Conduits

Amy LeBlanc


They say she lifted the calf from the bed
like a coil of rope, unspun and curling
with unsung sea salt through the sides of a boat.
He did not cry bubbles like a spool of thread.
instead, the water wept from his back,
the same shade of grey as a smoke stack in winter.

They say she held him for sixteen months,
she’d carried him over a year.
She keened underwater where no one could hear
the slaughter of her marrow or the ticking of a clock.
The cascading waves could not take him away.
to her, he weighed no more than a shell.

They say her cartilage ached from her passion play,
the labor of days spent crawling through water.
When her swollen body refused to sleep,
she packed his things and swam for weeks.



Amy LeBlanc holds a BA (Hons) in English Literature and creative writing from the University of Calgary. She is currently non-fiction editor at filling Station magazine. Her work has appeared, or is scheduled to appear in Room, Prairie Fire, Contemporary Verse 2, and EVENT among others. Amy won the 2018 BrainStorm Poetry Contest for her poem 'Swell'. She is the author of two chapbooks, most recently Ladybird, Ladybird published with Anstruther Press in August 2018.

An interview with John Luna

John Luna: I am a dual Canadian-American citizen born of Mexican + American expatriates. Besides writing, my practice is as a visual artist whose background includes painting, sculpture and installation, and a teacher working in the areas of art, design and art history. I currently reside on an island off of the west coast of N. America. Previous publication of written work in art criticism and poetry has appeared in Ditch, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, Canyon, Cordite, and Matrix, among others. A first collection of poems, Listing (Decoupage Publishing, 2015) was released through a small independent press with the help of a crowdfunding campaign. A second book-length manuscript was recently (2017) shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry.

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

Sometime in grade school… There was a huge making culture in our house… My mother was an etcher who also worked with puppets, wrote children’s stories, and made us toys. My father had been a painter and curator and also wrote poetry, fiction and entertained a host of unpublished research projects, and my sister drew pictures and wrote stories… This was a huge component of mutually sustained esteem for an underdog family. The will to prolong and preserve that culture is something that I have trouble framing and frankly don’t want to; it (that culture) is formless, or it formlessly asserts itself in the desire to continue to write.
  
Your author biography mentions your work in painting, sculpture and installation. Are you able to work on poetry at all during the creation of visual artwork? How are you able to keep the two separate?

You put your finger on something very difficult. I used to move back and forth between them, swearing one off… because the problem is the notion of an outlet, and that the enterprise has to seem like the only possible choice (outlet or escape or way of going forward) otherwise it succumbs to all kinds of limiting conventions. But fertile times for one are also (generally) good for the other, and I learned a lot about how to approach editing after years of problems by adopting tools or attitudes used in painting and collage or assemblage. One problem is my excusing a lack of studio time because writing has been happening, or vice versa, and knowing that this is just a sop for the drive.

I don’t know that I want these things to be separate (I can recall my Dad giving me Blake’s Dante to underscore the idea of doing/being both), but I know that they have, often, very different audiences. And I don’t want the product of both situations to point back to some notional person (the hybrid artist/author person) at all; something about the self-consciousness of this approach is repellant. I am in the midst of organizing a show right now of visual things that also includes writing, and the importance, the priority, is in maintaining a kind of incoherence between them as a way of addressing this problem. A parallel I am trying to address it is by having a study in the attic and a studio in the basement, so that this kind of Bachelardian (Poetics of Space) construct can supplant the idea of being both people. I like the idea of the house, with its naïve space, as generator…   

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

I studied poetry minimally in school (one creative writing class years ago), and kind of prize my amateurism, because thinking of the work as professionalized, conventionalized or academicized is something that was a tremendous grind for me in pursuing an MFA in painting and teaching art and art theory in colleges and in high school; It furnished me with a kind of place-identity and set of passcodes, but it also got to be an awful purgatory that I can only seem to work my way out of by working in less-formal teaching situations.

