Tuesday poem #239 : Biswamit Dwibedy : After Noon

light of recognition

reflected aimlessly                  

his body along

will hover.

As now you will

say: Can I?

Repeating

Let Me. Be Mine.

And the Many

in the forest turn concrete. Your breath

a staggering plateau. The delicate marriage

of bones.

An oar unraveled

Whatever rippled

roughly shaped like

another orbit

similarities we must reclaim.

An I on the other side

the other hand, awakens               

architecture. like mica

inside the eyes.     

 Wheat, dirt

elongated seasons.

That move, so assured.

Biswamit Dwibedy is the author of Ozalid (1913 Press, 2010), Eirik’s Ocean (Portable Press, 2016) and Ancient Guest (HarperCollins, 2017).  He guest-edited a dossier of Indian poetry for Aufgabe13, published by Litmus Press, and edits Anew Print, a small-press focused on translations from India. He was also a judge for the Best Translated Book Award in 2015. He has an MFA in writing from Bard College and teaches in Bangalore.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #238 : Kyle Flemmer : Constellations

When I first looked up

at the midnight sky

I saw points not constellations

*

When I was a child

the stars rained down

on my imagination

**

When I looked as man

I saw the patterns others

wanted me to see

***

When I grew old

my milky eyes

beheld no galaxies

*

And as I die

the stars go out

Kyle Flemmer [photo credit: Dean McLelland] founded The Blasted Tree Publishing Company in 2014 as an outlet for his writing and to build a community of emerging Canadian artists. He graduated from Concordia University in 2016 with a double-major in Western Society & Culture and Creative Writing.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #237 : Michelle Detorie : PINK DOLPHIN

There is never enough time.
The moon makes a milky
slick upon the sea. We are all
mothers swollen with the hell
of being human, of being
in between. The houses
we make have all
the rooms but the one
where we can meet. That room
floats in the belly of the beast
slushing the whale-road
of alphabets and broken birds.
Still, we can feel it. Bright
fins flashing. Sometimes
pretending is enough.

Michelle Detorie is the author of numerous chapbooks including Fur Birds (Insert Press), How Hate Got Hand (eohippus labs), and Bellum Letters (Dusie). She also makes visual poems, poetry objects, time-based poetry, and curates the public art project, The Poetry Booth. Her first full-length collection, After-Cave, was released with Ahsahta Press in late 2014. In 2015 she completed The Sin in Wilderness, a book-length erasure about love, animals, and affective geography. She is currently at work on a collection of prose pieces called FERAL PLANETS.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #236 : Jennifer Zilm : Devotional

My icon-bearing wall, the paint lightfast,

refusing the sun’s sleazy degradation.
Egg tempera is preferable to watercolour
because the leftover white can be used to
tighten widening pores or as scramble
for brunch after matinal devotions.
We who eat our god prefer our worship
objects with an edible sheen.

Out of the church, away from my altar, I find myself
praying to electric lights, to nostalgia,
to steam, the gentled railway tracks,
feast of freighter colour, power of
placement, oh our sweet lady of basic
bitch variations. I drink coffee only
at cafes where beans are locally roasted,
like Joan of Arc. On a bus shelter
I saw a sign: Someone took my brother—
I mean—my bicycle, I must learn how
to identify an emergency.

Jennifer Zilm is the author of Waiting Room (BookThug, 2016) and the chapbooks The whole and broken yellows (Frog Hollow, 2013) and October Notebook (Dancing Girl Press, 2015). A second collection The Missing Field is forthcoming from Guernica Editions in 2018. She lives in East Vancouver where she works in libraries, archives, social housing and harm reduction.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #235 : Adam Clay : Lincoln Avenue in the Early Morning Hours

The morning sun smears the clouds

away from the color white

for the first time

like every time.

Think about anything and it won’t

make sense at first or think

so much that dust becomes

a heart beating

through the trance of existence,

through the long stretch of life

toward a single touch.

Fragments of metaphor

litter the mind, waiting for the color

of light they’ll be held up against:

blue void of bliss

or red smudged the blur of a fire truck

in the early hours

of life, forgotten over time.

Because memories need no color,

they so easily shed themselves of it.

Adam Clay is the author of Stranger (Milkweed Editions, 2016), A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World (Milkweed Editions, 2012), and The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006). A fourth book is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Georgia Review, Boston Review, Iowa Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan