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.
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.
Filed under: Richard Stevenson
by akublik Date 16 August, 2010
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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.
Filed under: Sarah Miniaci
by akublik Date 12 August, 2010
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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
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.
Filed under: Sarah Miniaci
by akublik Date 9 August, 2010
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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.
Filed under: Greg Simison
by akublik Date 5 August, 2010
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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
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.
Filed under: Greg Simison
by akublik Date 1 August, 2010
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