My mother’s library introduced me to Anne Sexton as a teenager, and the idea of this kind of confessional yet hysterically detached, dry irony was something I loved at that time (15? Later, I would pick up the threads of this through Eliot, Plath and Auden, in that order)…When I was seventeen there was a sort of punk rock t-shirt shop that sold t-shirts with Picasso’s sketch of Rimbaud on them. I asked my father who he was, and he reached into the shelf and handed me Louise Varèse’s translation of Une Saison En Enfer, and, as they say, nothing was the same. I guess there was kind of a teenage dandy cult I shared with in my neighborhood that included Rimbaud and Baudelaire and Eliot and around that time Artaud entered the picture… and a few years after (early 20’s) the hugely important (to me) in media res questioning of Rilke and related negative theology of Paul Celan.

Candidly: it took years to shake off the influence of reading poetry in translation, which was kind of problematic from the point of view of both developing a sense of rhythm and a tendency to valorize/exoticize European surrogate father figures… My father had grown up with a lot of racism trying to become an academic as a Mexican in Los Angeles, and spoke about five or six languages, sort of reinventing himself in European cultural terms and this rubbed off on me I suppose. He had the best poetry library I had ever seen, with lots of bilingual presentations of Hispanic authours, so I also read Lorca, Neruda and Vallejo; the latter was a favourite because I was attracted to his obscurity and use of neologism (Trilce).

Later interests were more of those same threads: Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Hart Crane, W.H. Auden and John Ashbery…I sort of credit this continuum of gay uncle-figures (a self-conscious one, I think, linking Crane to Auden to Ashbery and, relatedly, John Cage and the art of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly), a crew of ironized aesthetes, with providing safe passage out of the European problem while still preserving the stoic dandy problem, which is a thing I seem to need to read and use. Recently I have been reading older essays by Joan Didion in the same way.

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

My family was hugely supportive of the whole creative enterprise when I was young (my current family is a great help now), but the relationship to writing was/is at a remove, in part because those years with my parents were years in which the adolescent trope of writing as a form of privacy was the mainstay. But there really was no mentor figure in terms of writing, which probably led to the problem of literature-poisoning at a young age that then had to be grown out of, gradually. At times I’m glad about this, as I put some stock in the notion (from Harold Bloom) of the value of misreading something, and mentors transfer personality and some notion of coherence along with whatever encouragement or craft is delivered… I’m very wary of received information and feel a kind of repulsion towards passed-on lesson where creativity is concerned unless (as in some art teaching) they can be either grounded in the craft limits of a specific tradition or problematized by fundamental mysteries in the way that, for instance, the entropic character of art materials can problematize artmaking.

What are you currently working on?

There are two ongoing projects, both represented by publications in Train. One is a series of fourteen line “reading poems” that use the notion of a reading journal as a casting off point. These will be featured in some form in the exhibition I alluded to…

The second is a small book-length collection of rather dense prose poems (The Accords) whose names are all taken from or referring to commercial fragrances. Train published “(Rive Gauche Pour Homme Eau de Toilette (Discontinued)) in November, which was from this collection. This had originally formed the heart of a longer book that I entered for the Robert Kroetsch Award in 2017; after it was shortlisted but didn’t win, I broke the book up and began working on the parts… The other two pieces (a series of ekphrastic pieces based on galleries in New York, and a sort of negative confession by way of poems based on a suit of clothes) are still in limbo. I am still adding to and editing The Accords, which will be about fifty pages as a word document, but will be trying to find someone who wants to publish it soon, though I have to get over my discomfort with independent publishing houses that ask you to compare your work to other authours they represent as a way of disambiguating your practice, a request that frankly appalls me.

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

I think Nora Collen Fulton (someone I met here in BC, now residing in Montreal) is a chasteningly brilliant individual. I saw her reading from Life Experience Coolant some years ago and it was sort of that experience of just having the voice float as an icebound, room-clearing digestif that you always hope you’ll hear in your own work as you pick your way through the bits and pieces of work/doesn’t work and warm/cool/cold in a piece of writing. She will probably hate my mentioning this, and may already be receiving plenty of attention for all I know, but is it enough, and can it hurt?

The Light Salesmen

Aidan Chafe


They come on a Saturday wearing their Sunday best. They come ringing bells
with songs in their blood. They come high on resolve, itching for ears.

They come before your first coffee. They come when you’re not dressed
eating avocado and toast. When your mind is miserable and misunderstood, they come. 
They come when you’re afraid of honesty and the best of you is hiding.

They come waltzing in with wings. With fireflies in the belly hocking broken flashlights.

They speak of the Electrician. Ask if you’ve seen him, wonder if you’re looking,
and how long you’ve been in the dark. They claim to know his whereabouts,
offer you a map with his coordinates.

When you hesitate—no, but thank you—they leave 
moving swiftly towards your neighbour.




Aidan Chafe is a writer and public school teacher. His debut collection of poems Short Histories of Light was published with McGill-Queen’s University Press (2018). His work has appeared in literary journals including CV2, Event, PRISM international and The Maynard. He lives on the unceded territory of the Qayqayt First Nation (Burnaby, BC).

NOTES ON A DIMINISHED LIFE

Billy-Ray Belcourt


I GOOGLE MYSELF TO FEEL LESS ATOMISTIC
I HAPPEN UPON A MISPLACED HEADLINE ABOUT A MAN WITH A NAME LIKE MINE
AND TODAY THAT IS MY BODY
MY KINK IS THE ANNIHILATION OF MY CORE SENSE OF SELF
ON TINDER, I SWIPE RIGHT ON POST-STRUCTURALISTS AND NO ONE ELSE
I AM LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WITH WHOM TO PURCHASE A SKINNY HOME
AT THE INTERSECTION OF FISSURED SYSTEMS OF MEANING
“THE BODY” WAS A LOST OBJECT LONG BEFORE THE PRESENT
A BODY BY WAY OF A BODY THAT WAS NOT BY WAY OF A BODY THAT WAS NOT
SELF-MAKING: A QUIXOTIC HOBBY OF THE ANTI-HISTORIANS
TOP ME, BUT ONTOLOGICALLY
THE POET IS ALWAYS AGAINST “X” WHERE “X” IS HERSELF AND THE SOVEREIGN “I”
PLUS AN EVER-MULTIPLYING SET OF PRACTICES OF CATEGORIZATION
HOW CLOSE CAN ONE GET TO THE NOT-I
AND STILL HOLD A SENSE OF SAFETY IN BEING IN THE WORLD
I AM IN A STRUGGLE AGAINST SELF-ABOLITION (ANNE BOYER)
I AM IN A STRUGGLE AGAINST THE APPEAL OF ALWAYS BEING IN A STRUGGLE
CAN ONE BE AGAINST DATA AND STILL BE FOR KINSHIP
I ATTEND TO THE ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN PREFIXES AND SUFFIXES
UN- AND -ING TELL ME ENOUGH ABOUT “CONTEXTS OF PERCEIVING” (HIROMI GOTO)
PROVE TO ME THAT SHE WHO DESPISES THE WORLD IS NOT ALSO TRANSFIXED BY IT
I WANT TO WRITE AS THOUGH EACH WORD WERE A LIMB TO BE PUPPETEERED

I WANT TO BE STOMACHED BY A METAPHOR; THERE IS NOTHING ELSE TO IT

ALWAYS, I MAKE ENDINGS OUT OF ENDINGS



Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a Ph.D. student and Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar in the Department of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta. This Wound is a World is his first book; it won the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize, and a 2018 Indigenous Voices Award. His next book, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, is due out in the fall of 2019 with House of Anansi Press.

Museum of Failures

Chris Banks


Henry Ford’s first two automobile companies failed
before America fell in love with the Model T. Cold
Fusion would be a great name for a night-club, or
a game-engine. In the Museum of Failures, uniformed
men panic as the Hindenburg bursts its small nova,
a piñata of fire, over a naval air-field in New Jersey.
Sky-cars and jet-packs never make it past design.
Frankenstein’s monster is fiction, unless, of course,
it is a metaphor for a viable pig-human embryo, or
nuclear deregulation. Chernobyl and Fukushima are
no one’s holiday destinations. A husband awakes
in restraints on a hospital gurney after deciding to go
for one beer. Another military operation goes horribly
wrong. In the Museum of Failures, there is a whole wing
dedicated to the human heart, its ability to self-detonate,
cause catastrophic loss. The story of the body is failure
amid evolution. Success is an algorithm sifted from many
defeats. Our lives are a landscape of small failures, but
we love to look at photo albums anyways. My inner
life fails to meet my expectations. Let’s stop pretending.
Be our authentic selves. Let’s stop failing to hear one
another. I’ve always wanted to write a poem called:
“The Care-taker of Loneliness Meets a Young Courtesan”.
which is either brilliant or a terrible title. Be honest,
but not too much. Emotions are okay, but keep out
the bodily fluids, unless it is blood. In the Museum of
Failures, this poem is written on a parchment of skin,
kept under glass, beside Creationism and the Avro Arrow,
adult baby food and vegetable-flavoured Jell-o.
If you are reading this, know you have failed to remain
undetected. The authorities are coming for you.



