Tuesday poem #434 : Howie Good : Carnivore

 

Rain was rattling down like a steel security grate over a storefront. Faces disappeared off the street only to reappear nine months later on other bodies. At that point, I was sitting on a barstool watching with a kind of puzzled fascination CNN live stream the latest mass shooting. I could feel the tingle of green mold spreading along the inside of my skull. Something told me it wouldn’t be OK anymore to think out loud. The thought uppermost in my mind was, ridiculously enough, that “canine” can refer to a dog or a sharp tooth used for tearing and shredding. 

 

 

 

Howie Good is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including most recently The Death Row Shuffle (Finishing Line Press), The Trouble with Being Born (Ethel Micro Press), and Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing). His collection, The Bad News First, is forthcoming from Kung Fu Treachery Press.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #433 : Ken Norris : EARLY MORNING WAVES

 

 

I took the Wallace Stevens franchise to another shoreline.
Now I'm staring at the early morning waves.
They roll in, blue and unafraid, white-capped and peaceful.
This ocean and I go back a long way.

You can't expect everyone to write at the Ontario cottage
and come up with something different. I travel--
to places where the white birds swoop and soar.
There's a tin roof waiting for me, there's a tropical heart
waiting to be born. 

                               When she sang beside the genius of the sea
he was there to hear it, and to take it further.
The waves are our brave counsellors,
breaking here, in the lush greenery, at our feet.

 

 

 

Born in New York City in 1951, Ken Norris came to Canada in the early 1970s. One of Canada's most prolific poets, Norris is the author of more than 30 books. His work has been widely anthologized in Canada and throughout the English-speaking world, as well as published in translation in France, Belgium, Israel and China. He divides his time between Canada, the U.S., and Asia. His latest book is South China Sea (Guernica Editions, 2021), and his latest chapbook is HAWAIIAN SUNRISE (above/ground press). 

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #432 : Katie Jean Shinkle : Figure No 1.

 

 

The gold-plated hour
casts the trees, yet

pine continues to ask
where have you been?

Tops touch
in a system of knowing

so ancient a brain of spindle finger,
each swirl

a life pattern,
each bristle

a precarious reckoning.
In-between branches light shifts,

and then over your face
in transcendence,

and I wonder when language left me,
when I forgot how to spell your name,

had to remind myself the curves
of an -a versus -y, an ending of -la

so feminine, how dare you.
The pine says, flex and you shall receive,

so on my knees I open my mouth
and my tongue reacts.

Every attempt to retrieve
a failure.

Oh holy,
holy,
holy, 

when the pines shake
awake the empty bedroom

and shadow tongues the walls,
there it is: the way day calls to you.

 

 

 

Katie Jean Shinkle is the author of four novellas and six chapbooks, most recently None of This is an Invitation (w/Jessica Alexander, Astrophil Press, forthcoming) and Will You Kiss Me Goodnight? (The Offending Adam, forthcoming). She is a 2021 poetry fellow at Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, serves as co-poetry editor of DIAGRAM and creative nonfiction editor of the Texas Review, and is an Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University where she teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing program.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan