by Mary Bass Poulin

The grocery cart is not too full,
and you’ve got twenty minutes—
time to fit in this last errand
and get to the lunch meeting.  But,
a man ahead of you needs a price check,
and the elderly woman
right in front has divided her purchases
for separate payments.  Then
you realize she’s in this line
because she knows the young cashier,
and they have a LOT to talk about.
So you are privy to a conversation
you have no right, nor desire—

I was in court yesterday and got full custody.
He’s only seen her twice, owes a year in support.
Now, no one can take her away!

The two exchange more as the girl rings up
the next cluster of items.         Cluster fuck,
is what you’re thinking about
in its beautifully figurative language:
the crazy convolution of people
tripping over one another’s lives,
trying desperately to maintain
a course of sanity through challenges
of being poked, prodded, and slapped.
And you ponder the literal,
how crazy that would be!  You think,
we’re all just bumping into each other,
balls and posts in a pinball game,
or, like we’re hip-checking the machine,
waiting for the ball to drop
while we flap our paddles anxiously
over and over and over, like a bird
lifting off into the air of freedom,
hoping to smack that ball back up
to the dinger of points, and then,
when you arrive at the restaurant
seconds ahead of your partner, he says,
Sorry, I was running late.

by Mary Bass Poulin

I expect myself to be more,
achieve more.  My hunger for story
and design drives me.

Complacency endangers me,
but my answers are likely mistaken.
Railing against life, decrying fate,

is the hardest to swallow.
Human nature is hard poetry;
the need to be written, evident,

to create, discover new ways,
accommodate disparate elements.
To enact, not compare:

I may never be
thin enough, prolific enough,
loved or loving enough.

This is my juxtaposition
of the yearning,
the solace of now.

I will, I will wake content
to windows covered in light
with simpler questions,

broader in scope, in wonder.
Once I lived in the early spring.

I want to come back home.
I want to come back to you.

by George Bowering

You’d think they’d learn a lesson from Icarus,
or at least the part of him they could see if
they’d only look, but no, one guy lets his sheep
walk on stone all the way down to the water,
where there’s nothing to graze.  And I can’t help but
wonder what he’s looking at up in the sky, while
another guy sits on the slippery stone, leaning
into the air far above the disturbed water.
The guy in the dead centre whacks his horse
while plowing around a dead sheep or maybe
female Martian visitor probably fallen from
above the sun.  They all could have taken a tip
from any father who said pay attention, any
odd and even peculiar poet, any such artist
could see those woolly critters will be lamb-
burgers, any Billy’s going to tell you, look out,
at least apply some sun screen, the sea is also
a labyrinth.

by George Bowering

There’s lime Jell-0 in the fridge.  Cupid
wears a smile.  Everything is cool
as we said in the nineteen forties.  It must
be jelly ‘cause prose don’t shake like that.
It must be Love-O keeps you warm
on a day without poetry.  A town
without poetry, that’s where I was
a boy with many friends invisible
to the naked eye.  Or you, a dream
I had in the wide-awake sunshine,
a better day to come, where Cupid
wears a simile, meaning this ain’t
for you, boy, you head up the road to
poetry, take a left at the fifties,
just keep going till you outrun
the arrows, Work hard and get yourself
a fridge to hold what you need at night.