.
Anyone can understand
they can’t be wooden
totems always,
specially not in moody
mid-December.
I lean against the window,
feel their heaving
hitch my breath.
Your face
in dotted dark
is parsed ~
          a noun,
an apparition.

 

 

Elana Wolff lives and works in Thornhill, Ontario—the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat First Nations. Her poems and creative nonfiction have recently appeared (or will soon appear) in Arc online (Awards of Awesomeness), Bear Review, Best Canadian Poetry 2021, Canadian Literature, CV2, Grain, Montréal Serai, MONO, Pinhole Poetry, Literary Review of Canada, Taddle Creek 25th Anniversary Edition, Waterwheel Review, and White Wall Review. Her collection, Swoon (Guernica Editions), won the 2020 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry. Her newest collection is Shape Taking (Ekstasis Editions, 2021).

 

SATURDAY MORNING, JANUARY

 

Matt Robinson

 

 

 

Post-storm, the new year’s sun—a soft heat
through the window—toasts the squint
lost sleep of your brow. The dog again, somehow,
sigh-purrlicued behind & against you, a warm
hint, in the near permanent dell—the sunk
weave—of your chair’s cushion’s fur-fetid
funk. She’s all belly & organic heave, a sigh-
manic white noise: a whole mood on huffy junket.         
Poised to gulp more of too sweet morning
coffee, there’s then that moment when Saturday’s
soundscape crescendoes & goes all-at-once,
twice, askew. A spin cycle’s engaged with a click;
Fortnite’s first-personing echoes anew, joy-
sticked down the stairs; your wife’s thumping
a far room’s desk into being, moving chairs
& spare parts. The dog starts & then settles,
a kettle on the verge of calling the day’s pot’s
matted black, but then doesn’t, having thought
better (not at all?) of that smack-talking
gambit.           You think you’d be fine, if—
you suppose—you ended right here, right
now: with this sun’s simple heat, this
dog’s metered breath, a family’s indiscreet
shifting through inane tasks & routines
on this fine, bright, early day. But you want
all the more now to stay: stay & curse
the icy idea of death, of being a stupid guest,
a minor character, in the crude whimsical acts
of your body’s dumb play; fear mostly the way
you’ll at some point never know—the hows,
the whens & the whos; future’s splay—of
what’s just now, right now, again now, again
now, become dear—become clear, post-storm,
in the new year’s soft heat.

 

 

 

 

Matt Robinson has published six full-length poetry collections, including Tangled & Cleft (Gaspereau, 2021) and Some Nights It’s Entertainment; Some Other Nights Just Work (Gaspereau, 2016), in addition to numerous chapbooks. He has won the Grain Prose Poetry Prize, the Petra Kenney Award, and The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, among others. He is on the editorial board of The Fiddlehead and he plays a fair bit a beer league hockey. He lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS, Canada).

the wood

Stan Rogal

 

 

 

in the beginning was the wood weaved dark & barkish
a’buzz with innumerable bees in immemorial elms
here, echoes of light halloo through the pitch from the get-go
that root

           an ah-some sense of strict irreversibility

paper peaches are tears, mistakes are revelations

           follow the droppings of the black sheep
                      (a language of volcanic harassment)       

this is the machine set to replicate itself from raw materials
not so much a proscribed space as a field of
predominant tendencies

           one direction expresses order, the other magic
                      you need only stretch your hands to establish
                                 contact with the

invisible

 

 

 

Stan Rogal: I live and write in Toronto. Work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies in Canada, the US and Europe. The author of 27 books, including 12 poetry and several chapbooks. A more-or-less conscious plagiarist, one foot in modernism, the other in the avant garde, a black belt in Tai-Chi.

