Tuesday poem #682 : Patrick O’Reilly : EL CAMINO

 

 

Boasting a box capacity of almost
33 cubic feet, and 17 miles to a gallon,
the Chevrolet El Camino combined
the rugged durability of a pickup
with a sedan’s sleek, suburban profile.
3-Speed automatic, CID V8 engine,
and with 400 horses under the hood
this baby could definitely fuck.
It was the perfect vehicle for anyone
who couldn’t make a decision
and wanted to do it fast. You
could drive an El Camino if
you didn’t know who you were,
or just where you were going,
or how you wanted to get there,
how much you wanted to bring with you,
or who you were willing to leave in the dust.
A vehicle of pure possibility,
no certain past and no real future.
You could run out for groceries
or run from the cops. Cruise the main drag,
back and forth, all night, for eternity,
past the unchanging Texaco sign,
the Jiffy Lube, the Burger King, the eyes
in the rearview mirror
becoming luggage. You could
take the rugrats up to the lake,
you could pack your bags and leave
in the El Camino. You could drive all night.
You could be a car. You could be a truck.

 

 

 

 

Patrick O’Reilly is a poet from Renews, NL, and a research monitor for the Hearn Institute for Fractal Nissography. Patrick is responsible for two chapbooks: A Collapsible Newfoundland (Frog Hollow Press, 2020) and Demographics Report, November 2023 (Cactus Press, 2024).

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #681 : Sarah Wolfson : THE PLANTING

 

 

One bean grew down instead of up. Perhaps I planted it wrong. For weeks, nothing. Then the soil moulded over with white fuzz indistinguishable from perlite. I almost threw it away, but the child said hang on and finally some odd, gnarly tooth-like roots anchored themselves upward into air. Soon enough they understood and latched back downward into soil, becoming rough green sutures across a heavy wound named not knowing. Then the stem appeared. It had been growing underground. Like Persephone, said the child. Her mother’s sadness is the reason we have seasons. The child herself conceived after a spell of grief. Finally, the seedling righted, curling back upward through its own looping cellulose. I thought it would choke, cord wrapped around its neck, which happens in more than a quarter of pregnancies. But this is not an uplifting poem about babies who face adversity and thrive: dumpster babies, rubble babies, dog-mauled babies, raised-by-wolves babies. Not a poem about losses, though we are often caught in the act of loss. In the end, the bean grew up, threading the needle of its selfhood. Leaves appeared, smaller than the rest. It’s a month behind the other shoots and who knows whether it will bear fruit, though some small signs point to yes. But help. Get me out of this poem about hope. I simply wanted to tell you how far a bean will go to bend toward sunlight, looping around itself, rising wrongly, before righting everything, a bona fide green cobra bobbing and weaving, hypnotized, toward some higher power.

 

 

 

 

Sarah Wolfson is the author of A Common Name for Everything, which won the 2020 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, Geist, Arc, and Prairie Fire. Her work has also been anthologized in Rewilding: Poems for the Environment and The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. Originally from Vermont, land also known as Ndakinna, she is a longtime resident of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.  

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #680 : Madelaine Caritas Longman : guzzle III

 

after John Thompson

TELEPATHY WITH GOD reads a sticker on the metro
Thank God I’m an atheist reads another.

Drumheller, Red Earth, Medicine Hat, the Walmart
parking lot: roads breathing fever.

John, you wrote not the destruction of form,
not the praise of the private hallucination.

passion, passive, and pathology grafted
from the same root: to be taken over.

in a backseat i half-slept, cheek pressed to the window;
wheat scraped the white from the sky’s edgeless mind.

there was something in me that wasn’t the world:
i thought that made it self.

 

 

 

 

Madelaine Caritas Longman is the author of The Danger Model (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), which won the Quebec Writers’ Federation Concordia University First Book Prize and was longlisted for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in PRISM international, The Ex-Puritan, Vallum, Room, and elsewhere. In 2025, she was awarded the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Literature. She lives in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal).

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan