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Poetry

Poetry

Tongues that Dance

Smidt’s burning bush has tongues of flame that dance and leap in autumn’s winds. The oaks that shed their dull brown leaves seem to look askance as this tall bush so boldly flaunts her red. I do not take my shoes off as I pass – though Moses did when “I Am” told him to – but stop before I hurry on to class. “Perhaps a voice will tell me what to do,” I muse, not for a moment thinking…
Dave Schelhaas
February 4, 2015
Poetry

Where Am I?

Hacking through a thicket of noise to reach some clearing within myself I am lost in a jangled jungle of thoughts Tossed about in the Facebook maelstrom Drenched in the hurricane of information so that I know everything except my self in the dense and tangled branches of our apple tree there were birds just yesterday redeeming rotten fruit with their pecking but today the tree is barren and the apples sag and stink Having just had coffee with a…
January 10, 2015
Poetry

Alberta Avenue, Just before 8 PM

It is almost 8 now the crowds have gone and the festival tents are packed away inside their Rubbermaid totes for another year of hibernation I am standing in the middle of the street which is a crazy thing to do in a busy city on 118th Avenue, or any avenue but not now, on Sunday, before 8 The roads are still closed The neighbourhood defended from marauding cars and trucks by a mote of pylons and barricades until 8…
January 10, 2015
Poetry

Psalm 727

For the Director, to the tune of “The Cup of Mourning.” Dawn, in her tattered veils, wafts one last breath over the pond like a bridal train; the ivory mesh snags, opening on a rain-pearled leaf, a peeling scroll of birch inked with cryptic lines— alas, no message there for a widow. French press steeps as layers of gauze keep parting, God’s hand there, stirring a glimpse within morning’s swirl of cream marbled through coffee, easing this ache we call…
Laurie Klein
October 30, 2014
Poetry

Earthworks 301

Such dubious tutors: the upwardly mobile drone whose instinct sinks his career with a single sting; the flim-flam deer tick, upended, six legs waving, with two new ones, nose hair thin and due to emerge before she self-destructs from Siphon Arrest; and, out-slumming all comers, the fly wannabe, that inveterate pond bum and bottom crawler, the caddis worm, sheathed with twiglets and crumbs of stone, bits of rotted sedge, an earring back, a long-gone snail’s bivalve casket. As it was…
Laurie Klein
October 30, 2014
Poetry

Romantics

He loosens his work-tie’s noose-knot, ascending a staircase climbing above our grey earth, fallen leaves clotting gutters in the car-park where a divorced neighbor, half-lifed, drags on a cigarette, smoldering time until her bed-mate’s pickup returns, a faded T-shirt her smock, her hair a mess like a nest. Exhausted, Ulysses stumbles into his haven, a two-room apartment, having passed by the taupe vestibule’s Charybdis, its mailbox, filled with bills starving for their pounds of flesh, to behold as he does…
Nathaniel A. Schmidt
October 30, 2014
Poetry

What Is Man that Thou Art Mindful of Him

What do we mean when we say children are God’s artistry as preachers are wont to do during baptisms, deleting from their homilies words like “daughter” and “girl” as they exhort their faithful not to deface her beauty? Her cries, while precious, necessary, compelling her mother from tranquil acceptance to energized aid in the nursery, are hardly melodic like deft little fingers dropped by a pianist on his Steinway, the right hand aware of what the left, separate, is doing,…
Nathaniel A. Schmidt
October 30, 2014
Poetry

Hard Red Spring

The day I stood on the clipped grass of Olds College – after palming Norquay, Chinook, and Neepawa, until my fingers had unlocked their doors, and I could smell the loam and feel the wind, and see three months of rain and heat, in an amber seed of Hard Red Spring wheat – I saw kaleidoscopic rings around the sun. And at the sun-dog-ends of those high-noon rims, were more rings intersecting, and at each intersection, like Ezekiel’s wheels in…
Stephen T. Berg
September 1, 2014
Poetry

God Likes Hair Salons

I can’t believe God lives outside the house of earth, beyond the lawn of stars, and the fenced-yard universe, out in the timeless cold, his raw breath, his radon brow, ridged, veiling nebular eyes, and his fingers, freezing as he writes down names in a book, for later. Of course God prefers the clamour of pubs, the company of welders and waitresses, the warm feel of a beech wood pool cue, the chatter on wharves and in hair salons, the…
Stephen T. Berg
September 1, 2014