Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Tuesday poem #4 : Hoa Nguyen : ANGEL GOING POW



Pansies    the yellow faced

pansies     bearded   & the robin

is a twerp 

    twirping in the Pear



Why do I say robins

are not my favorite?



Jays perch or pear     why jays

on strip-mall eaves   I hear

the sun 



            Do I hear sun?   I wrote

these lines after John Bell sees



We wondered together

whether the moon undoes the sun

like a pansy   



& the robin busts about

     eating worms



No this is not the start of something



North spring     it is spring    gawd

like a gob-smacked sip    etc

into spring wind



.  .   . 



            .  .  . 



PS



the continent is a mass

   both solid and rocky   a thing sung

and now also a detritus decayed



I can stand on it

and lament the lack



and the plastic bottle cap in the dead

belly of the young bird



(albatross)



Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, Hoa Nguyen studied Poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded Skanky Possum, a poetry journal and book imprint in Austin, TX where they lived for 14 years. The author of eight books and chapbooks, she currently lives in Toronto where she teaches poetics in a private workshop and at Ryerson University. Wave Books published her third full-length collection of poems, As Long As Trees Last, in September 2012.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Tuesday poem #3 : Marcus McCann : from Winter of Weak Welcome

And bam, I'm unnormally lost, pinned in the middle of gravity, I top its nub which is a gift when I pivot. When I pivot, the trees behind other trees lean, I get perspective. Out of every tree creeps a numinous purple snow tree, there are so many trees compared to me, I think, and something numinous and purple creeps out of and away from me too 

*

A wet, burgundy streak, fur pushed to the side like a curtain, its injury like a pot glazed in rich pigment, a satin sash over a matte dress, its organics focus into organs as I progress, beauty queen, beauty queen, I never saw the news channel, nothing, and now, I think, I am seeing news with my actual eyes, little man, forty pounds of carcass, it looks like a box TV, immovable. And then I moved it with my eyes, and dug in the snow with my eyes, and buried it with my eyes and it was gone with my eyes

*

When I finished singing, the last taste of my voice leapt to the top of a hill and looked back, the bowl of snow I am in turns like a potters' wheel, I feel my head twist off, an organ other than my heart pumps La Dorsale into my hands and feet, I feel clearheaded and blind and happy, I feel the string tied to my neck snap

*

Dispeptic on the vanishing points, orientational, seasick, my back squaring against a tree, like focus, focus, a man's jaw with stubble, colder, the cornerstone on a gothic tower, I stand up and face its knots which look like other nature, river bed, chilled magma, and, also, bundles of computer cables, laundry basket, a steamer on its end, I admit I have a problem, I want treatment, I need help

*

In the O of afternoon light, my outside skins I want to crack off, a thumb under, like from a boiled egg eggshells, a raw red noise always arriving, pulpmill rays, reams of them, surrounding me like a slick or my bursting overexposed sunspot chest, warm and daily, I am corresponding, there is verve in the air I am grooving to, I can feel. I recall knowing that I was “on”, the smallest light on the dashboard brave and unaware and continuous after the accident

*

The night grew from a wet spot in the sky: indigo, ominous, undiapered darkening. And then its long, feathered body smothered the copse I was in, I saw it coming, its blinkered eye, the whole forrest was talons, I bunkered down, I couldn't unclench but when the night carried off my desire it was warm and we snuggled, and I wasn't surprised, not at all, I saw everything, everything, pinwheels, a low pressure system, stardust, what was coming after

*

And, later again, me gaping, the whole forrest like thinning fur on a moose flank, I saw from my hot inside seat the trees were holy and deciduous, snow like a hairbrush's white tongue through bristles. Wider. I hovered in my thoughts, I watched a million cubic feet of air shudder, I was overcome. I was overcome, almost. I was almost overcome. In those seconds, I lost the brilliant gloss and got fussy. I fuzzed out


Marcus McCann is a poet and journalist. He is the author of Soft Where (2009, Chaudiere Books) and The Hard Return (2012, Insomniac) and a number of chapbooks, including The Glass Jaw, Town in a Long Day of Leaving, and Force Quit. He is a winner of the John Newlove Award and the EJ Pratt Medal, and was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert and the Robert Kroetsch awards. He now lives in Toronto, where he studies law.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Tuesday poem #2 : Megan Kaminski : Cityscape



Buildings accentuate their mastery of gray
swept skies      turn over page after page
this time the south drawn blank
drained of sea and fever  how many hours
trained to listen speaking through gestures of
hands and neck   like a theory of something without it
being shown              
            on streets below billboards billow flagrant
affection for Belgian chocolate and belted shoes
we want drawers to empty cop to some conclusion
fill our own pockets with more than blueprints


Megan Kaminski is the author of Desiring Map (Coconut Books, 2012) and six chapbooks of poetry.  She lives in Lawrence, KS, where she teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Kansas and curates the Taproom Poetry Series. http://www.megankaminski.com/

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday, April 09, 2013

Tuesday poem #1 : Elizabeth Robinson : On Recovery

There are mediate and immediate causes.


So often the body unlatches its lid and stores away excess.



The cause of the storage.


The fool said so.

Said recovery was an issue of storage.




Says, “I dedicate my storage to you.” 


So ordained, the dedication

occurred as a form of sacred logic.  By which


the fool means—causality: means



rarely did things happen for a reason.  Yet foolishness is

all that adorns, and recovery is a finding.   All extra that the consecration wears to


this day as a stole upon the recuperated body.



Elizabeth Robinson [photo credit: John Sarsgard] is currently the Hugo Fellow at the University of Montana. Her most recent book is Counterpart (Ahsahta). Two new books are forthcoming: On Ghosts from Solid Objects and Blue Heron from the Center for Literary Publishing. Robinson is a co-editor of Instance Press and a literary annual, pallaksch.pallaksch.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan