Deborah-Anne Tunney

old mission, San Juan Bautista

                        (referenced movie: Vertigo)

from the roof you are a speck, your skull

smaller still, inside its small bowl, the image

of her a mass of electrons firing like fireworks, like

sparks fly from a live electrical cable

dangerous stars, telling us all the world

ends in chaos, even if we die quietly, those electrons

grow frantic as ants searching for a home

a receptor, lost and frenzied and unforgiving. And this

is the point: no one truly forgives, no one survives

without the pang of old regrets, embers burning pure

at the core, the pain red, known by the heart’s

palm, the sadness in your worship scars deep

as the light of day fades along the walkway

that laconic landscape, the chapel’s serene arches

Bodega Bay, 2012

                        (referenced movie: the Birds)

the coast ablaze with distance

an unfurling of primal light

we squint against its painful algebra

its continents of logic, and zip

the ragged, cliff-etched road, to

reach the seaside town by

the bay, where all is still, a

reprieve, the restaurant calm

the view constant, the pinot gris a bitter

pinch of white on my tongue

inland, off the town’s main street

the schoolhouse stands brilliant in a

buzzing field of hot insects and stiff

weeds; fifty years ago, the same street, building

same blaze of sun, the same blistering

mystery of want and worship, moving

out through the town drenched in the past

through the adoration by the shore, out to

the churning eternity, an ocean of meaning

I Confess, July 1952

we were at a cottage, on a lake, and the night of

my birth my mother and father played cards

at the dining room table, they heard the slap of the

screen door that led from the porch, and glancing

up, told my brother and sister to stop running. this

was the time I was thrown into, this, the family

my mother leaning on the restless circle of me,

still roaming the hollow of her body

but much more roamed the country of that year

between us, alleyways and escarpments and lonely

pious men who genuflected before the Basilica’s

nave, where golden mysteries rested, the Rosenbergs

forsaken in jails, skies blocked by monsters

of sooted cathedrals, and there you were, Alfred

in the Chateau Frontenac, manipulating those images

of lone priests on night streets, your catholic concern

gleaming out like sunlight caught in vestries

this was what awaited that July night, when the loons

cast their long thin moan to summer, the cool from the

lake floated up to the cottage and touched my mother’s

tender skin awakening the wide ache of my arrival, and

you, the closest you would ever be to me, enjoying

a delicate meal in that ornate gilded room.

Watching Lifeboat

it’s meaning I’m after, settling down this winter afternoon

to watch, the day grows around me like a shell hardens

utter grey and the sky palely, continuously grey. it seeps

into me dulling as those images dull with their celluloid

claustrophobia. death settles, as the mist with its scent

of forever settles, so that I am numb with the peace of hope’s

diminishment. until the horizon grows wide with warring

ships, and the clamouring cacophony of voices, that litter

of rollicking animals, stop before the german future rushing

at them and worry for the entrapment of their tiny souls in

their tiny vessels, hungry for some shape of love and unsure

if the wet on their cheek is from a kiss or spit

Deborah-Anne Tunney of Ottawa is a member of Ruby Tuesdays writing group. Her short stories have appeared in the Missouri Review, Narrative, South Carolina Review, Fiddlehead, Descant, Grain and other literary journals and her poetry has appeared in YAWP, the anthology A Sea of Alone and will appear in the upcoming anthology I Found It at the Movies. Her book of short stories, For the Time Being, will be published by Great Plains Publishing in fall 2014. The poems here are part of a book of poetry she is currently working on which are inspired by the movies of Alfred Hitchcock.

Her stories in Narrative can be accessed at: http://www.narrativemagazine.com/authors/deborah-anne-tunney

RONNIE R. BROWN

SIX POEMS FROM THE SERIES  FREE ASSOCIATIONS ON FAIRY TALES

                                          

SNOW WHITE and THE SEVEN DWARFS,  PART I

SNOW

It is only in summer

that she dreams

cool coverlets of white

free of the hints of dirt

and piss that shade reality.

On sultry nights whitecold she feels

it melting from her heat, the moonlight

making it sparkle, adding sheen to her

moist flesh.  Only in summer, long

after winter coats have been mothballed, snow

shovels hidden behind mowers, bags of mulch, rakes,

do her dreams crystallize--

no two of them alike.  It is then her mind drifts,

becomes desirous of cool white

flakes falling on her tongue, longs

for the very thing she'll curse

a few short months from now.

(Previously published in:  Spire, Vol. 3, #10)

SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS, PART II

WHITE

Lighter even than his pale

skin, the yang-shaped mark

outlined on his cheek.  Scar-tissue white,

it is almost  invisible

to eyes less discerning than a mother's.

At his delivery the doctor, giving in

at last, called for forceps, swearing

it would do no harm; then,

after  the baby emerged,

a swatch of new-formed flesh torn

from his perfection, swore again

that in a year,

two at the most, there would remain

no trace that he had been yanked

into the outer world.

A man now,

she spots him

among the row of other graduates.

From this distance

the small white patch

unseeable, even by her.

Later, she'll kiss his cheek

in congratulation, allow her lips

to softly brush the scar

which will forever

mark him

as her own.

(Previously published in:   EVENT, Vol. 30, #3)

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD, PART II

RED

Next door, the old woman red-

faced, wet wash gathered dripping to her

corset-stiffened chest, mouth

 jammed  with clothes pins, pulled out

saliva-wet, to fasten greying-whites to the

sagging line.  He watches,

remembers ,  the girl

who came to help out just last week.

Closing his eyes he tries to picture,

the way the old woman's over-sized panties

caught the wind, slapping the girl's chest,

wetting her white

tee shirt, defining breasts still capable

of defying gravity, still ignorant

of what is to come:  a man's

lust, an infant's urgent tug.  Try

as he may he cannot shake

from his mind those nipples, erect,

polka-dotting the transparent cotton, disturbing

the perfection of white on white,

his peace, his mind.

(Previously published in:  The Fiddlehead, #214)

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD, PART V

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

Her motions cause his thoughts to kaleidoscope--

it's dawn,

the morning after the snow

when he sees her

the young woman next door, looking

so little out there,

wearing that red thrift-store cape

the one she always has on, hood covering

her long auburn hair.

Young enough to be

oblivious to danger, old enough to

know better.  Take care, take care,

my dear, he'd like to call out to her, but

instead he watches as she glides, red

brushing the snow, riding

the ice-slick path, melting

his thoughts, becoming wine, no,

port staining the damask

white drifts...thoughts of cranberry

red nipples, an auburn tufted triangle

at the junction of alabaster

thighs....His body,

longs to follow

as she sweeps down his street, longs

until even the faintest hint

of red vanishes.

(Previously published in:  Vallum, 3:1)

  

JACK AND THE BEANSTALK, PART I

JACK

Deaf now,

his angry shout

has become a bullhorn

bellow.  You...you...you

he sputters, the needle

of his brain caught

again in a scratchy groove.

His face slowly fills with red,

a character in some grotesque cartoon,

she's sure she can see the vein

on his temple throb.  Nearly fifty years

of shouts, accusations, fists and so much

more:  her only peace the times he went off

to fish, or hunt, war or

when he could no longer kill anything outright,

to the pub to relive past slaughters.  You..you...

he starts again, his mouth

open so wide she sees the pink

plastic gums of his upper plate, You

don't know Jack!

Since his stroke, this

is the best he can do.  She smiles

at him rooted in his chair

and says,

in a voice even he can hear,

"Oh, but you're wrong.  All those times

you went away I got to know

Bill down at the gas station

and Frank over at the Market and, yes

your very good friend Jack, too."

(Previously published in:  The Grist Mill, 2006)

  

JACK AND THE BEANSTALK, PART II

[and]  THE BEANSTALK

She is tearing up

an old bed sheet.  Ripping

strips that will soon

tie tomato plants, heavy

with bounty, to the stakes

she's  fashioned out of branches,

victims of last season's ice storm.

Her daughter, ancient

at twenty three, can  not understand

why she wastes her time this way.

Why all this ripping and whittling

when garden stores sell

everything--all sorts of plastic

this and that--which, her daughter knows,

will work better, look nicer.

One day, years from now

she will tell her about the hours

she spent as a child helping

her mother and grandmother, of the countless

hours of tearing, whittling, staking, weeding,

picking, cooking, canning, serving.

Explain how every time

she drives a stake, ties

a beanstalk she

can almost see the family

farm her grandmother used to describe, hear

the voices of all the women

who came before

urging her

on.

(Previously published in:  Sweet Annie & Sweet Pea Review (US), Vol. 6, #4)

RONNIE R. BROWN  lives in Ottawa (Ontario, Canada.)  She holds an M.A. (in Creative Writing) from Concordia University (Montreal, QC.)  Brown has taught literature, composition and creative writing at Concordia and Carleton Universities.  Her work has  appeared  in over 100 magazines and anthologies and has won a number of awards  including  The Acorn-Plantos People's Poetry Award (in 2006, for STATES OF MATTER.)  Brown's sixth collection of poems, ROCKING ON THE EDGE  (Black Moss Press) was released in 2010.  She was recently named the winner of the Golden Grassroots Chapbook Competition  for  her long narrative poem, "Un-Deferred."

John Barton

The Book of Marmalade

Its Antecedents, Its History

and Its Role in the World Today

A social good, our mothers would buy

Oranges to scrub and quarter, sly

Winter light slicing through steamed-up windows

While in copper saucepans on gas stoves

The wedges boil for five fierce minutes

In still-pure tap water to permit

In each house a release of sourness—

Life’s aftertaste meant to cool for hours

Till the peel is spooned out, cut in chunks

Each rank imploded fruit having drunk

Itself to a slick spongy softness

All adept cooks revere, slipperiness

A domestic duty shared, measured

Syrups reheated with beet sugar

Stirred in and held in tender balance

Cup for cup, nothing left to mischance

About how to decant clear viscid

Residues in sterile jars, liquid

Wonder gelling in back-porch larders

Year in, year out, the gem-bright languor

Of candied family sins spread on toast

Across the suburbs from coast to coast

Our fathers thumbing through classifieds

Pencils sharpened, want ads underlined

While, eyes averted, we’d sit alarmed

As open-mouthed they chewed, sticky crumbs

Jammed in front teeth and whiskers rinsed off

Before they’d race time to the office

Clock hands spinning faster, our own kids

Looking up, then away, as we slide

Slathered bites of croissant to our lips

A store-bought sweetness smearing pink slips

We fear await us, fiscal meltdown

Looming large as we commute to town

Skyscraper hopes in dwindling supply

On big-box shelves, though we may rely 

On little changing, on aspartame

The truths we’re cooking up not to blame.

 

ORAL SADISM AND THE VEGETARIAN PERSONALITY

 The cookbook you gave me I’ve thrown away

—Its rhetoric of grains and pulses cut

Too leanly: strict, its measurements outweighed—

Or aimed to—the body’s craving to stray

And voice unasked-for grumbles, each bouquet

Of digested inner darkness released

In scorned enmity—me no masterpiece

In politesse, you’d agree, though item

After item your recipes required

Could humble me, whims not said verbatim

I’d brown in olive oil, nuance unmired

By onion’s sweetness, the fresh garlic’s lyre

Not plucked with zest, each plate a tuneless mess

Of noisome glop, not piquant bouillabaisse

Yet you’d dig in with relish, doctrinaire

On how sharp tastes butcher us, sacrifice

Whipping blind faith into cream for éclairs

Such brightness beat gaseous, if not light

With vacuum-forced air, an olfactory spice

You’d keep coughing up as buoyant virtue

To cutthroat rancour, hunger’s déjà-vu

Language’s game an endangered species

Its gristliness herded inside reserves

For meat surrounding cities, obsequies

You’d found in rules you felt at last conserved

Long-compromised menus banning hors d’oeuvres

Those tangy canapés apt to assault

Our taste buds, impel tongues to ache with salt

Foie gras, and eggs, urge them to lick pathways through

To this paradise of auditory

Fullness where all meanings each sound accrues

Are hunted down or sown and picked, set free

Or tamed, filleted or thrown back unclean.

Each appetite denied an extinction

An open field shot of all distinctions 

 Your fruitless book not writ to roast me whole

Or stuff me up with herbs, its fading words

Worthy, just, of nature verses by souls

Mouthing vain soliloquies undeterred

By death, their awkward lack of scope absurd

So, however pellucid each rhyme might be

I’m deaf, my game-keeping ear out of range.

These two poems are part of a series of nine poems that were inspired by The Diagram Prize. Founded in 1978 at the Frankfort Book Fair and awarded each year by the British book-trade magazine, The Book Seller, the prize recognizes the oddest book title of the year. Until 2000, the winners were selected by a panel of judges; in the years since, the public made the final decision

When I first learned of the Diagram Prize, I was amused, of course, but I immediately saw in the winning titles a poetic potential. The challenge became to find a compelling subject that also matched each of the winners I chose to write about. I found that while the titles themselves were unabashedly, if unintentionally humorous, the poems that resulted were not. I hope the contrast between their serious content and the frivolous nature of the titles will appeal to readers and even comment on the social concerns that emerged from the series while I worked on it.

The titles of “The Book of Marmalade,” previously published in Crave It: Writers and Artists Do Food (Toronto: Red Claw, 2011), and “Oral Sadism,”  previously published in the Literary Review of Canada, are respectively the Diagram Prize winners for 1984 and 1986. Like all the poems in the series, both were written using a set form. The former is in knittelvers, the German equivalent of heroic couplets; the latter is the rime royal, an old British form, perhaps drawn from the French.  I cribbed the rules for both from Robin Skelton’s The Shapes of Our Singing: A Comprehensive Guide to Verse Forms and Metrics from Around the World (Eastern Washington, 2002).

John Barton’s ten books of poetry include Hymn (Brick, 2009) and For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems (Nightwood, 2012). His sixth chapbook, Balletomane: The Program Notes of Lincoln Kirstein, appeared with JackPine in 2012. His eleventh book, Polari, is forthcoming in April 2014 from Goose Lane. He lives in Victoria, where he edits The Malahat Review.

Maxianne Berger

Canada: A Lyric of Titles

Maple leaf rag,

that singing you hear at the edges,

what is to come . . .

Stranger music,

reasons for winter,

for love of the wind . . .

Whatever it is plants dream,

the shadows fall behind

snow formations --

the spaces in between

spaces between the trees,

temporary shelter.

The day is a cold grey stone,

one stone

suddenly, so much:

the stream exposed with all its stones;

fish bones

treading fast rivers;

the bridge that carries the road

when earth leaps up;

coastlines of the archipelago.

Swimming among the ruins,

we are the dreamers

reading the water,

the older graces

singing the flowers open,

counting out the millennium:

One leaf shaking.

Two shores.

More than three feet of ice.

**

Cento key

Maple Leaf Rag, Kaie Kellough (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Pub., 2010)

That Singing You Hear at the Edges, Sue MacLeod (Winnipeg: Signature Editions, 2003)

What Is to Come: Selected and New Poems, George Johnston (Toronto: St. Thomas Poetry Series, 1996)

Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs, Leonard Cohen. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993)

Reasons for Winter, Naomi Guttman (London, ON: Brick Books, 1991)

For Love of the Wind, Ray Shankman, (West Bay, NS: Medicine Label Press, 1991)

Whatever It Is Plants Dream, Richard Stevenson, (Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 1990)

The Shadows Fall Behind: Poems, Margo Button, (Lantzville, BC: Oolichan Books, 2000)

Snow Formations, Carolyn Marie Souaid, (Winnipeg: Signature Editions, 2002)

The Spaces in Between: Selected Poems, 1965-2001, Stephen Scobie, (Edmonton: NeWest Press 2003)

Spaces Between the Trees, Enos Watts, (St. John's, NL: Pennywell Books, 2005)

Temporary Shelter: Poems, M. Travis Lane, (Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 1993)

The Day Is A Cold Grey Stone, Allan Safarik, (Regina: Hagios Press, 2010)

One Stone, Barbara Pelman, (Victoria, BC: Ekstasis Editions, 2005)

Suddenly, So Much, Sandy Shreve, (Toronto: Exile Editions, 2005)

The Stream Exposed with All Its Stones: Collected Poems, D.G. Jones, (Montreal: Signal Editions, 2010)

Fish Bones, Gillian Sze, (Montreal: DC Books, 2009)

Treading Fast Rivers, Eleonore Schönmaier, (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1999)

The Bridge That Carries the Road, Lynn Davies, (London, ON: Brick Books, 1999)

When Earth Leaps Up, Anne Szumigalski, (London, ON: Brick Books, 2006)

Coastlines of the Archipelago, Colin Morton, (Ottawa: BuschekBooks, 2000)

Swimming Among the Ruins, Susan Gillis, (Winnipeg: Nuage Editions, 2003)

We Are the Dreamers : Recent and Early Poetry, Rita Joe, (Wreck Cove, NS: Breton Books, 1999)

Reading the Water, Laurence Hutchman, (Windsor, ON: Black Moss Press, 2008)

The Older Graces, David Manicom, (Lantzville, BC: Oolichan Books, 1997)

Singing the Flowers Open, Allan Cooper, (Wolfville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2001)

Counting Out the Millennium, John Oughton, (San Antonio, TX: Pecan Grove Press, 1996)

One Leaf Shaking: Collected Later Poems, 1977-1990, Robin Skelton, (Victoria, BC: Porcépic, 1996)

Two Shores: Poems = Deux rives: poèmes, Thuong Vuong-Riddick, (Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 1995)

More Than Three Feet of Ice, Brenda Schmidt, (Saskatoon: Thistledown Press, 2005)

Maxianne Berger, poet and literary translator, is active in both the French and the English haiku and tanka communities in Montreal and beyond.  Her writing meanders between the minimalism of Japanese forms and the unpremeditated outcomes of OuLiPo-style constraints. She is among those featured in Language Matters: Interviews with 22 Quebec Poets (Carolyn Marie Souaid & Endre Farkas, eds; Signature, 2013). She has authored two poetry collections and co-edited three anthologies -- one of haiku, in English, and two of tanka, in French. She also co-edits Cirrus, an online tanka journal in French. A dual-language collection of her own tanka is forthcoming.

Todd Swift

For the Boy in the Choir with Tourette’s

He slaps his face as others take communion,

A joyful disunion lurking in a devil’s abandon

That plays jerky havoc with his composure;

A boy of maybe ten or eleven, corpulent

With brown curls and a wide open stare,

Struck into the choir like a daring nail, who

Takes the music into him and jabs it out

Every third bar by an angelic shout;

I feel comforted he is up there, exposed

For all to ignore or mock. In a sea of doubt

And conceit and sin, his two-faced

Demon that winks about his eyes and mouth

Every so often with a punch to the head

Is all the compulsion I need to recognise

For all the love of Jesus a rich seam of lies

Resides within the idea of heavenly skin

Or a bag of cats roils just beneath us all

And in this sweet off-kilter boy is beautiful:

His stop-go body a rock to save stiller ones,

Says every twitching thing that crawls can sing.

Kora in Hell

If you take the pomegranate on your tongue

you shall know love’s soiled requirements

that keep us darkly down

even as the world withers above us

in fruitless abandon; never bite

the red seeds bitterly bursting their small loan

 onto the banks of your tongue

in the wan gardens underground

where no noon is.

To be hungry in love’s dead halls

is to be certain of return. To go pale

and drawn is to have hope to arise

and be sunlit after the dark season

in love’s grave. Do not feast

in the gloom on the blue shadows there

missing light. Keep thin and alone. Love holds

you to its hiding crest. It capes the fair

and puts a whiteness on the blush.

It is a crush this blue long night of being apart.

To be near the sun and on the ground is to be alive.

But love lights darker candles

in which a starker irresistance thrives.

And lively we are to Pluto who would touch upon

our vivacious glances. The darker longing

is to keep the slim sweet guest who never stays.

For time throws its best toys away.

Only Plutonic entitlement can steal a glance

and hold it there as on a vase.

Love is desire encased in death’s long art.

Never be devoured by longing or you will never get out.

The fruit you are is sweetest untaken but

will be taken down eventually in swoon season

which is the flooding crown when all the harvest

is a golden wave driven into the black kingdom

as a chariot rushing to avoid escape and love

is to bleakly look up once at sky then drown.

For K & S

when lovers dance inside their box
the locksmith loosens all his locks

the keys with which the player plays
release the priest from what she prays

the fox outleaps the highest praise
so marriage dances on our gravest days

each ringed hand ringing as it peals
for love speaks parables of what it feels.

 

 

Young Husband

I am in the room of my marriage, when I had one.

Like a memory of a dead long gone ancestor,

Everything is polished with a certain conceit.

As if simply by passing, time became right.

I can see myself in error after error, as in

A dream that supposes it knows more deeply

Far into the summer heat of un-thought fire.

I want to save myself from the burning hubris

But won’t.  That is the past’s glowing blindness.

It can’t look ahead but proudly affirms its place

At the central magnitude where all things radiate.

I hate the mute heft of the choices

I didn’t make; and the summer stupor

Of the ones I did.  It didn’t amount to more.

I am the one who did the upsetting stuff

That knocked our vases to the floor.  Vows.

All those rows, and tears, now mummified

As if the collapse of our civilisation was allowed

By chance and not design.  History gets formed

Like lava takes the shape of what it flows around;

It’s messy but it hardens soon enough

Into what is sure and still and rough.  I was there.

And so I moved about in languid haste

As if the casual spillage of those days would end.

Todd Swift’s poems have been recorded in the British Poetry Archive.  He has recently curated a section of Tupelo Press' major new anthology of world anglophone poetry, sponsored by The Poetry Foundation in Chicago.  He is included in the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry In English (2013).  He has published eight full poetry collections, many more pamphlets, and edited or co-edited numerous international anthologies. He is Director of Eyewear Publishing, and a University Teacher at Glasgow University. Photo credit Derek Adams.