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

Tuesday poem #679 : Robin Durnford : Peel

 

 

this whole day I didn’t think
of her, had work to do

fed the cats, ate an apple
played with the seeds

on my tongue I crunched
the bitterness and it echoed

through the hall as if I had punched
a hole through the middle

or thrown the flesh against the wall.
you seemed afraid of me then.

like I might spit a seed at you
or peel your skin

and bite you to the core.

 

 

 

 

Robin Durnford was born in St. John's Newfoundland and grew up on the west coast of the island. She is the author of five books of poetry, including A Lovely Gutting (2012), Fog of the Outport (2013), Half Rock (2016), Gaptoothed (2020), and most recently, At Beckett's Grave (2025). She currently lives in Montreal (Tiohtià:ke) where she teaches poetry and memoir at John Abbott College. “Peel” is from a poetry collection she is currently working on called Aspirations for my Enemy.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

 

Tuesday poem #678 : Gage Michael Wheatley : Anatomy of a Lotus Eater

 

I think there should be flowers
and my arms
should end in petals
the right mix
of forget-me-nots
and kink
fingers to swarm
my rosy skin,
peachy ass. Roots
embedded into
cotton sheets.
A charming biography
of a boy
who lost track
of his body
somewhere
in the aughts.
My stomach is where I hid
the lotuses,
where they pull me
to my core.
My fingers tangle
when I
reach
for the sun.
The earthy peat
feels colder
than I remember,
like an absent parent.
I think there should be flowers
in my skin pricking,
plucking
and staining my sides,
but it seems there are far
fewer
than there used to be.

 

 

 

 

Based in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke, Gage Michael Wheatley's interdisciplinary practice weaves together poetry, ceramics, and photography. They build on a queer aesthetic of playful art-making to explore how we relate to history, myth, and the world around us. Gage’s practice is a quiet inquiry into the space where discarded things become treasures. Their work has appeared in CV2, carte blanche, yolk, and Headlight Anthology, among others.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan