spring 2014
Table of Contents
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The Ford Takes Us to Wreck Beach
Melissa Sawatsky
I Invent a Character Before Lunch
Steve Klepetar
No Small Effort Joseph Dorazio
Lost and Found Things I Noticed . . . Ricky Garni
Poem for Jeff
Poetry Shortage
Kayla Czaga
The Last Year of His Life Barbara Brooks
We Are At Our Best
When the Rain Ceases Falling on Hanover
Richard-Yves Sitoski
The Day The Rain Stopped
Jane Mellor
An Interview with a Caribou Richard Kelly Kemick
Ariadne: the untangler
Fiona Mitchell
In the South Chilcotins
The Shell
Rob Taylor
Poetry Shortage
with a line borrowed from Jack Spicer
Rain again, blurring the world beyond the window.
Days slip off as I sit at my desk, vague
segments, named to give them shape—to say,
on Monday I woke up and constructed a routine.
I ate through my life, sensing it was sufficient
if not memorable. Time does not finish
a poem—no, it finishes us. My houseplants shiver
along with me into another winter of not thriving.
My cat’s wet nose presses cold into my calf, tickles
like new snow. She curls into dark corners
to sleep. I think the world is running out
of poetry. We can’t prove there will be more clear days
to compare to apples. Traffic shucks continually through
the rain, the din of it, muffling my head. The hum
that goes on with or without us, simply to go on. I hate
the things people tell me about art, creativity being this big
event we’re all invited to. To me, it’s always
been an ache I can’t compare to anything
which I try to compare everything else to. I don’t feel it
these days. The same old wind blows over buildings
flapping like a mouth. I still wander, sometimes,
my coat closing the world out of my body, with pockets
full of garbage, with my slender, steady want. I still
make the bed and unmake it at bedtime.