Tuesday poem #499 : Sarah Feldman : The Way Up Down

 

The way up down: one and the same.
              - Heraclitus B60

Turn back now, look: how far
you’ve come, how lightly
passed the trackless
distances which are and are not
the same you must travel now
back. Again you give yourself
to the current – not, this time, to be borne
along, the whole river’s length slipping
by in one flash like a dream-
less sleep. Now the current takes you
piecemeal, exacting, moment to moment,
compensation for the erring ease
of your birth – what’s left to you now
the upstream way and work
of self-unmaking.  So take it – not what you
have dreamed, sung, the sliding clean
from sheathes of skin and muscle
and nerve, the double-knotted chains
and helices of hope and fear and grief
and grief. Go now, harrowed without
by juts of root and rock, within
by a howling up from darkest innards
that chatters bone against bone
and parches the heart’s blood
to a scritch of dead leaves.
Let sea dwindle to river, and river
to stream, to – at last –
the shallows where you began,
the murky rim where water
runs to ground.

 

  

Sarah Feldman’s first poetry collection, The Half-Life of Oracles, was published by Fitzhenry and Whiteside in Fall 2018, and received reviews from Jean Van Loon in Arc and from Ian People in The Manchester Review. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Literary Review of Canada, Fiddlehead and Undercurrents: New Voices in Canadian Poetry.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

 

Tuesday poem #498 : Chris Kerr : Skeuomorph

 

I like my anthrax faxed to me.
The number’s on my site.
Trace it with your hacksaw please
and snort the dust it bites.

I think it’s 2001
an iPodyssey.
I see pod people. Annie
get your hand gun.

I get my ass handed to me,
Xeroxed, by my boss,
my monster truck tailed,
my workplace doxed.

It takes a detachment of veterans
to detach my retinal scanner
from my smart lightbulb.
I sand my fingerprints down on yours
to ten circular sores.

 

 

 

Chris Kerr lives in London. His chapbook Extra Long Matches is out now with Penteract Press. His first collection, Nam Gal Sips Clark, was published by Hesterglock Press. His first pamphlet, Citidyll, was published by Broken Sleep Books. He is the co-author of ./code --poetry with Daniel Holden. Find him on Twitter @c_c_kerr and via chriskerrpoet.com 

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #497 : Phillip Crymble : Last of the Colour

——— for your grandfather

           It’s cold in late November, not at all the kind of weather,
                    no, not at all how I remember

meeting him. Plant lice on his prize tomatoes. Those lost
           and leafless trees he painted —

           woodland cedars, birches, maples — every one a dream
                     he dreamed of fire depleted. 

Washed-out whites, a field of green, the palette-knife
                              to bring relief to earth tones. 

           And the trees in blackened aubergine — their branches
                     nerve-end arteries flash-frozen —

           windfall limbs and leaves — persimmon mixed
with orange peel. It’s summer

           in my memory — tent-caterpillars in the trees — out back
                              the blowtorch whispering.

 

 

 

Phillip Crymble is a physically disabled poet from Belfast now living in Atlantic Canada. A poetry editor at The Fiddlehead, he received his MFA from the University of Michigan and has poems either published or forthcoming in The Irish Times, The Walrus, The London Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, The Literary Review of Canada, The Forward Book of Poetry, and elsewhere. 

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

 

Tuesday poem #496 : Mary Rykov : asphalt garden

 

 

 

out the sixth-floor window

 

only snow beyond

 

one cone-laden

 

blue spruce tip

 

endlessly lit

 

by traffic

 

 

 

María (Mary) Helena Rykov is a Puerto Rican-Canadian who currently lives in Tkaronto with a beautiful, bossy, preloved, rehomed feline who channels Gertrude Stein’s cat. More at https://maryrykov.com.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan