Tuesday poem #450 : Saba Pakdel : lullaby

 

absence is a presence that never is

centuries would not pass

in an hourglass that’s falling

upward down

you did not believe in time

yet sand runs through

timelessness in a bubble

and oceans dry

does it all go back by turning the other end up?

 

what to do about the restlessness of the sun

the rebellious Icarus

falling to the borders of your stripped body

melts

in between your thighs

into a mirage appearing closer

yet absence still is

not standing afar

to outdistance recollections

 

here, is no fear

here is the fear

tall city towers fall apart

rows of pine trees succumb

a crowd wanders inside me

with hideous faces through the fuss

I             am                  pregnant with a disaster

mother lullabies

 

time follows you all the way up

don’t try to move backward

shadows

are not the darkest side of absence

when trees are the presence that never is

 

 

Saba Pakdel was born into a family of artists in Tehran, Iran. Growing up in a home of theatre, literature, and cinema, Saba breathed in the quality air of arts from an early age. She completed her BA and MA in English; attended and coordinated literary workshops and poetry readings; published poems, translations, and essays in Persian journals before leaving her home country to Canada in 2017. Once settled, she continued her studies at SFU (her second master’s degree in English) and gained admission to the Ph.D. program in English at UVic.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

 

Tuesday poem #449 : Liam Siemens : After The Internet

 

 

I was trying to remember everything. If you look at the sky long enough the bears and hunters gradually resolve into a trillion bright lights and a shattering distance, but that’s not quite what I mean. It doesn’t have to do with my friend, the laquerer with a Japanese apprenticeship who right now is brushing lamps for Bezos’ five-hundred million dollar yacht, caressing toxic sap into a beautifully reflective shade. While I try to remember everything worth writing down, there are engineers dumping soil on the Sahara to grow disease-resistant crops; artists are talking about grunge futurism and climate bunkers. This goes without saying, because everyone is talking about the future, but while the anxious are trying to get the geese out of their chests the pope is undergoing another genetic reconstruction of the face. More power, more problems. That’s the thing about the earth, which is that if you’re in orbit you never hit rock-bottom. But my memory, where did it go? If anyone is remembered in the distant future they will be given an anachronistic diagnosis they’ll be sure to dislike, but at the very least one of us will survive to tell them how it was. It might take someone who lives long enough to find car fumes so toxic they can wrap their mouths around the exhaust to kill their tumours, but hopefully they’ll still be able to imagine bellybuttons growing flowers. At least I know how I want to go: I want to enter a building shaped like a person, just like the Great Temple at Abu Simbel. My burial will be the same size as everyone else’s — so small you need a foldscope to see it clearly, so big you’ll never find its corners — and when you enter the casket you’ll learn that something new and unexpected just became possible. Memory, a haunting.

 

 

 

Liam Siemens is a writer from Saskatoon. Find his work at the Literary Review of Canada, SAD Mag, VICE, and elsewhere. If not there, here.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #448 : Trevor Wilkes : My Third Beer

 

 

 

friend made a joke
about behaviour east

of Yonge Street
man displaying his manhood 

shorts around his thighs
young woman walked into

bus stop headfirst
phone in hand while 

it momentarily rained shards
of glass all over salt stained

boots on her feet
there’s a man down the 

street from my apartment
he wears a Russian fur cap

with Tupperware full of change and
a book with a bent cover 

I want to ask his name
I’m afraid he’ll ask me for

some change I have no
problem giving money to communists 

I don’t have the heart to tell him I don’t
have any change either

a woman came into my work
asking for “akky” berry mix 

I didn’t give a shit to correct her
(ignorance is bliss)

we all can’t be health
conscious and intelligent 

my third beer predicts
canker sore on the inside of my lip

that makes me feel like a degraded leech
on the side of the road 

 

 

Trevor Wilkes is an emerging poet living in Toronto, Ontario, and is currently studying English (honours) at Ryerson University. In addition to poetry, Trevor writes literature and poetry reviews for his university's literary journal White Wall Review. In 2018, he self-published a small collection of poems entitled Waiting Room. He is currently working on his upcoming second collection of poetry.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan