Tuesday poem #208 : Adrienne Gruber : Dämmerschlaf

birth is but a sleep and a forgetting

                                                William Wordsworth

Twilight come

find me

in the bathtub

breathing drowning

writhing trapezist

steam vultures

my head there

but not really

there

everywhere

suckled pig

naked branded

flailing blanketed

peeled cored

alone alone

window ajar

keep sweating

can’t stop

wetting

in piss vomit

oh god

my poor pussy

I don’t believe

in survival

for all women

die this babe

is mine

or monster

every inch of

my fat lacerates

iron sear

smolder

between fetal pulse

somehow I sleep

the deep of pure

loathing

my satiety spun

stomach cistern

of bile

Twilight we are high

tripping off each

other’s vibe

the way you move

your fingers

through my hair

so rad

I once sucked back

by the river

a bunny cat

hopped by

afraid I’d retch

instead spun circles

now shank cramps

thick absorption

perhaps she atrophies

canal crushed

skull dissolved

bread crumbs for

birds

I forget her

cranium when I

come to

just wrap that

old doll

in a blanket

put it to my tit

that’ll do

We don’t need drugs

to join each

other the cosmos

that terrestrial

fear is a net

catches

drunk limbs

ocean sputter

fever swallows

my climax

you tricked me

my request

don’t forget

during your rounds

don’t pass me by

every dream I have

is for you

for us

I lost control

it doesn’t matter

you never came

Adrienne Gruber is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Buoyancy Control (BookThug) and This is the Nightmare (Thistledown Press), and three chapbooks, Mimic (Leaf Press), Everything Water (Cactus Press) and Intertidal Zones (Jack Pine Press). She has been a finalist for the CBC Literary Awards, Descant’s Winston Collins Best Canadian Poem Contest and twice for ARC’s Poem of the Year Contest. Her poem Gestational Trail was awarded first prize in the Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest in 2015 and she won the bpNichol Chapbook Award for Mimic in 2012. Adrienne lives in Vancouver with her family.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #207 : Brian Henderson : Words / How to perform the taste test

Everything swims upstream against the stickiness of vision

The street the house in the street the room in the house

The desk in the room the book on the desk the cut forest

The various chemistries the words in the book the desk

On which lies a book in the book and at which I am

Sitting everything is a door including the thumping

Helicopter of the grouse its wings pounding like a heart

You’ve stuck to my vision in the kitchen like the persistent

Brightness that remains once you close your eyes on the window’s

Gathering of the morning you don’t hear the helicopter you

Hear an unstartable motor one thing is always more than

One thing don’t you find words for instance a word is

A door a sound an etymology that is to say a continual

Transformation in time a reach is unique but also

Reusable for instance the word I’m thinking of bitcom

Telepathy autoimmunity chrysalis Lily Cup landfill

Tom-tom aubade ocean otter operand is probably being

Used in someone else’s sentence right now is a series

Of syllables or a single letter letter not yet mailed you

Put it in one fire and it burns green in another blue in

Another orange in another it’s knowledge that burns

To cinders when known and so forth in a secret

Solution and its invisibility rises to the surface and

Floats away though it’s addressed to you and you

Have to drink the solution that might be

Purple or teal or tea-coloured and has

A pleasantly sweet smoky finish

Brian Henderson is the author of 11 collections of poetry, including The Alphamiricon, a box of visual poetry (also on the web here), Nerve Language, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, Sharawadji, shortlisted for the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry, and [OR]. He’s at work on word swarms of liminal spaces and is a once-upon-a-time director of WLUPress.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #206 : Cody-Rose Clevidence : from Poppycock & Assphodel

ORCHASTROPHE

                         “an ordinary error placed me here”

in the serotonin corridors of my wilderness                           in the neural nets are caught                           in the mackerellight & ozone of my heart in the tense muscle of a crocus                                 olfactory bulb of my acre prime sublingual rib                                                      lost in the magnum opus of my heart                                                         independent of void most utterly devoid of song             tiny hummingbird         of my eyes violet quarrel deep in the forests verbage                         of my heart redundant of crocus               redundant of dogwood & redbud                  as petals fall triumphant              so too         I am at a loss                 & will blind the cathedrals of my knowing                with the overabundant scripture of my heart                                 will salivate copiously & with abandon in the blue gloaming      I mean groaning                               of my heart in the citadel        the sap salty in the flexed limbs        the mist dripping off each leaf           called to each                                 I call to each I say “leaf”     I say “violet”     I say “mist”     I say “dogtooth violet”      I say “how can I possibly bear whatever grief will inevitably come towards me through all the corridors of my life”         I say “I will blind the cathedrals of my knowing”     I say “I will douse the careless peony”   “I will vyy earnestly & with moderate valor”     “I will curse fervently & gesticulate also”     “I will try to not drink so much”         “I will strain the verb of my being into the dim groaning”     “as too I strain my sight there”                                “I succumb henceforth & wholeheartedly”             “eventually I will get up from wherever I have laid myself down”                                      the falcons too must eat in the endless neurobiology                                                   of the forest the delicate, the careless           lichen                                     of my eyes I swallow the great creek of dusk in me              it calls up a surge in me it goes along into the dark                               it goes along into the dark

Cody-Rose Clevidence’s 1st book, BEAST FEAST, was released by Ahsahta Press in 2014.  They live in the Arkansas Ozarks w their dog, Pearl. 

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #205 : Nyla Matuk : Transference

In Hamlet, when Laertes said, “Upon my life, Lamound”

I thought of “Dis de big one, Lamont! Lamont! Lamont! Dis de big one!”

uttered in despair on TV by Sanford, in Sanford and Son.

It’s not that I wanted to think Sanford and Son looked back

on Hamlet and considered the Prince’s problems with his father,

and that those problems were trickling 

down like a sinister leak of semantics

from a bothersome furnace appendage.

Simply, I want to find out Lamound’s identity.

Did Shakespeare imagine Lamound with

a big handlebar moustache like the philosopher Nietzsche’s

twirling paternalistic member, and an overripe heart

ready to explode all over a son?

Was it not to make Lamound anxious

with an influence or a transference?

To give him his explosive heart, and then die?

Nyla Matuk is the author of Sumptuary Laws (2012), and Stranger, which appeared with Véhicule Press in 2016. Her poems have appeared in Canadian, American and U.K. journals including The New Yorker, PN Review, Ladowich, Prelude, The Walrus, and The Fiddlehead. www.nylamatuk.ca

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan