Tuesday poem #469 : Roxanna Bennett : Seven Words for Pain, Beauty, Love, Ugly

 

 

Scarlet bird feeder swings like an alarm
sacred technicians carve   now a cave  once a wall  

calls, cardinals  alizarin crimson
It was the year the poets took up painting

cadmium orange  It was the year I quit teaching art  

burnt Sienna It was the year of the Yellow Masque  
yellow ochre  It was the year I quit taking part 

Payne’s grey my father’s eyes impasto sky smears        
what  of the backyard   colourwheel away the prayer

call me liar, each life I cannot perform
nib dib inky fingers, ribs of an easel        

sparrows cluster in thickets tender hidden vibrato      
hospital poems, waiting room poems,

hum along wheelbarrows
full of Whitman & other Williams

as indistinguishable as leaves of grass
crocuses, camellias.   

Camilla’s Millarca is bloodhunting
in the courtyard again

Does the breath even need me
to breathe it or am I

being breathed

 

 

 

Gratefully residing on aboriginal land, the disabled poem-making entity known as Roxanna Bennett is the author of The Untranslatable I, Unmeaningable (Gordon Hill Press) & other works.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

 

Tuesday poem #468 : Gregory Crosby : With My Own Hands

 

Little funerals full of tiny mourners,
these hours. Wondering if it’s worth it
to rob every grave, to drag the days back
to the laboratory, to stitch them
into something only lightning can love.
Will they mistake my creature for my name?
It will do neither of us any good.
All these years are only alive because

we belong dead. The spirit of the times:
pity mixed with horror. Torches, pitchforks.
We have pulled back the veil to reveal
darkness, & we sit in that dark, revealed.
The man who makes a monster makes the man
who makes a monster. Who makes a man.  

 

 

Gregory Crosby is the author of Said No One Ever (2021, Brooklyn Arts Press) and Walking Away from Explosions in Slow Motion (2018, The Operating System).

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

 

Tuesday poem #467 : Sue Bracken : Float

 

 

I float on the lake classifying clouds

I’ve always felt I should fly
but in my dreams I’m doing the breast stroke
slowly   laboriously
barely brushing tree tops

Earth bound   restrained
           I have skipped to my lou
           split-vaulted to a red ribbon
           cartwheeled in a perfect line
           grew up to jetté on stage
           met a glorious man and soared 

But I’m just a gravity girl
who wants to be a bird

Like a fish in water
float is my fly

 

 

 

Sue Bracken’s work has appeared in GUEST [a journal of guest editors], Hart House Review (forthcoming), The New Quarterly, WEIMAG, Another Dysfunctional Cancer Poem Anthology (Mansfield Press), The Totally Unknown Writer’s Festival 2015: Stories (Life Rattle Press) and other publications. Her first collection of poems When Centipedes Dream was published by Tightrope Books, 2018.  She lives in Toronto in a house ruled by artists and animals.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan