where is the river :: a poetry experiment

Kelly Egan :: Four poems Amy Poague :: Four poems Kim Fahner :: Three poems Mike Ferguson :: Four poems Lily Rose Kosmicki :: Four poems from The Fairly Ridged Sharp Protuberance from a Living Thing

Boyle’s Law Never understanding the idealism of it. This internal combustion engine was a simple process to learn and remember, but it was my illustrations that earned praise. Doppler too, and over the years you could hear it approaching before becoming a poem. Inversely, the proportion of engagement waned when it was no longer compulsory. There is a science of education which is based quite simply on kindness. Copious amounts of copying. Extrapolating how, with that kind of engagement, I should have achieved so much more than a Grade 4. What would Hirsch make of this lack of deep knowledge? Though the logic is smaller is greater. Remembering is an expansion across time. Gunpowder Gunnery and blasting and plots. Black powder. Hidden in sheds, unless. Accident propelled from the elixir of life. And birth of Irony. Prime of Pacific willow. Peppered and saltpetre follow-on. This and alcohol to shape a world. There are easy methods for creation, like chopping down burnt trees on b...

The Golden Ratio Adjusts Her Expectations Skyward The sky remains the rumor-- just a perfect holy number, a perfect  holy encounter and an awkward conversation afterward. Afterward, vastness cannot be just, cannot be only one awkward sky. Afterward, one lover cannot switch places with the sky to undress the rumor in its perfection. She lifts a sun- dress over her head, more vastly dejected than the horizon might suppose. Her dejection approaches infinite, perfect dejection. No love is merely.  Is just. Just dressing up delicately                    to put one over on dawn. I Collapse the Mays I’ve Known into a Hallway and Run Down It, Calling for Help Glaciers creep across the parking lot in March, though May blooms: the latest verdant version. I inhale you and lose sense, willingly the mendicant in these two weeks of your miraculous purple air. May’s rainy wind ushers in a synesthesia ...

Aglow This afternoon’s sun, this burnished heat, slides across my collarbones slow, like hands reaching, mindful, like fingers searching, until my face is aglow, radiant. Faery Lights One hundred in a box, these sparkle brightest lights: unspool, unlink, unwind them. Late July thunder, so that summer sinks into darkness of painted corners— of humid rooms, of hollowed out hearts. Spin strings of faery swirls, wrap arms and shoulders— feet bare on shadowed night grass. Twirl then—all tangled beyond untangling. The sea inside       When there’s a sea inside, even a drive out towards Little Heart’s Ease won’t make it less of a sea and more of a pond. Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. She was the fourth poet laureate for Sudbury (2016-18) and was the first woman appointed to the role. Her fifth collection of poems, These Wings (Pedlar Press), was published in Spring 2019. Kim is a member of the Writers' Union of...

penumbra of an intangible holiday First time I saw the ocean from the backseat of the family car, I didn’t know the sparkles on the water would disappear, that I wouldn’t be able to hold them—                *                       *              Knowing ’s a coming-of-age-dress                I hesitate to wear. That crown of street lamps pressed into the cliff         is a village where I’ll live one day                                 — t hough I know it    ...

worn out shoe: circulatory on the first day of all time, repeat the vitals: before you have a veneer or cracks roundabout loops in a drenched yearning circle: where maroon blood islands are filled with lionized arteries reoccurring swimming through “i like it and   i love it and so,   i love my day” if only we were known, known only by paper, why not? if times talk to each other, talk to themselves, time and time again, during again-times, when all is open: all shapes, stars purple, neon orange thaws with a pen and the idea aorta pushes into scrolls and skulls, single celled bacteria little girls who are and are not made of, made from, and made by: words/blood moving swerve war: proprioception puzzles and                                       ...