SKATE SHARPENER’S PANDEMIC LAMENT

 

Matt Robinson

 

 

                  It’s damage as cottage
industry gone ghoulish, as far as I'm concerned;
this sideline of mine’s—I’ve learned—a way
to get out of the house on nights, on weekends,
whenever I can. But it’s past high time I re-evaluate
my plan: I read somewhere how the death of a star’s easy
to confuse for the birth of a cell, if you only glance—
too quickly—or you maybe just squint? I’m skint,
what with all these latest restrictions & shit. Worn
down & tuckered. My net worth’s in the can. I’m all edges
& angles—everything’s a bit of argumentative math:
grumbling cos, sin & tan—a matter of sickened physics,
slant-wrangled attacks & a cruel-tooled, daily grind.
My books? You’ll find them a flint about to spark
the bone-dry kindling of my anxious mind. A kind of
fool’s errand, this constant cutting & cutting along
gleaming, steeled quicks. Each & every new shift’s a test
of my mettle, a weight my filing hands can’t balance,
can’t settle along the shining crest of someone else’s need
for speed or purchase. It all rings hollow. It may be time
to cut my losses, is my guess.

 

 

Matt Robinson has published six full-length poetry collections, including Tangled & Cleft (Gaspereau, 2021) and Some Nights It’s Entertainment; Some Other Nights Just Work (Gaspereau, 2016), in addition to numerous chapbooks. He has won the Grain Prose Poetry Prize, the Petra Kenney Award, and The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, among others. He is on the editorial board of The Fiddlehead and he plays a fair bit a beer league hockey. He lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS, Canada).

On a night bus

Ewan Whyte

On a night bus between cities,

the overhead lights turned out,

 

a stillness of strangers resting side by side

in their seats.

 

Long after midnight, in the outer darkness,

along the sides of the highway

 

the mangled tree-tops of autumn pass

in a grotesque parade of shapes

 

against a half-moon haze.

While watching a procession-

 

of collapsing monsters our ancestors

would have called gods,  

 

I receive the confirming phone call

that you have died.

 

Most are asleep on this bus from the back

I can hear the sleep-fighting voices

 

of talking children through the silencing

of their mothers.

 

In front a lit-up electronic devise is reflecting

off a window

 

double-imaging the trees on the ceiling.

 

(2)

 

I think of you and your outrageous life-

with its odd mixture of the high and low brow.

 

Your piano playing of Beethoven and Brahms,

your respectful mimicking

 

of Dinu Lipati’s recording of Bach’s Joy of Man’s Desiring  

during his remission from cancer.

 

Your rendering of Bach as a subtle question and answering,

and how you would obsess on the disembodied bliss of static time in art.

 

Your ghost held back from the self-conscious rush to death we all face,

where there for brief moments is no time at all.

 

Against this, there were the hardened strippers you would date.

Bringing them into the church to drink wine

 

and play the organ after the Montreal bars closed. 

Your comment that this urge against the sacrosanct

 

is in all of us to smash past an image to get to what is behind it

to find only other persona. You said you had grown tired of this.

 

Your weeklong bush walks of a hundred  miles.

Your interpretation of Colville’s painting, Dog and Bridge,

 

the frozen instant of the dog crossing a bridge

where brooding imminence is created

 

by the carefully constructed geometrical design

drawing our line of sight to the German Sheppard, centre right

 

intensifying our sense of impending violence.  

You spoke of the storms of sorrow that would come back on you-

 

the ordained demons of darkness hovering near you,

an aching loneliness, that could only be taken away by impersonal art.

 

Passing into a town, the opposing traffic charges toward the bus

in a sudden heart-pounding rush of blood.

 

I block the headlights, covering one eye,

losing myself in the central yellow line on the road. 

 

After a time, I look up, waking into a changed landscape

to the sound of  Mozart’s Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

 

in the voices of small children from the back of the bus,

through their mother’s gentle words about sleep.

 

 

 

Ewan Whyte is a writer and translator. He has written for the Globe & Mail and The Literary Review of Canada. He is the author of two books of essays: Desire Lines: Essays on Art Poetry & Culture, Shifting Paradigms: Essays on Art & Culture, and Entrainment, a book of poetry, as well as a translation of the rude ancient Roman poet Catullus.

FAITH

 

Jessica Lee McMillan

 

 

brace earth for disbelief.
this room you forgot
why you went, or when
you laughed last or read
a scale undismayed
that you were any stones
at all. forgot bones you bury,
carry you. now erode
at edges, more lines at eye
than iris. your weathering
is a pivot, a readable frame.
when you whittle
to abjection,
you have found
the wilding of faith.
when you stop to see
red globes link to blood,
words mend to phrase
in immanent patterns,
you may feel bewildered
anyway. you stray off
and make it to the petals
of a daisy. to days
of making chains.
you look close enough
and become its bee,
bumbling in squeals
of children caught
in fuzzy swath of yellow
black in a motion
minute without premise
of next. faith is in
the matter-less gap,
it tracks
from day to night,
lonesome as the end
of a train, bracing
for landscape,
rocks and silence.

 

 

Most people in high school thought Jessica Lee McMillan used psychedelics, but really, she was learning to become a poet. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Blank Spaces, Pocket Lint (gnurr), The South Shore Review, Antilang, Tiny Spoon, Pinhole Poetry, Dream Pop Journal, Willows Wept Review, SORTES, Lover's Eye Press, Red Alder Review and others. She writes from New Westminster, British Columbia.

home

Toast Wong

i want a fresh pack of cigs, scratch tickets, a full tank of gas, cheap thrills at the petro-can. i want to dance in the spotlight under these yellow x's, a captive audience of closed storefronts. i want the night to stay over. i want her to fall asleep on my chest so that i can feel the crest and trough of her breath. i want to run my hands through the sky, shake out all the starstuff, count all the wishes i made on what falls out. i want to close my eyes. i want to stay in motion forever, like a shark or a toddler learning to ride without training wheels. i want to know what it feels like to drive south on the northbound gardener. i want lake ontario to take me in her arms, fall into her like the bluffs will, one day. i want to breathe water. i want it to taste like air. i want it to feel like home.

 

 

 

 

 

Toast Wong: I am an activist, engineer and butch idiot living in Toronto, Ontario, writing about diaspora and gender, divorce and science. My work has previously been published in Untethered, which is how I heard about Train. I like themes of the science of motion, geography, and passing by/through/across bodies of water, and I'd like to think that those are the things that people like about trains as well.

I have found you nine times before, maybe ten And I’ll find you again (Emily St. Mandel, Station 11)

Nava Fader

 

 

dear honeysuckle dear wind that shook
the rafters dear rafters 

dear tumult dear
you don’t know what you’ve got 

dear absence of quiet
sound of quiet’s terrible 

wingspan swan song
stays for a good long time 

I did not ask you
things 

elbowed from feather your lightest
touch 

fuck you and you
love spring eternal and all 

that get the joke
waiting the worst 

of it. Niagara
falls for one

last time un-
remarked upon 

dear quiet
of absence dear 

one wished
for and away 

shoofly
pie the chickens 

come home to 

 

 

Nava Fader attended SUNY Buffalo’s Poetics Programs, writing her thesis on Adrienne Rich. She has two full-length collections and several chapbooks out in the world. Much/some/a bit of her poems are pilfered from other poets (Garcia Lorca, Sylvia Plath, Rimbaud, Michael Basinski, JH Prynne) as well as the internet at large, particularly Wikipedia. She views poetry-making as a cobbling together….and a curating and reusing of what is already around on paper and online and in the mouths of (insert noun here).

I don't want to die but I've got no choice

 

 

Gale Acuff

 

 

but I can choose to live forever when
I go and if I choose the good is what
they say at church and Sunday School although
they've got no evidence, no one's returned
from being dead as far as I know but
they say Jesus did, it's in the Bible
if I want proof and so on but I don't
believe even though they say that faith is
the evidence of things not seen and all
that but still I'm skeptical--that's a good
word for someone only ten years old but
I don't use it around them, I keep my
good sense to myself, I wonder for how
long—until I'm dead, let’s say. Then we'll see. 

 

 

 

Gale Acuff has had poetry published in Ascent, Reed, Journal of Black Mountain College Studies, The Font Chiron Review, Poem, Adirondack Review, Florida Review, Slant, Arkansas Review, South Dakota Review, Roanoke Review and many other journals in over a dozen countries. He has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel, The Weight of the World, and The Story of My Lives.

Gale has taught university English courses in the US, China, and Palestine.