Reading natural history on a bus leaving Ottawa
By Sunny Chan
“The day I found out seabirds drink saltwater using a gland above their eyes / We celebrated the news like it was something that happened to us.”
Poetry
We are so grateful to all of our partner-poets for sharing their work with us—please enjoy their beautiful words in our Featured Poetry catalogue.
The Afterlife
“Here, nobody / is what you’d call / deep. Mister Vroom Vroom / cruises his Vette / around the beach.”
Bird
By Jen Town
“Hold your hours. Hold each one / as it ticks away in in your hand / like holding a baby bird / whose entire being breathes / from your palm,”
Post Immigration Pastoral
“Do you // remember his steady hands? / How badly we wanted to love, in him, // some unliftable part of ourselves?”
The place in another universe teaching us our lost adolescence in a new alphabet
“In another part of you, the / damn-near-room-sized / loom, in another, us singing / Madonna acoustic just / because.”
Self-Portrait: Bullet, Prayer, Teeth
“The world wants us to see this– / girl in the ground. Girl / in the gutter — lover, lamplight // sifting through gum trees.”
Let the World Have You
By Mikko Harvey
“your life really / does turn out to be / a cycle of starting / fires, briefly / worshipping them”
Porcupines
“outside this shelter, a plague / stretching its empire around the world / fastens a mouth like a griot to his reed”
Provenance
“My great great grandfather’s head / looks nothing like my great great grandfather. / It’s placed on its side, in the Wallace exhibit, / in a museum in London.”