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