blue skies poetry

The Indelible Route

akublik — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 07:00:44 +0000

You never asked why, or how I found your village
despite not knowing its name or the alarming language
I heard while walking towards you.

It was the map you drew, years before,
in that rented room off Lang Suan

You had arrived on an overnight bus
doubtful as Bangkok morning sky
till your fingers retraced the indelible route
to a point on a curve of the river.

You became more necessary
than the space between words,
and I will be walking towards you again
breathing sunset over the river
after the rain.

~ Vincent MacIsaac

Vincent MacIsaac is a Canadian resident of Phnom Penh. He works as a ghost writer and editor.

Stains

akublik — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 07:00:59 +0000

A 
step 
down from this mossy brook,
these arms hug a murmuring pond.

Your chestnut fingers are long absent,
my opaque knuckles are naked
and who cares if my ass is grass.

Hello, yellow sun who doesn’t reach.

Shifting about,
lily pads and nettles
it’s unforgettable how 	I see

more of myself in 		this 	
reflection.

~ Tyler Gabrysh

Tyler Gabrysh has appeared in Geist, Jones Av., and Four and Twenty. His poem ‘Mindsweep’ received Honourable Mention in the 2009 Other Voices poetry contest. Future work will be released in Open Minds Quarterly. He resides in Medicine Hat with his son, feline and creaking hardwood inspiration.

In The Waiting Room

akublik — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 07:00:36 +0000

Every time the nurse calls a name, his mother,
with great difficulty, gets up,
“Hurry,” she says in a shaky voice,
“Or we’ll miss our turn.” He looks up from his book.
“It’s not you, sit down mom,” he says flatly,
and then repeats it yelling.
She is hard of hearing.

He is a son with white hair and the need of a cane.
She gets up. He yells. She gets up. He yells.
This goes on for an hour. His patience
is older than their combined ages, and there is deep love.
“It’s not you, sit down mom,” he yells.

When they finally do call her name,
she is asleep. She looks as if she died waiting.
He ever so gently wakes her up and guides her
towards the inevitable, the inevitable for everyone.
“Is it time for lunch?” She asks.
“Soon.” He answers.

All the way down the hallway to the
examination room, she jabbers about food,
what she wants for lunch.
Lucky for her, she still has an appetite.

He is not afraid of death,
still he worries that he will die first.

~ Jo-Ann Godfrey

Jo-Ann Godfrey is a Canadian citizen but she was born and raised in Copenhagen, Denmark, and educated at the University of Alberta. Her poetry has been published in TickleAce, Pottersfield Portfolio, Zygote, The Amethyst Review and others. She has been part of the Stroll of Poets Society since 1994, served on the board as vice-president and as a sales representative for the anthology. Presently she is trying to find a home for her poetry collection entitled, “From Beyond The Mood Wheel.”

Laughter, The Saviour

akublik — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 07:00:22 +0000

My mother, who has been a widow for a year now,
can’t remember because of old age. She is mad
about that because, “it is so annoying,” she whines.
I have never been able to remember at any age.

“You have to help me,” I say, “Remember
where we parked, level three, on the right hand
side, in the corner.” We both become silent
for a while, imprinting it on our minds, but
when we return, three hours later, we still
get out on the wrong floor. We joke about that.
We talk to the people on the elevator about
how we goofed again. We all giggle until it brings
tears to our eyes. “We’re so lost,” we say.

“I can get lost in my own house,” my mother claims
as if it was something to brag about. She is
laughing when she says it. Now I know we have
to find a washroom before we can drive.

“I like your turle brooch,” a lady says to me,
and we all break into hysterical laughter.
Sometimes it seems like that’s all you can do
to deal with it all, break loose and explode.
Laughter works every time. Now we’re home
and at the moment, we don’t feel very lost at all.
That’s in the past some time, we can’t
quite remember when.

Leddy Headbutter

akublik — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 07:00:01 +0000

Leddy Headbutter –
named after his colour
and head-butting habit:
I’ve finished cruising. Wake up.
You can pet me, feed me now.

a gray stray who cried
for days before we found him
trapped by a wasp nest
under the back yard driveway
now strides across his yard

marble grey
with bright slit green eyes –
how could he not look
like he just swallowed
Plato’s cave canary?

He found that dry place
when the wasps were asleep –
took refuge from a storm.
Woke up to a paper gray
brain blocking his exit.

What is this humming
thing thinking Mmmmm,
he must have thought.
Face swollen from stings,
he earned his blue caterwaul.