Chris Banks is the author of four previous collections of poems. His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada.  His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, Prism International, among other publications. He lives and writes in Waterloo, Ontario.

 

An interview with Canisia Lubrin

Canisia Lubrin is a writer, editor, teacher and critic. She has contributed to Vallum, Brick, Quill & Quire among others and her poetry has been widely anthologised, including forthcoming translations into Spanish. She is the author of the poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis (Buckrider Books, 2017). Lubrin’s fiction is included in The Unpublished City: Volume I (Book*hug, 2017), finalist for the 2018 Toronto Book Award.

Photo credit: Anna Keenan

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

I'm not sure that I can offer a definitive memory. I do remember writing stories at five, maybe four. Mostly with drawings and mainly involving animals and the woods and apparitions. So very early. The joy and hard-won possibilities and discovery hoped or even promised in the act keep me writing. Writing is a great way of making sense of the world.

Have you noticed a difference in how you approach writing poems now that you’ve published a full-length collection?

Not that I can tell. No.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

Dionne Brand. Folk Singers in St. Lucia. My grandmother. Derek Walcott. Kamau Brathwaite. Aimé Césaire. Many others, I'm sure, though I think confluence and even dissonance are better ways to characterize them. There's a lot of value in knowing what you don't want.

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

I've always valued guidance. I've not always had it in writing because I didn't think of myself as a capital-W-writer for a very long time. I knew I loved writing and practiced it daily--in isolation. But life as a published writer always seemed a far-off impossibility. Still, I'd been blessed with very encouraging teachers: Mrs. Marshall in grade school, and in hight school English: Ms. Anthony (sharp-edged encouragement); very supportive, positive forces in others like Ms. Cappel (Social Studies) and Mr. Dasrat (who brought such fun to English Literature). Our principal, Mr. Egbert James, drew me back to math after a catastrophic 4 years in the same. In many ways, James's artistic sensibility about math led me to the interior rhythms of writing. In university, I had greatly encouraging professors in Jennifer Duncan, Rishma Dunlop and Priscila Uppal. Michael Helm also. The most impactful force and grace in my development through both her writings and mentorship in life is Dionne Brand. She's the best. And you will give her all her things.

You are currently the poetry editor for Humber Literary Review and a consulting editor for Buckrider Books/Wolsak and Wynn. Why do you feel this work is important, and what have you learned through the process?

I imagine editing is important to every editor who appreciates how this work fits into the broader ecosystem of writing. All of the things that necessitate this process--every microcosmic and macrocosmic factor--lead variously to the eventual life of a book and that magical interplay between its author and reader. No matter how I feel about it, editing is important for the ways it stems from our being in the world. It is a special focus on improvement. It is a form of sculpting that brings the world into sharper relief. As much a technical exercise as it is an exercise in insight: one you learn, and the other, you also learn--though some things make the grasp of the latter easier and necessarily complicated at once. I hope I'm learning on par with the authors I edit.

What are you currently working on?

Fiction: long and short. Nonfiction. Poetry. Exercising more frequently. Getting more sleep. Drinking more water. Mastering the jump rope.

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

Chimwemwe Undi. M. NourbeSe Philip. Though what is even better is a world in which the measure of poetry is greater felt in spite of its conflation with attention or reception. That a poem will always find its true home, which is its best reader.
 

immemoriam

Jeremy Stewart

I

cannot do nothing
in dreamland I spit
tase your fears
drive off
fall from the wheel
of seasons
with lists I wish I wrote
not even those
horsey medicine mix-up
if we had known
deciduous thoughts
a situationist art school
in remotest hinterland
haunted used bookstore
your ashes in twelve golden discs
becoming-gone
in green pourings
after the end where I began
in dreamland
on herringbone floor
awake in dreamland
with dreamlanders
alone among dreamlanders
after my death I was alive
grue and bleen pourings
invented a language in
which to talk to myself
while a rotary dial I
answer “hello,” you
snored roundly
over Strauss’ Metamorphosen
you know zero about
me and understand
less


