NOVEMBER POETRY

colour in blue   Priya Bryant

I. ONTARIO

how can you write a love song when you’ve never been in love?
easy, darling, just copy the way they snap their fingers,
like this –

II. ERIE

trampling the kelp corpses into another world
the glass cuts our pebbled feet.
even those soft pink cathedral arches cannot escape.

III. HURON

quiet ripple now, book stacks. silence never warmed to you but it will sell you the Collected Essays of George Orwell for four dollars, no more, no less a child because you ripped out your own seams, because you crumpled like moths I slam through my open window, babies whose leafy flutter stains expensive carpet

IV. MICHIGAN

alone again. a mud-churned gasping. a shaking turn;
your Arthurian rise through strangle-green muttering algae, your sodden freckles, your hair-drip as you light a cigarette. embalmed rage, splinter-quick.

V. SUPERIOR
you think that fate is an old man, eyes waterlogged with age, but you are wrong. fate is a teenage girl. she blows translucent pink bubbles and giggles when they pop. she kisses the wrong boys in dark corners, inhales the wrong aftershave, burns tequila stripes, rum shivers down her throat to forget. cliché holds her hair when the bile fights back.

fate swings her legs open as she curses God and his botched creative streak, how he left her to pick up the fag-ends and empty cans. fate is frightened of the future. she is the most frightened of all. 

Priya Bryant | North London | Fall 2015

NOVEMBER POETRY

Two  Philip  Marley  Poems 


not titled

With the rich missed
for the last time, and
our eyes wiped of
grief, the gazing up, over,
done, and our homes now
facing Babylon; — it seems
time to let out the pink rabbits;
sing for what’s unbidden;
sight the silent hoof in dim
moonlight; brush; ask
the time of every home in
Bedlam; fling back the trollies;
wave our handkerchiefs as
hammers; and come back
through the same eye of
the needle.



An Ontology of Chairs

the image of the
child dancing on
a narrow chair,
stamped as the
seal of the universe.

wide chairs at
the tops of stairs
to protect us
from dreams-
within-dreams.

when you licked
my face
because our chairs
were
touching.

that raised chair
for those
who have the Latin:
sedes.

any fire you
set that
burns a chair
a potential
reader.

the child
dances until
Tereus eats
alone
at his ancestral chair.

though I tremble
with the thought
of being eaten, any
lone chair wrings out
my death.

all the hard
bones carved
into us; half-
blind from chair’s
truing.

too many
chairs
have been asked
to hold
a mind together.

a blue heron
on a chair— still,
calm, heedful —
my thin legs,
my wings.



Philip Marley | Toronto | Fall 2015

NOVEMBER POETRY

POETRY LAUNCH

You are invited to a 

Launch / Reception 

for two new books by Phil Hall 

My Banjo & Tiny Drawings

(Flat Singles Press) 

Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall, A Selected Collage
 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press) 

Le pluvier kildir, translated by Rose Després

(Pris de Parole)

Massey College     4 Devonshire Place 

November 25, 2015 

5:00 - 6:30 pm Cash Bar / Words / Music