My wife got stung twice
hauling his skinny ass out
of there. Now he sleeps
under the tarp covering
his yard furniture.

So much for
the retinal circus
playing against blue sky.
This ain’t T.V., baby.
There is no remote.

Richard Stevenson

Richard Stevenson teaches at Lethbridge College in southern Alberta. His most recent collection, his first collection of tanka and kyoka, Windfall Apples, has just been published by Athabasca University Press. Other recent collections include Wiser Pills (Frontenac House), Tidings of Magpies (Spotted Cow Press), and The Emerald Hour (Ekstasis Editions), all published in 2008.

Harvest Moon Triptych

akublik — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 07:00:51 +0000

harvest moon –
menopause hot flashes:
my wife moons me!

harvest moon –
no steelies, no tombollies,
no bull fudging!

harvest moon –
God’s best tombolly
left in the circle

***

(All free and clear.)

***

~ Richard Stevenson

Poet’s note: The second two are variants on the kids’ marble game theme — something I’ve always associated with the fall. A tombolly is an oversized marble (usually a cats eye marble), a steely is a ball bearing — both heavier than a conventional marble, and thus easier to knock other marbles out of the circle with, and bull fudging is cheating by allowing the hand to cross the line of the circle before the player releases his marble. When I was a kid, we’d always utter this phrase or the variant, “… and no totem poles,” which meant no drawing a line up to the marble you wanted to knock out of the circle, crossing the line in a T, then uttering “totem poles” and shooting from a more proximate position.

When it Falls

akublik — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 07:00:27 +0000

Here’s the bite, the kicker, the
hardness which we were foolish to think
would never come

~ Sarah Miniaci

Sarah Miniaci is a 20-something writer based in Toronto, ON, where she dropped out of university to live in the heart of the nightclub district and play tambourine into the wee hours and has a tendency to think too much about everything. Her poetry has been published in Xenith and Word Catalyst, and she has recently completed writing her first novel. She is co-founder and co-editor of Burner Magazine, which will be launched September 1, 2010.

Whisper

akublik — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 07:00:11 +0000

It’s all just a train car, sitting alone in a
station, going home after
crossing the first line, finding the
little, tiny, unpaid-for
fatality you knew to be in there
all along
it’s the minute of
the hour you approached out of
the single red walled
stall in a station
and heard the inevitability of it
all while licking your wine-stained teeth
showing off the bones
pushing through the skin
of your back and
shivering
with misanthropy in an
unpaid-for glass.
It’s just all just a train car, a walk with
the kind of coat that only
the wrong sorts of people wear at
these times in the morning and they’re
picking through wastebaskets that will
follow you home even when you
try to run
But it just keeps going keeps swelling and
growing like a train car that’s
brimming with the
romance of everything between the
confines of your skull

A pen, a page. All it took
was one day

~ Sarah Miniaci

Death Comes to Saskatchewan

akublik — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 07:00:07 +0000

In the mountains he arrives suddenly—
a slab of rock drops from the bluffs north of
Coffee Creek making you one with the cab of your truck.

Or a mudslide or avalanche, sounding
like an approaching train, sweeps you from its
track. With luck your body resurfaces late in the summer.

Or you reach to change radio stations
at the wrong curve on Highway 6, and plunge
five-hundred long feet to the black surface of Slocan Lake.

But here you have a chance—five or ten
minute’s grace to make your peace, time to fire
a few feeble, long overdue apologies into the never-ending blue,

while he strides across the fields,
straight for your place, grain parting like the seas,
his cowl and cloak billowing behind him in a bone-rattling wind.

~ Greg Simison

Greg Simison is a poet, playwright and columnist currently living in Moose Jaw. He is the author of four books: Disturbances, 1982, Thistledown Press; The Possibilities of Chinese Trout, 1986, Okanagan College Press; What the Wound Remembers, 1993, Borealis Press; and The Moon Road, (chapbook), 1999, Really Small Vernon Press.

Feast

akublik — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Though usually indiscriminate raiders
of valley gardens, fruit trees, and black-
berry slopes, the bears shun this ancient,
twisted apple tree beside the road. All winter
unmauled offerings sway from its branches,

the sourness so legendary even the earth
refuses its windfalls. But for us, colour-
starved in a white season, it offers a sweet
and generous gift—kindly keeping, beneath
their lids of snow, its small, green lanterns lit.

~ Greg Simison