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.

An interview with Jessica Lee McMillan

Jessica Lee McMillan (she/her) is a poet, educator and civil servant. She has an MA in English. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pinhole Poetry, Gap Riot Press, Antilang, Blank Spaces, Pocket Lint (gnurr), Red Alder Review, Dream Pop Journal, SORTES, Lover’s Eye Press, Willows Wept Review and others.

She is a member of the Royal City Literary Arts Society and associate member of The League of Canadian Poets. Recently, she won first place for poetry in the 2022 RCLAS Write On! Contest. She has read her work for audiences in BC and the US. A first generation Canadian, Jessica is a settler who lives in New Westminster, British Columbia on stolen and unsurrendered lands of the QayQayt First Nation.

Website: https://www.jessicaleemcmillan.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JessicaLeeMcM

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

I wrote poetry as any proper gothy teen, took creative writing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, put out a zine in grad school, but got waylaid by the production of discourse on writing. I struggled with fears of idealism, sentimentality and overriding angst in my writing. My voice often felt bigger than I was ready for. While I have always had creative outlets such as painting, I did not write every day until 2019, when I submitted a poem to an anthology commissioned by New Westminster's Poet Laureate at the time, Alan Hill. Accumulation of life experience, ownership of my voice and desperation for creative discipline to counter the proverbial grind finally aligned and I simply could not stop writing after that. The impulse to write is existential. Once I turned on that switch and realized how much I could channel through poetry--sans academia--it became the lost language I would begin to learn speaking again.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

Many of my poems are ekphrastic, particularly in response to music and sometimes film. I seek writing on music as poetry/poetry as music whether it is Langston Hughes, a physicist such as Stephon Alexander or John Coltrane--recently branded among Blue Note's "tone poets". I am not looking for metaphors but proof of interconnection--proof of free jazz in arranged lines. I am interested in ekphrasis as not only a response to art but as a rhetorical device where the poem becomes what it is responding to. I am querying my first chapbook, which looks at theories and etymologies of scale for its poetics and so many of the poems are ekphrasis on notions of scale.

Prose writers Jeanette Winterson and Toni Morrison have informed my poetic fascination with the body and text.

As for specific poets, the Modernists from Mina Loy to Dylan Thomas have an impact on my work but reading Blake set my world on fire at a young age. I have said a few times that I hope to be both Blake and Pound and find a way to be exultant and grounded. And the wonderful thing is, poetry itself inspires me to write because it can evade polarity.

I have special reverence for Fred Wah, bill bisset, Ray Hsu, Adrienne Rich, Randy Lundy, Erin Moure, Dionne Brand, Catherine Owen--and recently Liz Howard, Billy-Ray Belcourt and George Elliott Clarke--but I cannot read enough contemporary poetry. My list grows daily.

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem after you began publishing in literary journals?

I encounter the instruction "send us what you love, not what you think we will love" in submission guidelines, which speaks to the writers who overthink sometimes impossible prediction on editorial taste. I have stayed my course in how I write individual poems because they range in tone, subject and approach from absurd, pastoral and experimental to vispo, concrete, and form poetry. I tend to let the poem be itself and look for a journal where it may fit.

I have to think first about what a poem wants and any audience comes in the editing stages. When a literary journal has been gracious enough to give feedback, I keep it in mind for valuable information about legibility to audience.

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

I could not evolve without mentorship. In the last several years, I have navigated much of this solo and it is easy to reach a plateau. I took a poetry course last fall with Kevin Spenst that helped me explore many techniques with more intensity. His playful, clever and well-read direction changed my trajectory.

This spring, I was also honoured to work with Ray Hsu who had such a remarkable way of gently allowing me to be more receptive to how my poems move, astutely guiding me on my reservations, assumptions and considerations of form. Their reflections on artistic vision and ordering the manuscript were foundational to understanding my poems on the individual and collective level. I don't think many poets are looking for compliments but want to be seen. Sometimes when we are on track, we don't know it due to subjective proximity. Dr. Hsu gifted me observations that pull the very threads that the poems articulate.

I am also grateful to become more connected to writing communities because I want to grow precisely in order to reach and support the writing community.

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

A. Gregory Frankson is a poet has done a lot for spoken word in Canada over the decades and has recently edited an anthology missing from the CanLit canon: the absolutely essential AfriCANthology: Perspectives of Black Canadian Poet. https://www.africanthology.ca

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.

 

Train #19 After

Eugene Stevenson

 

 

During the year
he was away, 

railroad
management 

renamed
Train #13, 

changed
the number, 

to Train #19,
after it 

struck & killed
a little girl 

at a grade crossing
in the rain.

 

 

 

Eugene Stevenson, the son of immigrants, the father of expatriates, lives in the mountains of western North Carolina. Author of The Population of Dreams (Finishing Line Press 2022), he is a Pushcart Prize nominee whose poems have appeared in After Hours Journal, Angel City Review, The Hudson Review, Loch Raven Review, San Pedro River Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, & Volney Road Review among others. In the distant past, he worked at the Erie-Lackawanna, New York Central, Penn Central, and Rock Island Railroads.

Apocryphal

David Barrick

 

 

An eclipse isn’t due for another ten months, yet here’s one right now. Gauzy shadow like pantyhose pulled over a face—the schoolyard tinted sepia. A gremlin is tinkering with the firmament, preaches the lunch monitor. Do not look out that window, she says, rapping knuckle after knuckle with a ruler. You’ll be struck blind. Compliant, the student body chews the cud of cold cut sandwiches. On the sly, I tilt my arithmetic tablet, and behind it, fashion a pinhole camera from my milk carton. I point it upwards and out. A colicky pinprick of sun appears between my hands—toy solar flares licking dust mite sprites. No one else can see this diorama, its fragile catechesis.            

 

 

 

David Barrick is author of the poetry collection Nightlight (Palimpsest Press, 2022), as well as the chapbooks Incubation Chamber (Anstruther Press, 2019) and Two Dreams: Stratford and The Copyist (The Alfred Gustav Press, 2022). His poems have been published in The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, EVENT, and other literary journals. He lives and teaches in London, Ontario, where is Managing Director of Antler River Poetry (formerly Poetry London).

Three Ghost Trains at Niobrara

Jeff Burt

 

/
I have had too much grace.
Common wisdom says it cannot be so,
but I have had too much luck,
                     just too much of too much. 

I am like a clay side to a mountain
saturated by rain:  I slip then slide,
                     changing good boundaries. 

I am like a river that has leapt its banks
and gone to ruin orchards of friendships,
                     pastures of providence, valleys of love. 

I am like a spur of a train track rusting
under bird-less skies that ends in field of wild grass,
                     abandoned boxcars, spikes.

 

//
Workmanlike. Lower Missouri, river of commerce,
pack mule, wide and polluted, flat, churning below,
                     ever churning. 

Downstream the channels deepen, pace quickens,
the wild and rampant dominates beneath
                               yet never breaks into rapids. 

I respect no levee, rise to overcome impedance,
stem the flow of contributories,
                     make loved ones back away. 

Like the trestle that no one sees and thinks train,
I am graffiti, a spot for dispossessing,
                     in search of missing steam. 

                                      

///

I went down to the river near sunset.  One heron
split the sky and the last I saw of it
                     was blurred shadow in still backwater. 

I went down to the river because it was late
because the trestle was close and the train would go by,
                               and the smoke would wrestle white 

and black and seem almost cheerful.
I went down to the river looking for the scented word,
                               the petals of apology, of praise, 

for the shape of a common dialect, but a single twig dangled
in the water and drew me off into storms.  When I left the river
                               I passed the bridge but did not cross. 

I took the train tracks in the twilight and stumbled
toward home and as I passed the last house saw my self
                               in the dark window of ignorance.

 

 

                                        

 

Jeff Burt lives in California with his wife amid the redwoods and two-lane roads wide enough for one car. He grew up in Wisconsin, Texas, and Nebraska, and the landscape of the American Midwest still populates his vision.. He has work in Rabid Oak, Red Wolf Journal, Williwaw Journal, and Heartwood. He was the featured 2015 summer issue poet of Clerestory, and won the 2017 Cold Mountain Review narrative poetry prize.