National Poetry Month : Jane Virginia Rohrer,

canvas

there is snow

          are trees wiped upward

   as if with fingers

nail beds caked

with froze-dirt out here

there is human skin

          human forehead

   human nose human eyes closed

are human words saying

   stand for just     

          a moment longer

let me draw your shoulders

          right and I am

  allowed to be

    in the snow human feet

mouth turned maybe-happy

Jane Virginia Rohrer is a writer and teacher from Southeastern Pennsylvania. She holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Pittsburgh where she studies sound, radio, and contemporary poetry and poetics. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Peach Mag, Metatron, Bone Bouquet, and others, and a chapbook forthcoming with above/ground press.

National Poetry Month : Geoffrey Nilson,

How a Poet Gives

In Banff Fred told me of Bob’s generosity

to the young. how he once squeaked

silently a glass & burning cigarette

under Fred’s arms like theatre sports

after overhearing snow & the craving

liquid a stiff mash finger at the rim

curled staircase of blue smoke.

there’s no replacement for the support of a good poet.

some things don’t help so much as numb

blitz the leftover soul when a season

wipes its hands with the sun.

this is a story about winter when it’s not cold.

six months drinking alone thinking

about Kroetsch, everywhere I look there are holes.

what counts in this landscape makes my feet hurt.

Geoffrey Nilson is a writer, editor, visual artist, and the founder of poetry micropress, pagefiftyone. A regular contributor to Coast Mountain Culture, he is the author of four poetry chapbooks: In my ear continuously like a stream (above/ground, 2017), O (Swimmer's Group, 2017), We Have to Watch (Quilliad, 2016), and Alchemy Machine (2015).

National Poetry Month : Julia Polyck-O'Neill,

A Supine Poem for Adrian Piper

I reflect art’s heroes and elders

What does my reflection look like

Laden with the debts of collectivity

You shoulder the mattress of histories

Subtle daggers with dull edges, mostly shine

Class is cancelled in our shouted fantasies

An inscription gets reinterpreted with each read

We have the tendency to be lazy philologists

This conversation should be exquisite and unsettling

Stories nested together uneasily they’re not meant to be

Bracketed like this, chapters in logical sequence

I wear my irrationality an earned badge

Julia Polyck-O’Neill is an artist, curator, critic, and writer. Her writing has been published in B.C. Studies, Feminist Spaces, Tripwire, Touch the Donkey, Fermenting Feminisms (a project of the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, curated by Lauren Fournier), The Avant Canada Anthology (WLU Press, 2019), and other places. She recently co-edited a special issue of Canadian Literature with Gregory Betts, “Concepts of Vancouver: Poetics, Arts, Media.” She has published three chapbooks, femme (2016), Everything will be taken away (2018) and poem| image | self, all with above/ground press. She currently lives in Toronto, completing her SSHRC-funded PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities (Brock University).

National Poetry Month : Stephen Brockwell,

    San Bernardino Freeway, Very Late

    Twist your face, ape.

    Shuffle on the green

    as a gibbon in a jungle garden

    trapezes canopy branches,

    or perambulates the forest floor,

    arms up, as if to say, “Who, me?”

    Do you have consciousness?

    Who knows? No evidence.

    You wear no crown.

    Your numberless consorts

    cling to the cash in the pockets

    of your cashmere overcoat.

    The gibbon, monogamous,

    eloquent in its way, sings

    amorous oratorios

    and lamentations of the leopard

    skulking under the fig tree.

    O great ennobled gibbon!

    You slur, cart-driven cur. Spurned

    shambolic goblin, wielding sand

    wedge and blood cap, your clan

    of suite-caged hairless primates

    are paragons of the grasping caste.

    Hucksters under your plane tree.

    You are as honest as a drop

    of acid rain. Twittering ape,

    you ape a species of man extinct.

    Homo minimanus, cross your arms and frown.

    You’re expelled from the profession of the clown.

Stephen Brockwell’s sixth book, All of Us Reticent, Here, Together won the 2017 Archibald Lampman Award. He runs a small IT company from shared office space above a restaurant in Ottawa’s ByWard Market.