by rob mclennan

1.

Each of your birthdays, in turn, highlight

such universal constants: poodles, pigeons,
sparrows,

haircuts. Writer going to hell! The name
telegraphs, withers. This amplitude of highways

that bear significant weight across lakeshore,

and the inability
of metaphor. I open

my mouth.

2.

For such an occasion, one centres the mind.
We reconfirm altitude,

amplitude, position: Amherst

and Hardscrabble; the Upper Canada
Academy. These strongholds

of Family Compact, and a garage
packed with chapbooks. One late, late night

in 1979: you began to formulate an outline,
calculating digits

in your father’s office. The light
of his photocopier.

3.

In the mid–nineteenth century, the largest centre
in Ontario. The city of Cobourg,

and the stretch of two centuries to finally evolve
from quiet lakeside

to quiet lakeside. What the poodles in the state of Oregon
and Wisconsin combined

had dreamt into being. The conspiracy

that followed. What it had most likely been
all along.

4.

Happy sixtieth birthday: neither words
nor mere numbers

but outlaws

and vaudeville stars, performing
on an endless, perfect stage. The concession stand

is raining. The books have gained sentience,
and can’t sell themselves fast enough.

Poodle.

by James Lowe

In the chapel,
throned in the pulpit,
you’re scrubbed and splendid
in the hot spring light,
dripping, not from heat
or from physical exertion.
You say as much another time,
watching your father dig
in flower beds below,
you high and dry at the window above,
digging with your pen, you say.
Your scene’s visceral: its straining,
stooping, rooting, and another:
mining ancient corpses peated brown,
not the turf cutter, you the sculptor,
making them palpable,
the killing grounds, Old Jutland
to yesterday Derry,
sickle in the tall grass
next the slashed throat, dripping.

Mounted here on high,
full of physicality,
though not Lawrence’s horseman
in spring, energy clamped
between his legs,
heavy and blooded
and tangible, and the sex.
Not one for much of that
or Ireland not obliging you,
it severed south from north
consigning you even
as eunuch to relic queens,
the slung weight gone,
the dark, wet flesh grieving.

by Paul Guest

And the darkness is best described as other
than velvet, or a bruise the precise hint
of an unknown fruit, when the night is haunted by wind,
by physics, really, when you get down
to it, the way that the world feels in your gut,
when you dream of vampirism
and it seems right, just so,
true to your biography,
which includes a place of birth,
and parents and a time of day
and where in the sky did the moon hang like a glassy dream,
who on that day quit breathing,
who died wrapped up in wet, astounding pain,
blood on the floor and walls
and outside persistent rain coming down like nuisance,
I think of Jimmy Hoffa
who vanished from this poem just now,
and Amelia Earhart,
her lasting thirst and the little island which swallowed her up,
and the Lindbergh baby
found buried in a shoe box,
no knowledge his father was a Nazi sympathizer,
a sort of vileness I thought
was safely trapped in the amber sap of history,
but, no, look who is president right now
and everyone who wants to be
and it makes a shattering version of sense
that my heart is
thudding, messed up, good as single use plastic is good,
I answer to my name like a dog on a leash because it is mine.

by Paul Guest

So nothing anymore makes sense,
let me tell you. Is it secret
what you love, or loves you like
a medicine. A flame. I am
so committed to this moment
in which it’s easy to imagine a violence.
In movies, getting punched
seems to hurt just a little.
Mostly is impact, slap of meat on meat,
then an instant sleep
and no dream of crushed knuckles
and blood and pain
that will always linger.
When you’re old, grows worse.
When you press close
to a future warmth
and tell everything about a previous life.
I floated in space. I won.
The ocean was lavish then
and not dead and not memorial to this ruin
that seems to be encoded
within. I’m afraid of you. What you mean.
Last night the moon
in the sky hung
like a glowing fraction
and a stranger asked me if I believed in fate.
I thought of the night
I spent in an emergency room years ago:
a man lay sobbing
with a hunting knife deep in his shoulder.
My heart is broken, he sighed.
Let me go. Let me die. Let me out of here.
What he wanted, I did.
I do.