II

grue violets burst and disperse their seeds
trace wire transfers branch to branch
arms flung around horse
we might as well all of us
be forgiven crimes
you in the back
think you are free of guilt
ushers will escort you out
what you hate in what you write takes
revenge on all you loved
singing saw sang songs
unface darkness in a lamp-out room
blank shirt or negative-coloured
bleen map of anthill
I should be happy I escaped
plans for a cathedral
shed or treefort
perfectly invisible or more so
becomings-what already
in logodaedaly
if I want to live
survive becomings-unaffordable
why did I not form healthy habits
want to live but now
judgement impends
somewhere else would I
I would have meant such else
that unchanges you
smooth seam with creased hand
how long can you deny
what fortress do you defend
not to change
the place it hurts
body is where it hurts
who is the smallest meteorite
interstellar mote


III

what music will they make
me listen in hell to
fans overhead in dreamland spin
describe a gidouille
when that else of life overwhelms writing
do you lose those poems
or are they stored somewhere
for your return to writing
in some form
does the loss of poems accumulate
as anti-matter writing
with own invisible gravity
calculable as mass
of unwritten time
in future writing
you would have loved my children so much
in dreamland



Jeremy Stewart is the author Hidden City (Invisible Publishing) and (flood basement (Caitlin Press). His work has appeared in Canadian Literature, Geist, Lemon Hound, Open Letter, and elsewhere. Stewart lives with his partner and children in unceded Coast Salish territory/Vancouver, BC.

The Eganville Healer’s Compound

Dominik Parisien

We went there as a family, once. Being secular, I believed
in salvation through the self or science, not charms or charlatans.

But when medicine failed me, my mother & father, devout 
followers of the church of parenthood, reached out to him

& God & anything they thought could help me. At his compound  
we found dollars drowning in his wishing well; a counter full of prayer

cards & chocolate bars; a wall of postcards proclaiming him a god
-ly man; & platters overburdened with bills, the marks of his charity.

In his office, I felt only emptiness at the miracle of his touch. And,
he promised, laying on hands was possible even at a distance

through the wonders of technology. Polaroids were the pictures
of faith. They were hung in his chapel like saints & shot

by those who ached with love for the affected. Later, my parents
captured me & my pain and mailed us to his compound packed

with their hopes & their money.



Dominik Parisien’s work can be found in The Fiddlehead, Wordgathering, Plenitude, Exile: The Literary Quarterly, as well as other magazines and anthologies. His poetry chapbook, We, Old Young Ones, is forthcoming from Frog Hollow Press. He is also the co-editor, with Navah Wolfe, of The Starlit Wood, which won the Shirley Jackson Award, and Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction with Elsa Sjunneson-Henry. Dominik is a disabled, bisexual, French Canadian. He lives in Toronto.

  

An interview with Rebecca Rustin

Rebecca Rustin is a freelance copywriter and translator in Montreal, Quebec.

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

Maybe it was, and still is, an effort to participate in and understand the world. It’s hard to keep going sometimes, like if there’s too much work or emotional overwhelm going on.

Has your work as a translator influenced the ways in which you approach your own work? How do you keep the two separate, or do you?

I do commercial translation for work. I did literary translations at school and tried to make an effort in that direction after but it’s hard to do your own work and translate at the same time. So far it hasn’t happened and the two activities remain quite separate.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

In truth it isn’t only poems that come to bear on how I write, there are plenty of novelists, short story writers, meme writers, tweeters, philosophers and rappers… And it isn’t only writers; it isn’t only language. Henri Meschonnic has written on language as a function of ethics, of human behaviour toward self and other. For a poem to work it has to arrive at language through an ethical process that somehow creates unity of purpose, meaning and form. I can’t be the only one surprised at how language seems to do that sometimes, almost on its own. But it takes looking past the supremacy of the sign to initiate the real work. (Sorry, my first answer had a list of like 25 poets.)

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

Mentorship is important because it forces you to come up with something. There are some gifted teachers out there. My poetry workshops: Barbara Barg and Larry Sawyer at Chicago School of Poetics, Hoa Nguyen online as often as possible, and one with Ariana Reines at SLS. I did a fiction workshop with Jami Attenberg at SLS. I also really count on friends who read my work and who offer feedback and support. Also my mom, she lets me read stuff over the phone. My British-born dad with his pithy economy of style.

What are you currently working on?

There’s a chapbook MS I abandoned last year from which I’m fishing out little things to rewrite. I have a sonnet about love and death. I just moved to a new apartment and don’t really know how to write here yet. I’m still trying to get used to the weird new sounds. The local McDonald’s has wifi, so I should probably go work there since all the sounds and smells are predictable.
  
Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

John Murillo. I love his book Up Jump the Boogie. If you grew up around more concrete than trees check him out.

There was a poem this week (August 6, 2018) in the Luther X. Hughes newsletter that blew my mind: “Mountain, Stone” by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. It’s on Poetry Foundation.
 

(Rive Gauche Pour Homme Eau de Toilette (Discontinued))

John Luna
 

(I.)

The parents were the first body to move. Like a muscle with blood… this incredibly vital relationship with an audience, which was of course we few. Just calculating the ratios in the midst of their art was exhilarating and exhausting at the same time. Your body will eventually require the grace of the rooms in which you conceived its lives.

Each time I go down into the basement to let out the dog, I leaf through the books, scanning Perrault’s “Bluebeard” or the cover of Greene’s Power and the Glory. Imagine how much harder it would be if blindfolded by history’s being perceived in a line rather than as a staircase ending at a sagging pocket door where the wind is seeping in. Picture dark corridors coated in dulled white lead enamel & the plastic muskiness of containers for another life’s long irony & their aura; each page a quatrain, the best, the cream, condensed like those yearbooks in navy sleeves.

Geranium tang sings an exhausted carpet dusted with debris: a face awaiting the razor’s skipping-cricket gait; grit-scaping, sagacious, dryly whistling oneself clean; the whole scene the thesis of The School of Athens flashed as diminishing returns towards the three-fold bathroom cabinet mirror, seamed in steam; smooth equivocation of truth and beauty advertised with praiseworthy virtù disclosed to squinting light lately rising from still pines beyond our drive.

Belted into vintage trench coat static-electrical field’s sweeping fall of leaves, Baroque gestures suggestive of crimes against time. Flip-flops, wishes in the days’ shadows under airplanes, picketed with symmetry; robins, hums. What a strange thing to happen to a little boy. Heredity is a long game… Somebody has to put up a stake, and somebody has to take care how it’s paced; lest the lesser is more the morrow. Familiar caricature and truth-telling citation are both important in this sense, as kind regards, best wishes and yours truly. And must it mean if a star nestles into a night like a field of rustling ferns, dry as a pill, resting on the pile of newly-laundered cotton sheet, or a breeze attaching itself to the crown of nail-studded suede, of a freshly buzzed, untroubled head?

Heavyweight the light between elements of doubt & sorcery mixed into Rothko’s suicide cocktail (outside: “yes” whispers of cars and trees, blurred & whirled.) Your unconscious life right now is informed by the movies: a veritable Valhalla of frozen-in-the-open fears, magazine flesh crawling over collaged moonscape floor: under the same night-light, blazing-white pillars of books bathed in sweat, pale parapets of lean and shadow; the strength of any dream being in the effective use of mixed metaphor commuted to thoughts in forespoken, doped-up prosody’s lore. In a mirror, for instance, you noted the writing on your mirror-right hand that read: “left handed gods”, the sign-off from a friend’s letter rendering protective blessing. The past will stay in the past, its aim is an imperfect tense. I’m going to ask you to stay out loud so I can live with myself. We are all so deep in dysfunction, a synthetic lubricant, in this particular winter transmission to be palpably endured by the generations in generous gradations, while the mirror-flexed eye of the shower knob stands as moving observer to my betraying and praying and ultimately staying, as though about to move away from something…fixedly contemplating… turned towards the past. And here we are (coming) back to where we stand; the knight always wins (cellphone message dings.)

(ii.)

If it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt at all; become your own guardian. If there was another chance, the whole leftover game to play or one more day of conversations to mate, I’d glean. It could happen here, in the midst of the quiet summers you while away sweetly mapping, tracing, watching, reckoning – but won’t. The fridge crackles cool, consuming fuel. In the beginning, in the work-world of childhood-in-the-making, it was dark; picture people leaving the lights on in late summer evening. You can hear the lawn mowing sounds so you know it must still be warm; but these are means of egress, there are no machines to speak to this.

(But still, you know a Tuesday from a Saturday;) you are a natural as the absent-minded sky over the open-air theatre of asking why. See how much practice it takes the dog to wait out her silhouette on the floor? Gather up some laurels (would it kill you to try?) There, resting on the stove, see the tray for someone’s sick-day meal. Convalescence lasts and lasts, as some discomfort’s due, while a melancholy that never actually ceases getting started settles in to cause furniture to creak and the cat to stretch & shake. See now how with a freshly extinguished match held in your mouth, rolled over on the tongue and beginning to flake, you will taste the warmed wax from the candle knowing in your nose’s memory-banks what it objectively was, explained back by way of quoted soot & grit & bitter wood. Flowers flow uphill as we run from shadows as the sun’s carbonizing math melts pools of silver-grey snow between our worn-in hedge + house.

Erstwhile, you emerge in the doorway to ask if we are planning a vacation. My voice drops an octave, as this is the where and why of it, but idly. There are interesting things to pick out of the day’s accounts; so many to prolong conversation’s end until we’ve both become old men.

 

 

John Luna: I am a dual Canadian-American citizen born of Mexican + American expatriates. Besides writing, my practice is as a visual artist whose background includes painting, sculpture and installation, and a teacher working in the areas of art, design and art history. I currently reside on an island off of the west coast of N. America. Previous publication of written work in art criticism and poetry has appeared in Ditch, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, Canyon, Cordite, and Matrix, among others. A first collection of poems, Listing (Decoupage Publishing, 2015) was released through a small independent press with the help of a crowdfunding campaign. A second book-length manuscript was recently (2017) shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry.

 

An interview with Craig Santos Perez

Dr. Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). He is the author of four collections of poetry and two spoken word albums, editor of three anthologies, and co-founder of Ala Press, the only press in the U.S. dedicated to Pacific Islander poetry. He has received PEN Center USA Literary Award, the American Book Award, a Ford Foundation fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation literary fellowship. He holds an MFA from the U of San Francisco, and a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the U of California, Berkeley. He is an associate professor at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa.

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

I began writing in high school, but became more serious during my undergraduate and graduate studies in the United States. My storytelling is inspired by the oral stories I was surrounded with growing up on the Pacific island of Guam. As a native poet, I feel a responsibility to my ancestors, my community, and my descendants to continue writing our stories and experiences into existence.

Your full-length poetry collections to date appear to be part of a single, ongoing work. How did your writing evolve into working on such a large-scale project?

While working on my first book, I realized that the themes I was exploring (indigenous culture and identity, the politics and history of my homeland) could not be fully written about in a single book, so I conceived of an ongoing book series, the fourth of which was published in 2017.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

Poets like William Carlos Williams, HD, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Nathaniel Mackey, Robert Duncan, and Louis Zukofsky have all influenced my approached to the long poem and serial book. Many native writers have also influenced me, including Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, N. Scott Momaday, Allison Hedge Coke, and Leslie Marmon Silko. As a Pacific poet, I am deeply influence by Pacific writers, including Albert Wendt, Hone Tuwhare, Haunani-Kay Trask, Brandy Nalani McDougall, John Pule, Konai Helu Thaman, and Robert Sullivan.

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

Mentorship has been very important. As a high school student, I had two wonderful literature teachers, Thomas Seaton and Kami Tomberlain. As an undergraduate, I studied with Joy Manesiotis and Leslie Brody. As an MFA student, I was mentored by Aaron Shurin, DA Powell, Truong Tran, Rob Halpern, Barbara Jane Reyes, and Rusty Morrison. Rusty Morrison has also been my main editor, mentor, and publisher over the past decade.

What are you currently working on?

I am currently working on the fifth book of my ongoing series, as well as a separate collection of environmental and political poetry.

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

Everyone should read Hawaiian poet Brandy Nalani McDougall.