Tuesday poem #121 : Shannon Maguire : Incorrigible

Night off! borrowed frock peach berserk smoke thick as vaseline over tux-tails on dance floor. spontaneous combustion neckings in annex storefronts & roommates walk in while pinned under at knife point (fully clothed on living room carpet). they smile and creep up servants’ stairs assuming negotiated, but total surprise, actually & last of three dates with aspiring romance novelist. Night off! cherry beach blind date. idea for never-to- be-made-film starts with exterior night butch with pretty face stripped naked (but not shown in titillating way) and cuffed by group of cops cut to exterior sunrise she hobbles wearing only a shirt pulled down as far as it goes about fourteen blocks to brownstone where femme in 60s dress opens door registers shock ushers inside cut to exterior we’re walking all night different parts off city, stalling, cut to interior crack of pancakes at mel’s in annex close as we get. ever. Night off! cherry bomb at andy pool hall outside in line waiting in rain goosed by leather dyke, quickie in stall with different butch cabbing home: her dime my place chocolate martinis eight or nine between us turns into four months, ends in choking & bruises, so much for that. Night off! coffee with straight femme friend that other friends ridonculously think is perfect match, admit fear-flight thresholds screaming but soooo not border patrol! rush off to date four with bi femme met though dial-in service in free weekly, sex on date three outstanding but spend evening unintentionally recalling scraps of convo with straight friend and date knows it, long subway ride to work after part of night spent in 24-hour greasy spoon with severe case of the broods. Night off! after-shift close encounter with zombie walk, wanting to join but not quite dressed for horror success, instead meandering westward everyone away for not-holiday weekend. Night off! first day off fifteen day juice cleanse carefully timed to coincide with severe lack of funds, attend friend’s poetry launch skinny as grade 11, mutually flirting with scorching but much younger trans guy when combo of gifted intoxicants pile drives night. Night off! three months since last kiss & total mess so write “kiss stranger” as item three on to-do list as prank never guessing that out with friend that night would meet “The Voice” from cbc and kiss a tall stunning blond, saved from dying of boredom and loneliness, lake-locked, lost in own coils.

Shannon Maguire's [photo credit: Tanis MacDonald] first collection, fur(l) parachute (BookThug), was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, the Golden Crown Award for Lesbian Poetry and the Manitoba Magazine Awards in the category of Best Suite of Poems. She was a finalist for the bpNichol Chapbook Award for her chapbook Fruit Machine (Ferno House) and has a poem in The Best American Experimental Writing of 2014 (OmniDawn). Her second collection, Myrmurs, is forthcoming from BookThug in fall 2015.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #120 : Elizabeth Treadwell : 3 from Penny Marvel & the book of the city of selfys

selfy as both anchorite and mermaids

the horizon’s vague, strict in my masquerade, my shy

passersby— famous anchorites, when we were

the bright imaginaries of the dawn—

awash in this, our softest lexicon—

piercing the lacy portals of an ancient remnant—

tiny beings as we glisten, curving

selfy as a painful exciting atlas

nurse junctures haven’tsea, hidden extremely songs:

very old folk motion, the animals, the plants, and stillness—

fashion geranium play, since jobby, but again, typical, decent, essay—

given jewellery, obsolete lucky outside

current expansion theory—

what kind, daily, there’sanew

always—

able, library, sorts

selfy as the duchess of normcore

the gnostics give birth to him again and again,

forever normcore, in the sacred cave of

subjectivity and wifely splendor, whereby

doctrine cauldron

oak damsels magpie entrail—

the nymph echo
as the fish

and the rivers

cry

Elizabeth Treadwell's latest book is Posy: a charm almanack & atlas and a career-spanning selection appears in the new anthology Out of Everywhere 2. The poems for today's Dusie are from a new manuscript, other materials toward which reside at pennymarvel.tumblr.com.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #119 : David James Brock : But What Did their Skin Look Like?

Like fine bones of long dead fish placed just-so

on dried out cobs of corn, kernels eaten at an

outdoor dinner on a bygone Earth. I expected black

organs through a lucent shell, rushing plasma

revealing similarities between our species. I remember

a sound on the skin, a wonderful hum that told me

I was about to be taken. The skin played music in

notes mostly like the ones we have. I did not see

bright light. It happened like pond fog. My thoughts

turned banal: the leftovers in my fridge, I knew I wasn’t

about to die (is that oddball?). The abduction was hot—

but you asked about their skin. I was off to be a

curiosity. (Maybe there’d be pain). They were limbless.

I could teach them of hands. Maybe they’d learn

mercy. I promised, I wouldn’t fight back. I smelled

an ease of relenting: a flower with petals I can’t

name, having no botany in the brain tank. Believe me,

I gave up quickly. I thought I’d feel flight, but I sank

somewhere. Nothing else in my time as captive remains.

Sorry I can’t tell you more. You ask me what I do

remember. My first fear was hunger, not their skin of

dried corn…fish bones. On Earth, we could eat them

as deterrence. Now, since I everyone I knew is gone,

please tell me which year I’ve returned to.

David James Brock is a playwright, poet, and librettist whose plays and operas have been performed in cities across Canada and the UK.  His first collection of poetry is Everyone is CO₂ (Wolsak & Wynn). He is co-creator of Breath Cycle, an opera developed for singers with cystic fibrosis through Scottish Opera, which was recently nominated for a Royal Philharmonic Society Award.  
Website: www.davidjamesbrock.com Twitter:@davidjamesbrock.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #118 : Sarah Burgoyne : The Somnambulist Parade

Lord, we always knew you’d be famous. Having been spoon-fed spumoni all our lives. No broken bones. Send your new lover back to the farm and let me refuse another way of seeing. I used such hairy hands to leave the bread crumbs for no one but the thieves.

I am not so happy. Therefore I will take no more photographs. I will loose my onions to some new green arms. My brother’s father is dying. I wrote shit lines about hearts. Walk ahead of me old flames, and I will stalk you back to the station. No one else and no one else and no one else.

Maybe, an old man looks for mercies the way a child looks for winks from a stuffed bear. Some things: mercies, a wind across yucky water, another voice not going. No one will answer the full turn, so I stopped paying tribute. Look, I grow to formidable proportions. A desiccated bicycle on an old post slumps in the wake!

Whoever sent that dead rose, listen. Don’t keep me so far and long. Give me what I want (the things) and I promise to never lie down again. Don’t return to the pond without me. Forget your father’s name by the flour mill with your bicycle and jar of sacred almonds. I won’t come around. I’ll sit in the sycamore. And again.

Sarah Burgoyne lives and teaches in Montreal. Her latest chapbook Love the Sacred Raisin Cakes was published in November with Baseline Press.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan