Tuesday poem #186 : Sean Braune : untitled

lapsed gradient
A turgid pli projects [the]
[its] cenozoic lies, convex
[as] curious plastic equality
            tarry tableaux  :
            try holism, tired
            misery
            numbness ,
               the inferno
[night]

i’m
          voltage

Sean Braune’s theoretical work has been published in Postmodern Culture, Journal of Modern Literature, Canadian Literature, symplokē, and elsewhere. His poetry has appeared in ditch, The Puritan, Rampike, and Poetry is Dead, and elsewhere. For the past three years he has been invited to speak at the graduate level at Yale University on the topic of avant-garde visual poetry. His dissertation focuses on retheorizing the semiotic sign in response to new materialist philosophies. His chapbook the vitamins of an alphabet appeared earlier this year with above/ground press.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #185 : George Stanley : To a Young Voter

I can't take politics seriously, at 82
I'm too preoccupied with my own

mortality.  But I can go 'meta' -
I can take your taking politics seriously

seriously.  I know, intellectually,
if your party wins the next election,
the new government will raise

taxes on the rich, lower
taxes on the poor, set a price for carbon,
save the children, save the aquifers -

even the rich will feel they are happier.

So I take very seriously
your taking politics seriously,

notwithstanding my mortality.

 

George Stanley [photo credit: Cath Morris] is a third-generation American modernist poet taken refuge among second-generation Canadian modernists.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #184 : Marie Buck : I Cough Into Your Face and You Cough into Mine

I was practicing suspending a coin in midair,
a coin the size of a standard desk globe
and the weight of a very heavy thing.

And now I remember something already ghoulish,
my majestic pink belly glowing in the dark.

The belly button ought to be sexy but isn’t;
it’s sexy to the one who licks it but feels
like nothing to the one who’s licked,
so that both parties will eventually decide
to end the awkwardness of trading pleasure
and sit back and instead read the script
on the decorative
napkins they’ve been given.

The script that says “the world is not terrible,
it’s pretty awesome,”

which no one believes,
which kills all desire.

Marie Buck is the author of Life & Style (Patrick Lovelace Editions) and Portrait of Doom (Krupskaya). She lives in Brooklyn.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #183 : Jason Christie : a portrait

gallery walls acrumble
and i'm inside eating

i'm inside eating my
lunch before work

sunlight and dust, so
much that a new

statue has formed
around me, impossible

to resist the accumulating
import, sunlight howls

my thought to shift
from tight couplets

to a disregard for the dust
that i follow and my body follows

and at some point i remember
the layers of shit on the walls

that seemed so important
while i was eating lunch

in a broken gallery surrounded
by colleagues and acquaintances

before i had to start work
dismantling the portrait exhibit

Jason Christie lives in Ottawa with his wife and toddler. He is the author of Canada Post (Snare), i ROBOT (Edge/Tesseract), Unknown Actor (Insomniac), and a co-editor of Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Mercury). He has three chapbooks from above/ground press, two of which were nominated for the bpNichol Chapbook Award: GOVERNMENT (2013), and Cursed Objects (2014). The third chapbook is called The Charm. He is currently writing poetry about objects.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan