YOU DON’T REMEMBER ME I GUESS
i used to nurse a teabag sit for hours without shame
what does it mean to pay attention to silence
what tree is this that i have
come across
keeping my eye on the edges of things
the rate at which a body is allowed to change
positions with respect to another
the silence can be filled with dark knives
scroll fragments, scorched
solar particle trapped in the earth’s magnetic field
ghost
orchid
each
word of the telling takes away
what
little life that still survives
inside
the heart
stands as a mere breath
I AGREE TO DO THREE
closed systems
unusual string dipole-dipole attractions
apophthegms
phenomenologists
potato-shaped mars moons
buzzer-beatings
it’s a gas,
gas, gas
jumping jack
flash
balaclava
raglan cardigans
colandered
pastafarians
frowning nights
life sentences wrapped in dustballs
WE
ARE A SUBDUED GROUP
andside
always
tilly her tea
that
while
tilly
mum
might
side
said
why should i not
a
dunnamany brothers and sisters
need
right
than
them
to
conifer responsibility
no
windows in the lower level
shitshape
sluicide
ptarmigan
the
kind of model brat-in-law
who comes flat-packed
no matter how minor the minor members
as if eve were away
doing charity work
while adam ate apple
happy
happy happy happy talk
step
hen
zen
DONOVAN CHAMBERS
LEARNS
OF HIS IMPENDING
DEATH
IN THE NEWSPAPER
now, this is what he calls adventure
(cloud of ironic despair)
how those horrid conservatives will jeer at him!
(what are we to do?)
what
to wear: panic
(still want to see her naked in the garden)
a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche
sprinkles cryptic proverbs on
the nurture of the moon
(her ming
tiffany twisted/ she got the mercedes bends)
way
to go eagles will miss you
well, zing! darling, where
are your fibulae
a slip of the tongue on new
year’s eve
no more thirty more years of
this o dawn of ashes
detroit
diesel owl city pretty (virtual embrace)
CLARA IS NOT AS
YOUNG AS SHE USED TO BE
has forgotten Virgil’s latinate
curvo saturni
lets the cat clean the kitchen
on the roomba
often says
forgive me but
i must milk my camel
and no longer
talks of parcels of rogues
bought and sold for english gold
likes to say
backatcha backatcha
her past shadowy establishments
of conspiracy
adrift in that peaceful easy feelin’
shouts of a saturday
give’em a hail mary pass
and considers not the true
number of her days
chants parish of rooks
clamour
of rooks unkindness
of
ravens storytelling of crows
and
word for word:
i will take you by a dear
dirty back way, miss honeychurch
IN TRANSLATION
the true number of skies
and the true number of nine
there was a cloak and dagger
there was a caramel brown
anaesthetic yes, i’m the devil
oh, and I don’t care none
there was that steak
you’d rather have than me
there was miss modelo 1959
naked batista’s hand
on her thigh there was
the wind speaking
there was
the extended meditation
on the polished
polish furniture
after the dove
dove into the mistletoe
thicket and there were
crimp-haired angels
A GOOD NUMBER OF
PEOPLE THINK
THEY CAN
INSTINCTIVELY TELL
WHEN SOMEONE IS
LYING
i am not among
them
headstones back from the dead
if you think your sense of direction is trued
p
j harvey’s words that maketh murder
pinball madness
ping buzz
demented insects
ringer wrangler
stronger strangler
jetranger
has been given a large brain by
mistake
avignon
when
i say every day
i
have to forget you
snuffles and bellows and squawks
whisper on the
wind
do exactly what
you would do
if you felt secure
says meister eckhart
the window of the floor
leaks two dark feathers
sootfall
heart-felt ido not
believe
you do not have the proper
permission
for this research
A member of Ruby Tuesdays writing group, Claudia
Coutu Radmore’s Accidentals, Apt.
9 Press, Ottawa, won the 2011 bpNichol Chapbook Award. Her submission where language forms was selected by Christian Bök as runner up in
the 2010 Banff Centre Bliss Carman Awards, and her poem all saints was shortlisted for the 2012 Malahat’s Open Season
Awards.
Her poems
have been published in Prairie Fire, Grain, Arc, The Antigonish Review, CV2,
The Bywords Quarterly Journal, Sugarmule, Pith & Wry; Canadian Poetry;
Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen
Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament, and Lighting the Global
Lantern, The League of Canadian Poets Poetry Month
Blog, 2010, 2011, among other journals and
anthologies. Ruth Roach Pearson has accepted a poem in her forthcoming
anthology I Found It At the Movies: an
anthology of poems about film, Guernica, 2014. In 2008 Claudia won the National Capital Region
Canadian Authors’ Poetry Award.
Trade
poetry books are Your Hands Discover Me/
Tes mains me découvrent, 2010, Éditions du tanka francophone,
Montreal, and a minute or two/ without
remembering, 2010, Two Currents Press, Sudbury, listed as a Special
Mention in the 2010 Pat Lowther Awards.
Notes:
i will take you by … from Room with a View
curvo saturni: Saturn’s knife
parcel of rogues, from Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation, Robert Burns
frowning nights, William Blake
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