The Mighty Wurlitzer O baronet’s birthday cake piano, once-a-year-eccentric-aunt piano,razzledazzle toccata lark piano, played by the sparkling Lance Luce,chitty-chitty-bang-bang please piano, strobe light glockenspiel whee piano,rococo rollercoaster-run piano, monkeyclapping brazen summernoise,you fabergé grotto dream piano, you honkeytonk-and-grogshop spree piano,you never-yet-met-Mendelssohn piano, you Von Trapp kid who loved their feral phase,O shirley temple gremlin fizz piano ..read more

the moon gets impatient when full starts shiftingtime is a point .weightless. precisionsharp as a pin.I walk the tips. leave a moment for someone behind to step in.to be in two moments at the same time is to bleed twice. *I sell my hair at sunset. miss a heart-beat. jump in. invisible to the hours ..read more

spring’s sentriesshrill with chlorophyllrubber-banded phalanxesfill farmers’ market stallsadolescent stalksspindly impudent spearswith their scaly fauxhawksthose rebel yells out in force–the first sign winter has lost the fightor, echoing snow,arrive deliberately albino–inexplicably bunkeredby exuberant Germanssparkling over April’s Weißspargel, then shipped out in glass cylinder galleriesstolid in citric lymphaching for a hollandaise duvet Bio ..read more

I went there once, nose first, on a date with a high school teacher I’d met at a communist bookstore— revolutionary communist, to be clear— to see 12 Years a Slave. I don’t remember the neon yellow Sunshine above the black marquee or the mostly-black graffiti splayed out on the urban beige brick or the ..read more

“make a map,” she says and already i am lost. i understand what's being asked; i don't know if it's possible to make a map of feelings. diligently i assemble a list of parts: title, scale, orientation, legend, border. it's a representation of something or of some place in relation to some other thing or ..read more

It is often said that an essential quality of poetic writing is its immunity to translation. As Dante wrote in his Convivio: “nothing harmonized according to the rules of poetry can be translated from its native tongue into another without destroying all its sweetness and harmony.” Dominique Bernier-Cormier would, I think, agree with Dante’s image ..read more

“Serious art is born from serious play.” This quote from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way epitomizes the poems in Dennis Cooley’s latest book, body works, in which he continues to write with a playfulness that has produced a rich oeuvre of poetry spanning the last five decades. Built from the machinery of the body—its clicks ..read more

you speak to me in skylines| the techno of concrete walls| | cacophonies of light & noise collide| with glass & | asphalt | | instead of ocean chants | & mountains. the wind can’t tell the | difference. it scales | the heights of scrapers| |shoves us around the corner of Burrard| |and Hastings ..read more

You set the board, a field of alternating black and white squares. Multi-level, like Star Trek, to consider time, space, all dimensions. Bolt to the boundary of the table, stay in the lines, ignore the teeth menacing at the edges of my field of vision. Shift to the rook, you circle, gaze down with one ..read more

Water flows throughout Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin’s remarkable Fire Cider Rain, with the book’s four sections, titled Evaporate, Condensate, Precipitate and Collect. Water features in many poem titles and in the poems themselves, ranging from omnipresent ocean to storm to “water on tile” (“Seamelt II”). Fire cider, a spice-infused tonic, comes down as precipitation. In ..read more