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From Mintos new EP Days Gone By Engineered by Hayz Fisher, Produced By Minto and Hayz Fisher

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Foot of St. Georges Avenue

-by Russell Thornton

The boxcars couple, they shunt into the railyard,  their wheels cry all night, they play. The late work  at the dry dock beneath the hull-filled vault,  at the grain elevator, at the shipping terminal  where the freighters lie up against the pier  and the tall cranes lift floodlit containers,  at the crossing where I chewed car-spilled grain and made a rough gum - is play. No one sees beyond what he sees when he runs, swings, screams,  no one knows more than a child knows. A boy will look up, call for a father to put a crashed electric locomotive back  on its perfect circle of rails. He will see no one,  and leave the room to look up the rest of his life.  The tracks laid down along the pale insides of a man's arms gauge the same loneliness. The train  makes its pass the way his blood makes its pass.  In the festering he will focus on it,  in the hole he tears he will find it, the one thing that is real, and any memory kill -  the slamming of boxcars into a vein. Now he can go anywhere he wants in the night. The train will take him, the switching will never stop. Below the city block where my balcony hangs  and the avenue ends, the work keeps on. I don't know.  I don't know how it is that paradise is so wide,  the junction in the head so narrow. If you shut  your eyes, in the dark behind them you will  watch while eyes are riveted into you.  If you listen to the coupling, crying, clanging  continue down through you, it will become a chant,  and that chant, what you know; and whatever you are will be forsaken then finished. The sleep you crave yet fear will come, the sounds and lights die into what rises within you. A ferry sits in fittings, a freighter rests, its deck loaded,  boxcars stand still, ready to be hooked up again. What you dream, what transpires while you lie there,  is the beginning of the day you will wake to -  a world assembling itself, both workshop and toy,  a Christ entering metal, never to return.

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My Hands Are On Fire. A new song by Mark Davis. Performed by Mark and Alice Kos.

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https://vimeo.com/37047604

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Horse

-by Elizabeth Bachinsky

for Michael Turner

For you, I’ll recall

walking to the barn to ride my horse Biscuit.

1991. I wore a white blouse

that tied at the throat

and mom’s brown leather coat

with tangles of suede dangling from the sleeves.

I was thirteen.

             See the camel-coloured

jodhpurs, the tall black riding boots,

my brown hair tied up in a pony

tail, and me taking big steps

through the suburb?

  It didn’t take long to cut out

to the fields where mom boarded the thoroughbred.

I went there after school,

but sometimes I’d arrive and realize what I’d forgot,

so I’d tack him up and ride him back

through the subdivision where horses couldn’t go—careful

not to leave a hoofprint

on the neighbours’ lawn.

  I’d tie him to a streetlight

and go inside.

  For you, I’d like to take

a picture of that. The empty

subdivision at 3:15 in the afternoon

on a Wednesday; those rows

of identical homes, brand new as

they all were then; and

those pastel colours (you know

the kind) and the beige

vinyl siding and the brand new green

lawns like postage stamps

licked and stuck to the earth out front.

No trees, just a razed cow field

where developers built and

we moved in.

  This picture is huge.

Pull back.

See my bay tied by the reins to the street lamp?

  From here, he is small, impatient,

wanting to snip at the grass

with his enormous flat white teeth—

but he can’t, he’s caught up.

He lifts one wide front hoof and

brings it down on the asphalt,

a clop like two heavy blocks

coming together in an auditorium—

then stamps that hoof again

my big dark horse, waiting

for me to come on back

outside.

  -from Liz's new book  The Hottest Summer in Recorded History.

elizabethbachinsky.blogspot.ca/

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Birthday Poem, 2012

-by Elizabeth Bachinsky

  The birches went a long way back.

You couldn’t see past them.

They were planted in rows.

We’d better look out for that bull,

I thought. My sister agreed.

We could see it stamping one 

cloven hoof way off in the distance.

Just a little brown bull, far off.

Then it came charging.

A bull is a terrible creature.

It’s horns are terrible.

It’s eyes are terrible.

Its solid flesh steams in winter air.

We’d better get behind this tree, I thought.

My sister agreed and the bull got bigger 

as it came closer until it slammed into us, into our tree—then 

  that furious thing 

backed up and started over again.

I’ll admit I was frightened, 

but my sister was laughing. The way you might in church 

or a particularly earnest high-school 

presentation.

It’s not her fault.

I am my sister, the forest, the tree.

I am the bull 

and the still-frozen ground.

  No sound.

Shoulders moving

up and down.

-from Liz's new book  The Hottest Summer in Record History.

http://elizabethbachinsky.blogspot.ca/

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Tenement Song

by Gillian Jerome

Sing the song of centuries Sing the song of ninety-degree summers The song of syphilis The song of electrical storms inside us Sing the song of seagulls Sing the song of doors slammed The song of bosoms in our shirts The song of drunken parrots Sing the song of cauldrons bubbling The song of our daughters filing past The song of school kids revving their engines Sing the low song of wolves sharpening their teeth Sing the song of the living Sing the song of mail in their hands Of marbles, keys, envelopes sliced open The song of shoes shuffling past Sing the song of sneezing and coughing and changing direction Sing the song of Theseus’ madness, midsummer The song of hard-working, of happenstance                          of some tinker’s reliquary The song of tsunamis Sing the song of pigeons scoring the wind Sing the song of obstacles, of evergreens The song of our liturgy, the song of the answering machine The song of the alcove, the lean-to                   the chlorophyll bright in the trees Sing the song of Apollo, of Agamemnon The song of Cassandra, the loneliest woman in the world The song of the swan gliding in swamp water The song of the clavicle, the cave dweller Sing the song of our small breastedness, our bordellos Sing the song of our nightgowns, our decrepit teeth The song of our hips, our split feet The song of our thirty-three sails in thirty-three un-                                                    sailable waters Sing the song of Cecil nailing the shingles to the roof Sing the song of mist hovering in the button trees                                        of Caesarean sunset The song of hydro bills, of snowstorms The song of bottles, of algae, of billy goats Sing the song of Mars, of Mercury, of the Americas The song of our finger bones tapping the locks The song of the pale bow of the moon, the sun Slipping into our song:                                           Dear Landlord,

-Tenement Song is from Gillian's debut collection Red Nest. 

www.gillianjerome.com

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Dove Creek Hall (Formerly Swedes' Hall)

-by Matt Rader

The children play their fiddles so slowly I am sad

For the old wooden hall among the cow patties.

Who cut the rhodo blooms and set them on the piano?  

They bow tiredly through every tune. Even the cows

Have wandered away from the music to the far side

Of the pasture. All the Swedes who built this hall

Are dead now and the women they married are dead

And the pastor who married them and their friends.

But the children do not know this or just how sad

Beauty is on the last day of spring with instruments

And young players making music beneath the rafters.

They play along with mistakes and embarrassment.

Tell me, who hung the hand-stitched stars on the wall?

Who hung the evening light from the windows?

--First published in Arc, Winter 2012

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Unspeakable Acts in Cars

-by Matt Rader

It’s the first day of summer and we’re so happy

To see the sun and the satchel of colours it schleps

All those dark kilometres. The sky is so blue

And the sea is blue and the small islands in the sea

Are blue also. How our sun must love blue.  

We have beachgrass and bull kelp and lion’s mane

And we love them all because we love the sea

Which is cold and buoyant. Friends now of seasalt

And knotweed, the mountains know all about us

And who we are when we are most ourselves.

But their blue haughty distances are no help.

We are who we are with mock orange and wisteria.

We’ve nothing to bitch about. The high cirrus

Can’t touch us. We been alive just long enough.

--First published in The Fiddlehead, Autumn 2012

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The Dead Poet

Al Purdy From:   Beyond Remembering - The collected poems of Al Purdy. 2000.

I was altered in the placenta by the dead brother before me who built a place in the womb knowing I was coming:  he wrote words on the walls of flesh painting a woman inside a woman whispering a faint lullaby that sings in my blind heart still The others were lumberjacks backwoods wrestlers and farmers their women were meek and mild nothing of them survives  but an image inside an image of a cookstove and the kettle boiling — how else explain myself to myself where does the song come from?  Now on my wanderings:  at the Alhambra's lyric dazzle where the Moors built stone poems a wan white face peering out — and the shadow in Plato's cave remembers the small dead one — at Samarkand in pale blue light  the words came slowly from him — I recall the music of blood on the Street of the Silversmiths Sleep softly spirit of earth as the days and nights join hands when everything becomes one thing wait softly brother but do not expect it to happen  that great whoop announcing resurrection  expect only a small whisper of birds nesting and green things growing and a brief saying of them and know where the words came from

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A brief comic-strip bio of the B.C. singer/songwriter. By Shawn Conner.

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Three Poems by Cathy Stonehouse

Our Father, the Cartographer

After you had left us, had moved on from this world –

your spirit quiet as a knife in its sheath, blunt enough

to be drawn across the hand – after you had left us

only gargoyles grinning from roofs, pitchfork-wielding 

gods, the fallen angel, had lured us sheer

to the rim of this cratered earth,

had eaten of our sorrow, spat its bones out,

even redrawn our very map of the world – networks of shadow 

across the bed, your hand before the nightlight’s light  –

had warped our continents and distances, shrunken our ice caps,

swollen our oceans, leveled forests, washed out deserts,

diverted rivers, poisoned lakes and renamed countries

only to lay them back again to waste –

after you had truly come and gone,

had left us only shadows of your finery

deep in the dressing-up box of our skin, only then

could we know you as you really were, could we see

in your corpse the grandeur of the body,

broken now, and bloodied, shriveled down at last:

a tiny thing.

_________________________________________________________________

  Epistle

Welcome Jesus,

You talk just like my dad,

i.e. you’re a Geordie.

Out in the world I carry a bird

Who warns me about noxious gases

Emitted by adjectives adverbs

and other ghosts.

Jesus, are you still in there?

At night my dad wraps vowels round his fingers

And goes on mining for northern working-class

Poetry 

Despite the fact that no one else

Thinks it exists.

_________________________________________________________________

The Snowman

He had the coldest of hands.

I look down a shrinking tunnel

At the dazzling sight of him, breath smoke

Livid as he patiently moves

The sticks of my small body around.

I did not expect him to wake like this.

He has taken out the coals of his eyes

Ripped out his carrot stick nose

Removed the red scarf that separates head from neck

And become all snow: his voice, his teeth

Still glittering. Ticklish at first, then anxious,

Hoary fingers holding me down as he peels off

My cold weather clothes.

It’s as if he’s trying to press me

To his own fat shape. As he enters

There’s a ripping 

And I try to remember the field’s surface

Compacted by my own hands into ice,

Each rolled ball collected in a long bandage:

Now his face breaks off in pieces,

Clearer and clearer becoming not my own.

The world pressed flat

Into a framed picture, my limbs elongate,

Distant and overexposed. 

When I reach for my lips

I cannot find them—

I need to find some stones

For eyes, a row of small pebbles

For my mouth: I know I’ll have to lie,

Later on.

http://cathystonehouse.com/

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The Fire / by Carmen Lethbridge.

You can check out more of Carmen’s songs performed with his wife Lana Ryma (drums) here:

http://carmanlethbridge.bandcamp.com/

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I'll Be A Ghost For You / Rae Spoon

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My Father's House

-by Diane Tucker

My mother died in my father’s house

and her death went wall to wall

like the rusty carpet, swung itself round

the central staircase like a cord sliding

behind a roaring vacuum cleaner.

The dust bunnies under the bed 

are stuck together with death now.

The motes in the cold sunbeams

are each an iota of her body,

sloughed off, that will not leave the room.

He retreats to the basement, leaves 

the main floor for Death to roam in

freely; that is a mistake.

Painting himself into a corner, 

he confines himself to sleeping

and sitting.

Death’s made itself at home upstairs.

Death has long, loud parties.

My father retreats into the house

of his head and Death has the whole place

to itself. It squeezes him out.

We ensconce him in a new place:

dustless rooms, and higher, we hoped,

than skulking Death could reach.

But Dad has brought his tenant with him

in his empty pockets. He will not see

the light in the fresh new rooms.

His eyes full of dust, his joints clogged with it,

no home can be any longer home.

Sleeping and sitting, the house of his body

sags and sways. He looks warily

out of the small windows of himself.

My mother died in my father’s house

and a rot began in the foundation;

a black mould grew. Tyrannous Death, 

freed from four old walls, supplanted the wind

and brought the whole house down.

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( from the album Blue Cholera / Jay Clark and the Jones )

http://music.cbc.ca/#/artists/Jay-Clark-and-the-Jones