Tuesday poem #501 : Jaeyun Yoo : Empty Nest

 

 

 

 

Wednesdays after school
in the cavernous study
we deciphered hieroglyphs of mathematics

X marked the spot where we mapped
father – daughter 

until test flights over the curfew
the arthritic car piled with boxes
my bedroom pale as a skull 

next spring, I was a migratory bird stopping for a feed
I sat sun-swollen on the patio with poetry
calculus limp on my tongue
you were silently squatted on a tatami mat
windows shut to the backyard 

each year, my feathers land on foreign ground
you dig damp dark burrows

each year, I fetch tree branches for a nest
you build a wooden cross

each year, I think you are ready

to burst golden like a lotus flower
but you weave a shroud out of moss
shovel dirt on your craggy face
let the weeds grow over

 

 

 

 

Jaeyun Yoo is a Korean-Canadian poet and psychiatrist living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, also known as Vancouver. Her work has appeared in Canthius, The /tƐmz/ Review, Prairie Fire, Grain, CV2, EVENT and others. She is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University. She is a member of Harbour Centre 5, a collective of emerging poets. Their collaborative chapbook, Brine, was published in 2022. @jaeyunwrites on Twitter.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

 

Tuesday poem #500 : Ben Meyerson : Granada After the Correlation

 

 

 

In the least measurable world, mind
squalls in a shred of swamp, recuses
each pearled dreg, nips at its own heels –
but moves, refuses walls, pretends
not to know nature even as morning shifts
docile in its stall and huffs
to its own ends: a crick
in the aubade, waking up stiff,
tongue all stuffed into a calligram,
knotted with sweetness and bile –
it is thus that the measureless day
imprints itself, bray
onticology or hyper-object all you like. 

A wealth of speedbumps on our way
to mortifying the surface of dazzling change –
pity the mind, rattling on and on
with a bog-moon above to fortify
its dim aegis: we prod it silent
not a moment too soon.

I am in the clasp of a different morning,
where sun begins to seep through every slit
in the closed door and the houses outside
are impregnated with flowers –
you can smell it from the streets and
the terrace bordering the other room,
where threadbare towels dry on the line
and dogs sigh in the dizzying heat.

We do it like this: we insert the subject
into an impossible image and watch
it yearn, watch its ears prick, the faint burns
where air meets its skin – we tell it
that it is a mind; we ask it for nothing.
We wonder what it can see.

Warm air pierces the curtains, sweetens
my nostrils with gusts of plant slough
flung in estuaries against a dam of attention – 

I have already felt the breath burst from
your nose as you pace the garden
outside my window. 

You hum to yourself.

I can hear your lashes
like gummed cicada wings in the waning dark.

 

 

 

 

Ben Meyerson holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and an MA in philosophy from the Universidad de Sevilla. He is currently a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of Toronto. He is the author of four chapbooks: In a Past Life (The Alfred Gustav Press, 2016), Holcocene (Kelsay Books, 2018), An Ecology of the Void (above/ground press, 2019) and Near Enough (Seven Kitchens Press, forthcoming in 2023). His poems, translations and essays have appeared in several journals, including Interim, PANK, Long Poem Magazine, El Mundo Obrero, Great River Review, The Inflectionist Review, Rust+Moth, and Pidgeonholes. His debut collection, entitled Seguiriyas, is forthcoming from Black Ocean Press in the fall of 2023.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

 

Tuesday poem #499 : Sarah Feldman : The Way Up Down

 

The way up down: one and the same.
              - Heraclitus B60

Turn back now, look: how far
you’ve come, how lightly
passed the trackless
distances which are and are not
the same you must travel now
back. Again you give yourself
to the current – not, this time, to be borne
along, the whole river’s length slipping
by in one flash like a dream-
less sleep. Now the current takes you
piecemeal, exacting, moment to moment,
compensation for the erring ease
of your birth – what’s left to you now
the upstream way and work
of self-unmaking.  So take it – not what you
have dreamed, sung, the sliding clean
from sheathes of skin and muscle
and nerve, the double-knotted chains
and helices of hope and fear and grief
and grief. Go now, harrowed without
by juts of root and rock, within
by a howling up from darkest innards
that chatters bone against bone
and parches the heart’s blood
to a scritch of dead leaves.
Let sea dwindle to river, and river
to stream, to – at last –
the shallows where you began,
the murky rim where water
runs to ground.

 

  

Sarah Feldman’s first poetry collection, The Half-Life of Oracles, was published by Fitzhenry and Whiteside in Fall 2018, and received reviews from Jean Van Loon in Arc and from Ian People in The Manchester Review. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Literary Review of Canada, Fiddlehead and Undercurrents: New Voices in Canadian Poetry.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan