Tuesday poem #138 : Beverly Dahlen : "The half-open eye of the moon"

  The half-open eye of the moon over Mission Street

  the scrim-colored sky         blazing shadows on the

  tarmac in the Safeway car park       trees lost in the

  slight breeze over Big Lots     & further up the hill

  lights bite night early now   January still and north

  is north & east of here the continent    to which we

  are thinly connected shifts imperceptibly into dark

  ness ahead of us             while the western heavens

  bloom rosy gray     a late bird gasps and flies away

  veiny branches of       buckeye & cherry at the foot

  of the garden now choked with weeds the emperor

  of which is sticky goosefoot    but little cymbalaria

  lives among mosses and leaves  tiny pinky flowers

  tendrils on the wall

A native of Portland, Oregon, Beverly Dahlen has lived and worked in San Francisco for many years.  Her first three books were republished by Little Red Leaves Editions in 2012; parts of her long open-ended work called A Reading have been published  over the years by various presses.  Beverly Dahlen was a recipient of a 2013 Grants to Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #137 : Jake Kennedy : from Kobayashi the Will

10.

One of the Transformers might rework itself from a giant robot down into a sleek car; the most intriguing part of the transition, says the samurai, is the middle-stage in which the Transformer is neither robot nor car but simply a becoming; Hanshiro as a ghost telling a story of ghosts: educating the clan about their already-happening dissolve into the realm of spirits; John knows how this works, too, and I have seen him sing “Coney Island Baby”—with a sneer— because the sonority of the music—its very romance—is in a battle with an army of two-bit friends; basically, the clan wants H. to resolve himself; when he arrives at the inner chamber, the ancestral armor is exposed as carapace—and it’s also the exquisite anticipation of his own hollowing; it’s as if H. hardly believes his own fury and part of his physical power is the delight at his own relentlessness; a man arrives at a gate and asks permission to tell his story—this is where H.’s narrative has brought them



12.

Don’t explain or apologize, said Nadya to Slavoj, don’t flirt or pirouette, don’t balk or simper, don’t hesitate with me; I carry the bamboo blade, half in my gut: there never could be a story more sincere: in brief, our shit gets clogged in the prison’s pipes and we must take our own hands to unclog the works; it is embarrassing to talk with the hilt wanging like this at each syllable—and yet that is the truth! Tonight Hanshiro Tsugumo is replaced by Nadezhda Tolonnikova; 1630. 13th day of May. Fair skies. Extremely hot from early in the day. Clan journal… into 2013. January. Cloudy skies. Extremely cold—her blood all over the sewing machine; an early shot establishes the complexity of the court: a map; or this is how bodies become lost within the compound; ludicrous convolutions of power; [narrator] when she arrives before the warden it is shaming to be in the presence of her simplicity / resolve / such clouds / a greater hunger / not understanding it he… what role do women play in the film / in the cellblock / in the country? Miracles arrive, as she needs them, in the form of her own unwaveringness to remain “this complexity”; Slavoj cannot understand it / the Counselor cannot understand it / the warden certainly is at a loss; there is nothing to eat, smoke, or read—there is no work: merely ruin or slavery; the sewing machines are engines but they will not levitate the barracks; the fog lacks self-confidence, too, and can only keep them hidden for so long; H. and N. emerge through the air: doors for others

Jake is no stranger to the grass always being silver lining the golden parachute a bird in the hand. He is a proud Thug. These poems are from a longer poem entitled Kobayashi the Will which will be published soonish in a letter press edition by Greenboathouse Press.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #136 : Jenny Haysom : Scrapyard

A blue afternoon

and the gulls

patrol. No fish-heads

or dumpster grub

here, yet they angle

and circle, stirring

the firmament,

ready as angels

to salvage. Beneath,

forklifts and cranes

travail, and a giant claw

stacks wrecks

in polychrome

layers. Like mattresses

in a futurist

fairytale, piled high

for the shallow

sleep of automatons,

a strata in which one

white feather

––shrewdly inserted––

might awaken something

or someone.

Jenny Haysom lives with her family in Old Ottawa South. In 2011, her poem "Minnowing" won the Diana Brebner award, and in 2013 her work was long-listed for both the CBC and Gwendolyn MacEwen poetry prizes. Her writing has been published in a variety of periodicals, and she is currently the prose editor for Arc Poetry Magazine.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #135 : a rawlings : from DUMP

a rawlings [photo credit: Matt Ceolin] is a writer and interdisciplinary artist specializing in acoustic ecology, vocal improvisation, and ecopoetics. She has collaborated with numerous international artists and organizations, including Maja Jantar, the Logos Foundation, and Valgeir Sigurðsson. rawlings' poetry publications include Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Coach House Books, 2006) and Gibber (a digital publication, 2012). Her libretti include Bodiless (for composer Gabrielle Herbst, 2014) and Longitude (for composer Davíð Brynjar Franzson, 2014). In 2013, her work Áfall / Trauma was shortlisted for the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Playwrights. rawlings holds a BA in Creative Writing from York University, where she received the bpNichol Award for Distinction in Writing. She also holds an MS in Environmental Ethics and Natural Resource Management from the University of Iceland. She resides in Reykjavík.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan