Matthew Zapruder

POEM IN YOUR POCKET

Hey Jack put me in your pocket
so I can be by the blue above
all those ungrateful heads
somewhat darkly bereaved.
The sky once thought
it knew me and never will.
Please feel not quite
sorry enough to take me
out in the sun. Leave
me here where I can’t touch
the shoulders of tourists
shopping for apples. You’ll just
have to lean down and listen
to me tell my reliquary
what it almost felt like to be
a breeze. Listen. Then you can
tell everyone you’ve heard
a poem in the world.



Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon, 2010) and Sun Bear (Copper Canyon, 2014), as well as Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017), a book of prose. An associate professor in the MFA at Saint Mary’s College of California, he is also editor at large at Wave Books. He lives in Oakland, California. “Poem in Your Pocket” was written for a librarian who requested a short poem he could carry around on Poem in Your Pocket Day, April 26. On this day, Americans are instructed to “select a poem, carry it with you, and share it with others at schools, bookstores, libraries, parks, workplaces, street corners, and on social media using the hashtag #pocketpoem.”

Amelia Does

CHEAP MEDALLIONS

The milkman of Cheddar started off in business school. Lefty Orange sold
cheap colonial-style bronze medallions out of his coat lining.

One day he was outed by the mayor at a flea circus presentation at the edge
of Cheddar.

Lefty ran home and scurried under the gate, hiding outside in the doghouse,
wearing only a grey wig.

When the ninth night fell, he was back on the streets doing what he was
born to do.

Lefty was in and out of jail for four decades. One too many times and Lefty
learned a valuable lesson.

You can prowl the streets peddling delicious milk in a white uniform and
truck. But you’ll never be accepted by the bovine community. And you’ll
get all the familiar thrills of selling cheap medallions.



Amelia Does is an Ontario writer whose work has appeared in Acta Victoriana, Cineforum Italia, and Incite Journal of Experimental Media. She is the author of two chapbooks (The Yellow Piano and Baby Eat Violin), a biography (Do Not Look Away: The Life of Arthur Lipsett), a forthcoming novel (The Coming of Jarbina), and a children’s book (The Walking Tree and Other Stories).

Allison Chisholm

MY UNRAVELLING

Well, maybe I did
clamour around the subtle sense of luxury.
During the angular movement
I disfigured a Sanskrit scholar.

But maybe I didn’t
abandon the child prodigy
and the metabolic processes
like two drops of sadness
abundant on the teaspoon.

Pee break.

Our mutual decay
and your untying of my apron strings
occurs each Wednesday
or when hanging from the branches.



Allison Chisholm lives and writes in Kingston, Ontario. Her poetry has appeared in The Northern Testicle Review, the Puddles of Sky chap-poem The Dollhouse, The Week Shall Inherit The Verse, and the Proper Tales Press chapbook On the Count of One. She played glockenspiel in the Hawaiian-dream-pop band SCUB. Her photography has been exhibited in the Tiniest Gallery.

Amy Dennis

LIGHTNING

                                        i am
                                        a hushed

                                        daughter,
                                        the smaller. made
                                        in her. raised in her dark
                                        house.

                                        electric light silent, reminds
                                        i can write. overwhelming weather
                                        with swollen

                                        grip, ink
                                        rain, translate
                                        skin as sky,

                                        firefly
                                        firefly
                                        firefly





Amy Dennis received her MFA through the University of British Columbia and continued her studies at Harvard University, where she was a reader for The Harvard Summer Review. In addition to publications in England, Wales, and France, Amy’s poetry has appeared in over twenty Canadian literary journals, and in the chapbook The Complement And Antagonist Of Black (Or, The Definition Of All Visible Wavelengths) (above/ground press, 2013). She recently completed with distinction her PhD on ekphrastic poetry and new confessionalism. Amy lives in Ontario.