Tuesday poem #482 : Sharmila Cohen : The Primeval Forest

 

The forest was full of wildlife that couldn’t survive our modern world.
Those creatures don’t believe in progress, a youth said.

An elder put on a wise face and replied, wisdom and progress are not one and the same.

And then the youths threw stones at him for being such a cliché. 

**

There are so many trees, one of the youths complained, and they’re so old. Our bodies are not habitat-specific and we’re ready for new vistas. Let’s find a really big snake and ask it nicely to drive us out of here. It can slither us all the way to the sea.

It’ll slither you all the way to hell, someone older, but not as old as the trees said.

Hell is a construct meant to keep us in line. But we’re all curvy, another youth giggled. And then the group started hissing.

**

Something new had entered the forest: rain. It was determined to make its mark. It rained and rained and rained. The water soaked into the ground and the earth grew soft and came apart. As the situation became more dire, peoples reacted differently. Some decided to go with the flow and drift away. Others climbed to the treetops. There were those who filled their pockets with stones and waited at the bottom for the floods to end. Nested societies of shrinking magnitude.

 

 

 

Sharmila Cohen is an award-winning writer and translator. Her work has been featured in publications such as BOMB, Harpers, LitHub and Epiphany. In 2021, her English translation of The High-Rise Diver (Die Hochhausspringerin) by Julia von Lucadou was published by World Editions. She also co-founded Telephone Books, an interdisciplinary press dedicated to experimental translation. Originally from New York, Cohen moved to Berlin in 2011 as a Fulbright Scholar to complete a creative literary project.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #481 : Ellie Sawatzky : CHIHULY’S MILLE FIORI

 

 

 

In the dark gallery we look at the glass.
Grasses, snakes. Bulrushes and flushes of colour.
My sister and I—we’re charcoal-supple, still calm;
it’s a full moon tonight, and later we’ll go dancing.

Grasses and snakes. Bulrushes, flushes of colour,
while Dad’s on a stretcher waiting for a brain scan.
It’s a full moon tonight, and later we’ll go dancing.
We look at the glass. One thousand flowers.

And Dad’s on a stretcher waiting for a brain scan.
Somewhere else, a different city. Everything feels right.
We look at the glass. One thousand flowers
reflected in a black pool, drowsy.

Somewhere else, a different city. Nothing feels right.
In the hospital it’s never dark. Fluorescent moons
reflect in the black windows, manless.
And we don’t know yet what’s happened.

In the hospital it’s never dark. Fluorescent moons
in the windows, flashes of white like fractured bone.
We don’t know yet what’s happened.
Innocent minutes drift between the glass cattails.

The windows, flashes of white like fractured bone.
My sister and I—we’re charcoal-supple, so calm.
Innocent minutes drift between the stalks of cattails.
We sit in the dark garden. Look at the beautiful glass.

 

 

 

 

Ellie Sawatzky (@elliesawatzky) grew up in Kenora, Ontario. A past winner of CV2’s Foster Poetry Prize, runner up for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize, and a finalist for the 2019 Bronwen Wallace Award, her work has been published widely in literary magazines across North America. None of This Belongs to Me is her debut full-length poetry collection, published by Nightwood Editions in October 2021. She is currently an editor for FriesenPress, a member of the Growing Room Collective, and curator of the Instagram account IMPROMPTU (@impromptuprompts), a hub for prompts and literary inspiration. She lives in Vancouver with her partner and a cat named Camus.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #480 : James Yeary : 26 from 31 autobiographical statements

 

 

Those feet of yours are all the talk
everything that is already missing
arranged into a word and placed north of the canopy
it attacks the respiratory system
introducing its own layers and lenses 

Come join us here under the mask of the living
soft red deer scalp
fox bright and dark alternating
            around the eyes
            little soul nap 

            midnights with the rain goddess in Florida
            reckoning tweets in a loop

            love has broken down our mentation
            many flavors including chastisement

                        nuance, after all
                        is not speciation

There just aren't that many types

 

 

James Yeary is a poet and visual artist, who makes works primarily in the serial poem and epistolary collage. He is a laboratory assistant in a pathology department of the medical-industrial complex. Recent chapbooks include S/2004 N1 (The Magnificent Field), Hawai’i (cielocanth), Sonnet for Edith Jarolim (spitch press) and The 66,512 (above/ground).

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan