Two excellent Canadian literary magazines found room for my work on their pages this winter.

I recommend you check them out, and to get an idea of the kind of work they print, you could start by reading my poems here.

Prism international, based in Vancouver, includes my “Tinnitus” in its new issue:

Tinnitus

I read John Cage and, in a silent room,
listened to the low thrum of blood in my veins,
the hiss of nerves in my head.
Proprioception I called it, after Olson.

For years I believed what I heard
was the microbiome of my inner ear –
cells living out their lives in there –
and I wondered about this thing called me.

How much of me is a population
of microbes doing I don’t know what
to or for me, living and dying
as I say these words?

Now I accent the first syllable,
call it tinnitus, as if that’s an explanation.
I told the doctor, I guess there’s little I can do.
You can complain, he said.

Waterloo, Ontario magazine The New Quarterly includes two of my poems, and I have written a blog post about one of them for the TNQ blog. Here are the poems.

Dark Flower

What fresh hellebore is this that flowers
deep purple, deeper than its shallow
sunny fellows?
How deep
to flower in winter, face frost
and snow, to know when to bow,
how not to break.
Burgundy bloom,
have you a tincture for me and my fellows?
A word to the wayward perhaps?
Or a charm to scare the devil
out of any who cross us?
Would you at least come live with me
and be my dark midwinter comfort?

Please forgive my forwardness.
You are, and that’s enough for me.

Nocturne

Wind in the branches
Whispering waves

How much of our poetry is
staging

the abalone bed for
a single small pearl

found on a petal
or a rainy street

on the crest of a breaker
in the beak of a raptor

in the depths of the sea
or the eye socket of a skull

If you could see its gleam
without the setting

you’d be left without
a poem to learn

It would turn in your mind
like a moon