Category - Poetry

Laura Mota-Juang Literature Poetry

unit of ordeal

when we lay on the sand as a triangle trying to invoke some truthful looking, there’s much disturbance. might be the sky or the shadow of a leaf that distract us from actually staring at the upstairs’ void. we have the unrealized knowledge that Space is red. but whenever we look up we see a...

Literature Mezi Poetry

Reclaim the peasantry

A tale of two weekends: a) Twists and turns like shimmer ….of gentle ocean, thirst ….in dreams and waking hours. ….Still, like blue ….at the pit of the morning sky ….—where do I turn? Forgive me. ….We had a good day. b) I can’t pretend I’m not wounded …...

Literature Maggie Burton Poetry

Two Quarks in Love

i. Bottom Quark Top, bottom, up down, charm me into strange submission, Quark, just this one time we can poof away time like snaps leave no trace of feelings I once had. You top, I’ll bottom and one day you’ll decay become me. Then you can lean into my synaptic cleft, but don’t get too positive or...

Adele Nwankwo Literature Poetry

A Contemporary Tragicomedy

ACT 1: Will the Real Billy Bard Please Stand Up? A lady told me the other day that Shakespeare was really a man by the name of Edward de Vere—an earl, or a count, or a royal gondolier from Oxford or Downtown Abbey or something— and expected me to fall over aft-ways at the prospect of such...

Jenna Lyn Albert Literature Poetry

coup de foudre

they call the phenomenon “the brain zaps.” …………I call it the air before a thunderstorm. ……………………metal on your tongue. scent more ………………………………ozone than petrichor. harsher. …………………………………………you’re all sweat and dizzy ………………………………from the buzz, the crackle of it ……………………reverberating in your head:...

Literature Poetry Ziysah von Bieberstein

reef anchor

the chevron has rubbed off my anchor ring tattoo chain and rod swim rootless in finger flesh book re-ink appointment on the to-do list—ten years and counting you and I sleep in separate rooms one of us may as well get a good sleep new parents—temporary measure—eight years and counting coral reef...

Literature Poetry Wess Mongo Jolley

The Turtle and Me

The turtle sheds his shell and smashes it upon the rocks. While I, a hobbled ape, cough up my skeleton like jumbled driftwood. …..Quivering like jellyfish, …..we seem surprised that we …..cannot walk away. So we painfully gather our fragments and try to reassemble ourselves upon the sand. …..The...

Literature Martin Breul Poetry

Moons are suns are looking for each other

I. Vilnius / destination a black grape hovers in the face of heavenly darkness before falling back down towards the streets of the capital straight into your wide open mouth like a warm trap. my eyes don’t follow the descent but I join the applause of our new-found friends nonetheless, my...

Aris Keshav Literature Poetry

Leave of Absence

I almost got the certificate before the paperwork passed away. You used to wear confidence in every button of your shirt before the suitcase rolled away with your buttons and the students filed into other rooms. We’ve fallen between the desk and the wall. They listened to you, I know that...

Amilcar John Nogueira Literature Poetry

didactic trans poem

1. Imagine the poem: something about clothes and makeup, probably fingernails— the pains of paints: ochre, pink, yellow. Or of breasts and tits and dicks and cunts of bodies, (always) bodies. 2. 40% of trans people snort milk from their nose. 30% wake up crying in joy. 75% sweat at the sound of a...

Literature Poetry Shannan Mann

A Child

From India’s dirt forests, into the elephant chest of the West we brought a child. Years erupt on skin. You are larger than Canada!—you are not a child. We all see things we do not want to see. In a white world, my father left my mother—she knew she would be a prisoner as soon as she got a child...

Devon Rae Literature Poetry

Conversation with my Grandmother

You are ninety-eight and blind and nearly deaf and can hardly walk and live mostly in another world now, a world in which dolls can talk and each person appears twice, and in this other world, I like girls, or so you tell my mum matter-of-factly one afternoon as she sits with you in the care home...

Ellen Chang-Richardson Literature Poetry

A Node in the Nebulae

Liquid dark slides down our throats, sloshing against curved glass. I place my goblet back on the dash. The evening air shifts, a mineral of many disguises. Body twines within itself. Groaning from the cold, the liver and the heart sit — at the centre of our existence. † A deep and pulsating gloomp...

Lisa Richter Literature Poetry

The Invention of Memory

And while I may look like a prophecy-monger, we shall confine our attention to the clump of houses in a seaport subdivision, home to Lancelotti the Italian abbot, a respectable and veracious man save for his tentacle suckers, big as saucer lids. Absolutely I am governed by sunbeams. When death...

Literature Moni Brar Poetry

Gather

I look no further than the edge of my body my map to gather you oh brother my brother my brown skinned brethren my kin and distant loves my turbaned uncles my unclejis crowned like kings backs alder straight I gather you from the bastion of a ship a ship that sat ashore my uncles whose feet did not...

Literature Matthew Stepanic Poetry

Boyfriend won’t say the word

I don’t mind you’ve put on a little       actually I’m attracted to         boys      do we deserve a snack tonight?        what you eat really isn’t that healthy                          we should exercise more            I can police your food if you’d like      you shouldn’t wear a shirt that...

Literature Maryam Gowralli Poetry

Dusk on the Hati Marege

Mother, then setting off— I see the world in which you inhabited sand breaching between land and seafoam you left clues, spinning sagas in my all too Canadian body of a place so delicious in warmth, the providence of natural resources prone to warships and the occasional genocide. Mother, on the...

Jamie Kitts Literature Poetry

This is not a poem, it’s a meme

after “Dick from a Girl with Autism” I love autistic gay trans queens Us sensual sensory gals Euphoric smut and top-shelf memes From squishy a-spec pals High-stim, low-stim Not him, zmm zmm Tattoos, role play Bound by the High Fae Head pats for days and no more shame I hear you call my name I wanna...

Breanna Ho Literature Poetry

My Shore

My father told me he came from an island. A boat in the middle of the night took him and his brothers to the city. They would grow into men, become part of another land to tell stories from, be named in— no longer speaking ways of the water. When my father became a settler on the prairies, I came...

Lisa Richter Literature Poetry

New Year’s Lament

I am writing you this letter from the bottom of the ocean where my eyelids are bottle caps and my stomach turns burnished copper. Maybe it is time for a new oral tradition. All day I flicker and sometimes I go out and leave in my wake the faintest trace of sweat and hibiscus. Maybe I am an embryo...

Katherine Alexandra Harvey Literature Poetry

The Wake

I removed my belly button and paid attention to the healing process. No one believed I could feel the hole closing over, that it reminded me of being born. My mother was laid out on the kitchen table for a week. Formaldehyde high, you never noticed when my skin blackened. I felt undesirable. You...

Literature Poetry Shannan Mann

The Lie

Her body was part-whale, part-mouse—behold the lie! It lives in your belly. Like an unborn baby you mould the lie. Slice my ears with the jagged stars. What did you ever do with the gift of music? I buried the violin and told the lie. This lamp in the ocean. A wolf with feathers for fangs. The...

Conyer Clayton Literature Poetry

Low Maintenance

I don’t really have a preference. Which name you use. The coffee beans. Fonts or flowers or flavors. Except when it comes to bubbles. Keep my water flat, I don’t need it to be interesting. I’d prefer not to say—that’s a preference. I’d prefer to stay—that’s a...

David Ly Literature Poetry

Dragon Hunting

The Hunter’s Moon reaches bloody illumination tonight obliviously obscuring what would be my first glimpse of the Draconids. I’ve yet to witness a meteor shower which is to say my blood still burns from when I saw a star fall by chance years ago and didn’t make a wish— how dare the moon rise...

Eli Mushumanski Literature Poetry

the creation of adam

    i think of myself in images: oranges split down the middle, pavement damp with rain. spring fields     are the same as being under water and fill the hollow in my gut where a rib used to be. sometimes, i am a row of naked bodies on different planes, reaching out to touch fingertips     that...

Literature Misha Solomon Poetry

Shopping

We buy a speckled ceramic vase for his mother and then we buy a new vase for ourselves. The vase we buy ourselves is glass, hand-blown, twisted and prismatic. There’s an Italian word for it, surely. Before this glass vase we had a ceramic vase: floral and millennial pink, yet vaguely 70s. We grew...

Amanda Merpaw Literature Poetry

Essay on Closure

I try to end it the night we lunge lung first into the north country, the unappeasable shores of Lake Superior and me too unappeasable, restless and reckless, tensing the edges of the waves. We can’t tell if they’re advancing or receding. Gravity forgets us our measures of depth, the possibilities...

Katrina Lemaire Literature Poetry

Homegrown Prairie Love

a speckled bloat of metal-ridged rooftops come to life from deep under the roots of blue grama grass stuck over a cast of wither-dry sun beams boredom is rampant plastered in checkered flannel top countertop stale coffee over a pot she is homegrown straight from chernozemic soil Moose Jaw is an...

Jade Wallace Literature Poetry

A Ladder Set upon the Earth

d i m e n s i o n s w e c a n s c a r c e l y r e c o g n i z e. ever been. The balance of our faces will be alien— nostrils, our eyes round as planets, wide as they have ourselves going grey, left with only the twin slits of our move more swiftly toward our demise. Soon, we find human cells...

Literature Poetry Tannaz Taghizadeh

Unedited me

Not a pretty structure No beautiful content Ruthless Lots of typos Lots of mean adverbs Repetitive form Contrasting voices Yelling in Farsi Shouting in English Not pragmatic Just dark Stuffy, complex not like-me words Redundant Maddening Screaming in capitals Calling people that not who No clarity...

Dominik Parisien Literature Poetry

bilingual insomniac at the witching hour

the world sleeps while i listen. the faucet sings frère jacques frère jacques dormez-vous dormez-vous. what language would i be dreaming if i were. i ask the pillow to consider how in its breaking legacy leads to sitting. leg assis. assis one of many words rooted in my tongue. the pillow says it...

Lisa Comeau Literature Poetry

Cheers

Dogwood blossoms return men materialize down by the tracks one slumped over a shopping cart says he will make some graffiti drink some beer holds up a Bud can—cheers a guy in the alders with a flip phone gingerly raises his hand says hi hi hi by the flattened Coors cases Absolut bottles soot from...

Literature Nathan Mader Poetry

To The Mirror

I was as an orchid wearing nothing but the light. You hammered an I into me like a nail, taught me the language of glass as you forged my eyes from the surfaces of sight. You’ve seen it all: the feral child putting on his Halloween werewolf suit, the teenaged boy kissing his breath-fogged...

Amber Dawn Literature Poetry

Unnamed Service Road

It’s 2:56 and you are awake. The pulse under your jaw throbs. Carotid arteries throng your brain. The senses reside here, below your jawline, so does speech. You say “service” aloud like a wish. Go to the road, again. Go. It’s 3:12 and you are awake. You paddle your feet under the covers. Your...

Cale Plett Literature Poetry

Curtain

Begin by noting that there’s no path to      the other side of rain.The only way is perpetually through.      A bicycle on two wheels forthe first time. At the viewing, only the mourners       keep the emptiness at bay. Before and after,            a room of objects. If youreached across, it would...

Lee Thomas Literature Poetry

[nectar names] / [white stripe]

seafoam sours beneath my tongue spills over in the speaking of a name a tide in my throat, a surge of syllables the gravity of the words i swallow turns my body inside out tears my teeth from my mouth. secrets dissolve in my mouth drops of nectar spear my tongue to my jaw, i speak without saying...

Literature Maureen Hynes Poetry

The Juggler

After the painting, The Juggler, by Spanish surrealist, Remedios Varo (1908-1963) Yesterday a great many pellets of graupel shot out of the low grey sky— bouncing ice-balls! Spring’s thunderous shout muffled by its cloudy facemask. We have been too knotted into death counts & pollen counts...

Ashley Van Elswyk Literature Poetry

Garden Party

Pear trees line the grove, netting the sun, sheltering the predators encroached behind the thick green leaves and bodies fat and round. You pass me a knife and ask if I would carve a feast for you, a garden under golden skies and pear skin peels as cries of insects pitch the air. Fireweed...

Literature Poetry Shanai Tanwar

Tulips

“The one you would choose: Were you led then by him?” “What longing, O Yaar, is controlled in real time?” —Agha Shahid Ali (Ghazal) i dreamt of tulips today they opened their mouths in a yawn the kind that engulfs the sun in its vacuous mouth like a little hurricane; the sort of yawn that could...

Literature Pamela Mosher Poetry

You Hope This Message Finds Me Well

But how could it not, when you used the precise alphanumeric sequence needed to land your words in my inbox? Not what you meant? Let’s begin again. Sarcasm arrives too easily when I’m nervous. Yes, I am well. As in I am doing well. As in I remember to steady myself with deep breathing when...

Literature Louie Leyson Poetry

crying at the jay som concert

before lockdown i dreamt that a serpent tried to kill me. so i tattooed it to my forearm in the place of my neck, a vision of black scales & black eyes blazed alight beneath the red of an imaginary sun. when an alien summer leaves you hypomanic it makes perfect sense to carve nightmare...

Literature Manahil Bandukwala Poetry

I love you, kiss me

I am you in your jewel-domed reading room, I am you in your kayak skimming. —Phyllis Webb The sky was inverted. I called you in the bare yellow night. I am you against the river of clouds, I am you in an energy current shaking down the kitchen walls, you in the contrapuntal stream of two trees...

Khashayar Mohammadi Literature Poetry

Dispatches from a Harmonious Armageddon

In Loving Memory of Simon (1992-2022) * in the city that screams beauty occurred to me between the city and the city there’s a body of water and a ferry * we have found in ourselves a great proximity to danger we are born of fire and blissful taste of forget I forget how many Is I have written into...

Kate Cayley Literature Poetry

Of Rats and Floods

There are rats in the house. They gnaw basket-straws, the cardboard edges of things. Their shit, softening in repeated washings, hidden in the fingers of a glove. Grey stains along the baseboard. They track each other, smelling. Eyes dried berries, swiveling. The intelligence of their tails...

Literature Poetry Sean O'Connell

the core empties

i fear the deluge of careerists tapping concrete in oxfords & ballet flats chic folx in Barbour & Burberry coats released from desks to trains or after hours off king west dead ass with pretty young things, all beauties and good vibes only—so kalos kagathos—made flaccid by business manz...

Literature Poetry Shannan Mann

The Past

Read to me in tongues aflame in blame, I asked the past. My prayers burnt to accusations, I cannot get past the past. Killing, not violence if you believe a killer rearranges a body’s time. Rubble of muscle, not soul. All have killed before—so vast the past. I bathed my shadow in a rainstorm...

Juli Kagiwada Literature Poetry

Balancing

A flying woman, balances between the cruel heat-drafts of mid July She hovers, between tin-can house-music and picnic-fattened ants whose licorice-backs gleam in the merciless summer heat Her support? The co-conspirator to this rebellion against gravity? Perhaps she’s a childhood friend, a lover...

Frank Klaassen Literature Poetry

Pink Fog, Black Dress

It’s just fabric, but the shape is everything. Like a boat made of steel, it’s all about how you mould yourself into the world. Like how the body is mostly water but still walks, doesn’t pool and run into the sand, or turn to droplets suspended in the air. Like how even a disjointed sentence makes...

Literature Poetry R/B Mertz

Supercuts

I beg for it short like a boy, Boy-short, please. I come out with a pageboy: gymnast, figure skater. Still a girl. I swallow red. I hate myself. I didn’t know how to quit cutting my teeth/brain on my culture, sweet carts & cameras, cutting through me like a parking lot, making everybody look...

Literature Nofel Poetry

Cloudy Dispatches

for Kasem Last night I saw clouds turn into paper Stars waning in your eyes’ unuttered anger. How do we speak of love, my brother When tongues are as stagnant as tears?Remember the lonely tree of our childhoodThe inodorous sand, the clouds that turned into cinder? I try to forget my first memories...

Literature Poetry Stacy Thomas

glacier

cooling my burned thumb at the kitchen tap I’d grasped the roasting stick too high up cold water rushing over the raw spot farther down the stream rinsing yellow plum the neighbour brought over tasting the sour water eye always wander out I kept this in a box, snug I pull the lid off and it rises...

Literature Poetry Trenton Pollard

To Dream of Flight

When I say strangle I don’t mean the hands that crush the throat, but the body that won’t resist, confident in its ability to hold its breath, or not. There are nights when I wake up choking because my body wills itself to stop breathing. Tolerates few terrors of murderers or other lovers— silent...