Tuesday poem #330 : Samuel Ace : Every morning I wait for a pouch of dreams

Every morning I wait for a pouch of dreams   the scrabblings of birds and all the rushings by   my parents call from two different corners of the room   suddenly dead   martyrs in the stories of their recent lives   my mother lives in a new house   she tells me she loves the windows that look out to the sea   she shows me her kitchen   far messier than the one she had before   my father   singing and bald at twenty-five   shovels dirt or coal   I hum along with him but I’m not sure he hears   I ask my mother if she’s seen my sisters   Who? she shouts   all the hairs!   all the mouths!   she does not know the tall rangy man in overalls   my father   gone before she knows him   as he walks down a path near the river   where the after-life happens before it can be caught   where the life before is a dog or a fly or a portrait on the wall   my sisters stroll through the center of the room   one has a broken arm   the other a cane and a limp   I run to them and hide beneath their matching rose velvet gowns   I sing my father’s song up through their ribs and hear an orchestra of breathing tubes   rabbits on the floor   a hint of lime   eggs scrambling in an iron pan   I see a block of marble where the wind   a drum in the grass   a grave of killers   rises and wanders toward morning through the dark  

Samuel Ace [photo credit: Matthew Blank] Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer poet and sound artist. He is the author of several books, most recently Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish), the re-issued Meet Me There: Normal Sex and Home in three days. Don’t wash., (Belladonna* Germinal Texts), and Stealth with poet Maureen Seaton. He is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry, as well as a two-time finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series. Recent work can be found in Poetry, PEN America, Best American Experimental Poetry, Vinyl, and many other journals and anthologies. He currently teaches poetry and creative writing at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts. www.samuelace.com.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #329 : Manahil Bandukwala : Sandcritter

you straddle the world

between my dreams

and waking state

on the radiator fallen

black strands crisp

become a dust that gives

you form

incept plastic sheets

and stagnant shadows between

window panes

the lever is stuck

the window half open

snow flurries phase through

mesh tears up a black spot

runs in a vertical sliver

this is where you enter

when my body

convulses my partner sleeps

on unknowingly

return to the night animals

bats sometimes fly

this part of town

my partner picks almonds out

of mixed nut packages

and sprinkles

them on the windowsill

wish for squirrel

wish for skunk

wish for black pawed

raccoon

when you are gone

i wonder

did you learn

the forms of animals

Manahil Bandukwala is an artist, poet, and writer. She uses experiences and observations to produce art with a loose and carefree style. Her upbringing and culture greatly influences her poetry. Her creative interests include painting, illustration, sculpture, and poetry.

Originally from Karachi, Pakistan, she now resides in Ottawa, Canada. She studied art in her O Levels and privately throughout her adolescence. Currently, she is an undergraduate student in the department of English at Carleton University.

Her work, both visual and written, has appeared in a number of literary magazines across Canada, including Room magazine, The Puritan, Parentheses Art, ottawater, the Ottawa Arts Review, Coven Editions, carte blanche, and other places. She was the 2019 winner of Room magazine’s Emerging Writer Award. Her poem, “Pipe Rose,” was awarded second place in the George Johnston Poetry Prize.

Manahil is on the editorial team of In/Words Magazine & Press, a small press literary and arts magazine run out of Carleton University. She hosts the monthly reading series, promotes events and news on social media, designs covers and layouts, and carries out numerous other tasks for the magazine. She is also on the editorial board of Canthius, a feminist literary magazine.

The Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #328 : Diana Arterian : THE HUMAN IMAGE

God, a selfish crease

knits a father, child

snares a human down
waters form his dress

Then of dismal dime
feeds over the shade

bears the heathen nest
thickest Brain in there

Diana Arterian [photo by Ali-Reza Nusrat] is the author of the poetry collection Playing Monster :: Seiche (1913 Press, 2017), the chapbooks With Lightness & Darkness and Other Brief Pieces (Essay Press, 2017), Death Centos (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), and co-editor of Among Margins: Critical & Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics (Ricochet, 2016). A Poetry Editor at Noemi Press, her creative work has been recognized with fellowships from the Banff Centre, Caldera, Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo, and her poetry, essays, and translations have been featured in Asymptote, Black Warrior Review, BOMB, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Poetry Foundation website, among others. Diana holds a PhD in in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, where she was a Russell Fellow, and an MFA in poetry from CalArts, where she was a Beutner Fellow. Born and raised in Arizona, she currently resides in Los Angeles. 

The Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #327 : Winston Le : black metal alloy

beta-bitten. third generation
born into werewolf diaspora—
Hannah comes of age.

bristled bare feet ice-burn,
wander lunar-chilled fields
amidst argent forest. invertebrates on all
fours. clenches teenage-berserker fangs—
metamorphous-grit the night
of tết beneath full moon rite-of-passage.

glossolalia tiếng-hư. horror
monster language bilingual-
prefixes & portmanteaus
her cleft-shapeshifter ego. 

torn vascular-scripture diary-scrawls
bad grace. namesakes— 
the blessed                              the cursed
helix-intertwine like barbwires. metal
characters reverse-engineer & phonetic-meld
vietglish incarnate—cô ấy la

alpha-transformed       Hưnnah.

Winston Le is a Vietnamese-Canadian poet and asemic artist who resides in Langley, BC. He is a graduate of the Creative Writing program at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and through the Surrey Poet Laureate Program was the Events Coordinator for Asians on Edge, an avant-garde Asian-Canadian diasporic literary event. His poems have been featured in both filling Station and Seagery Zine. His debut chapbook, translanguaging was shortlisted for the 2018 Broken Pencil Zine Awards. He most recently collaborated with multi-instrumentalist composer, Cameron Catalano in composing an art song as part of Art Song Lab 2019, which was performed by soprano singer, Robyn Driedger-Klassen and pianist, Rachel Iwaasa at Pyatt Hall.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan