Tuesday poem #85 : Aaron Tucker : What letter of the alphabet has lots of water?

midnight car alarms yowls us awake + so
we listen to the coughing air conditioner pour noise
a low level language microcode between hotel + occupant
that cough the same subroutine as my father’s distinct cough
a hunnh that separates him in under-populated malls || grocery stores


those coughs: one huddles around suitcases + pours
the other is both lungs, an intimate root-assemblage pulse
an exchange in which an object is merely a singular collection
of functionality + inheritance + containment, assembly-language


each noise demands an impulsive instinctual linking
instruction to object, where the slow roll of an analog wave
beautiful, full, is equal to the steady tide dragging ashore
evaporites made of potassium gypsum tin
limestone copper quartz germanium silicon


polymorphic || the ability to be in two distinct forms
one the cough of a machine the other the cough of a father
complied languages one sharp the other plus || plus plus
an elegant primordial subroutine that conflates macrominerals
+ pulses + essential chlorides + calciums, each equal

Aaron Tucker’s first book of poetry punchlines is being released by Mansfield Press in Spring of 2015. An earlier version of punchlines was released by above/ground in the summer of 2013. His poetic works and reviews have been published across Canada. His previous chapbook, apartments, was shortlisted for the 2010 bpNichol Chapbook award. As well, he is the co-creator of the ChessBard, an app that translates chess games into poems that can be found at chesspoetry.com.

His collection of essays Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema was published by Palgrave-Macmillan in July of 2014.

In addition, he is a professor in the English department at Ryerson University where he is currently teaching essay writing and digital literacy to first year students.

He is working on learning chess in between watching his beloved Raptors lose games. You can reach him at atucker[at]ryerson[dot]ca and aarontucker.ca

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #84 : Carrie Olivia Adams : from “Daughter of a Tree Farm”

My father and mother, a daughter. The branches that obscured the view. The same, instill fortune while embroidering a private govern language. The itch of a secret. And science, a believer. The distance lent me the simplicity of reduction. Everything in correlations of atoms but want of the ordinary. I gave up for ever at home. In life I remember present, read to represent a promise concentrating, carried away. A great many books ending with “I was fascinated and surprised.” That tongue developed out of the feeble growth of a living creature.
 

In the dark of the farm, we would sit till late. At that time I tried very hard. It was in a letter wrote little and rarely replied. With us, every new idea or the carrying of some instance wrote upon me the idea of history. My father, it was because he felt the beauty of his own creations that time was not bad. Serving has given strength. I also war. And peace when I am carried away. Sometimes, all the winter had been read to me.


When material, namely miserable, muffled-up. I am writing to tell you. In November, I sent it to my harm. I was often astonished and could not understand why, corrected or destroyed, I used to be delighted. Sometimes, a request or a gram would be sent to substitute. My whole became instance, frequent repetitions of the same wooden point. Sometimes, my remarks, explain my clumsy afterwards.

 
Newly written, some passages in war had to be copied over and over again. Others, the hunting party in peace were read aloud. Allowed often in life, when works not only move but grieve suddenly. Haven’t you remembered the old oak forest near the house lighted up by the sun and the fields? Dictate to me. Pass away home.

Carrie Olivia Adams lives in Chicago, where she is a book publicist for the University of Chicago Press and the poetry editor for Black Ocean. She is the author of Forty-One Jane Doe’s (book and companion DVD, Ahsahta 2013) and Intervening Absence (Ahsahta 2009) as well as the chapbooks Overture in the Key of F (above/ground press 2013) and A Useless Window (Black Ocean 2006). Her third book, Operating Theater is forthcoming from Noctuary Press.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #83 : Marilyn Irwin : murder, old ottawa south

one means anger; two is mirth; three a wedding; four a birth; five is heaven; six is hell; seven is the devil himself.

we walked

paved

in argument

you were lying

i called you on it

thought i could

hold your hand

and make you shut up

enjoy the October sun

then, Hitchcock quiet

black leaf swarm

perched, scheming

so loud we stopped

dead flat defend attack

found our way

back to your apartment

there is always a cure

Marilyn Irwin’s work has been published by above/ground press,  Arc Poetry Magazine (where she is a Contributing Editor), Bywords, In/Words, and New American Writing, among others.

A graduate of Algonquin College’s Creative Writing program and winner of Arc’s 2013 Diana Brebner Prize, she has three chapbooks: for when you pick daisies (2010), flicker (2012), and little nothings (2012). for when you pick daisies was reprinted in full in the collection Ground rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013. 

She is currently shaping her first full-length collection.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #82 : Richard Froude : Some Jelly Beans

This one tastes yellow speckled with green.

This one tastes like an apology.

This one tastes awful but real, how I want Botox to taste

There are cattle grazing in the Astrodome.

When I was a boy my mother grew potatoes.

When I was a boy I played in the dirt.

I held my hands before me.

I examined the filth.

I licked the length of my palm from the wrist to the base of my index finger.

It was bitter, like earwax, like the skin of a cucumber.

I needed to know.

This one tastes like waking on an airplane.

This one tastes like the worst kind of porno. 

This one tastes like touching the ring on the electric stove one pancake day because I needed a connection between color and temperature, helping my mother chop parsnips, letting the blade slide onto my thumb and for the shortest time watching blood rise before I knew pain.

This one tastes like amoxicillin.

This one tastes like bubble gum.

This one tastes like the truck stop on I-80.

I want to come to nothing before there is pain.

The same texture on your first chew but then with the second gone.

My father tried to teach me.

We sat in the beach hut on rainy days in August, listening to the cricket far away.

Under blankets with the windows closed and the beach deserted but our money down.

Reasonable, non-refundable.

I miss the country I came from.

I was once a child.

When I asked my father what infinity meant he said the end of numbers.

When I asked the highest of all numbers he said no.

That numbers will keep on forever.

Which is what I knew of God.

Not to my knowledge a number but a new kind of man.

The highest we could find was a centillion.

So I learnt the names of those that fall between the million we knew and the centillion far beyond.

The quinquagintilliard, the novemnonagintillion.

And a billion in England is a thousand times more.

So the billionaires in England are a thousand times richer.

But all of the billionaires were once children.

Death will not feel like a dream.

This one tastes like my first job in the abattoir.

This one tastes like a scraped knee.

This one tastes like a die cast Ducati.

The billionaires are sniffing their fingers.

I want to visit the Astrodome before it is destroyed.

Unlike God or numbers, all of the billionaires will end.

They will end in hospital rooms.

They will end in private planes.

They will end in hotel Jacuzzis in Auckland or Japan.

There was a day when I first noticed the taste of blood.

There was another when I first noticed God.

This one tastes like the swimming baths on the Mumbles Road.

This one tastes the way excrement smells.

This one tastes like oranges and formaldehyde.

This one tastes like the convenience store in the basement of our first apartment building where we lived so high off the ground that the patio in the morning was surrounded by clouds.

We opened the windows to let the clouds in and whenever I stepped out of the elevator I felt as if the concrete beneath would swallow me.

Whenever I was underground I would think about the earthquake.

Whenever I was shaking in this way the world felt impossible and the concrete would rise and I would purchase my bread and Gatorade and we would listen to the cricket far away and talk about being billionaires and when the clouds lifted we closed the patio doors because death will not feel like a dream.

This one tastes like the coins we placed over your eyes.

This one tastes like a curtain call.

This one tastes like the end of numbers and death will not feel like a dream.

Richard Froude has written three books, FABRIC, The Passenger, and Tarnished Mirrors. New writing is included or forthcoming in Dreginald, Ottawater, The Sycamore Review and in the Modern Masters exhibition at the Denver Art Museum. He was recently awarded the 2013 Wabash Prize for Nonfiction.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan