THIS
CHRISTMAS CARD IS PHOTOSHOPPED
I inherited my green hair from my mother. She’s
a quarter cup salt and a soupçon of blue food colouring. Dad left his genes at
Old Navy, came home with wool socks pulled up to his knees. The family tree is
rooted at Fourth and Main: one hundred years of pity, bar fights, and the
occasional vegetarian. I smash the fine china and rearrange it into snowy
mountains. None of us cry at concerts, micromanage, or hug longer than the
sell-by-date. We send each other e-cards on the wrong birthdays. Dad adds extra
sugar to Mom’s brussel sprouts for texture. The magic skipped a generation. Mom
likes to fly kites on days there is no wind.
The third season of Vancouver’s Rahila’s Ghost Press chapbooks [see my review of the first season here; the second season here] include Emma Tilley’s Carp Dime (2019), Kyla Jamieson’s Kind of Animal (2019) and Brandi Bird’s I Am Still Too Much (2019). I’m enjoying
these small collections, although I’ll admit I’m not sure why such short titles
require tables of contents (my own quirk, I suppose). And why are there no
author biographies included in these collections? Either way, Rahila’s Ghost
has, through nine published chapbooks-to-date, established themselves as a
press with a preference for the local, publishing emerging poets (all but one
title so far, Meghan Harrison’s third chapbook, Amateur Hours, last fall, have been debuts) with a focus on the
narrative lyric. Given their website offering that they are a publisher of
emerging and established poets, I am curious to see if and when a more
established writer might appear on their roster (this isn’t a complaint, merely
a curiosity; there is nothing wrong with preferring the emerging, and perhaps
there aren’t any established writers sending them manuscripts that excite the
editors enough for publication).
These
are chapbooks by poets who, on the whole, seem to very much be writing
themselves into being. Vancouver Island poet and flash fiction writer Emma Tilley, who has a BA in Creative Writing from Kwantlen Polytechnic University,
is the author of the debut chapbook Carp Dime, an assemblage of short prose poems. “I am a poet in a prose body.”
she writes, in the opening poem, “SELF-INTRODUCTION,” a poem that closes with: “I
stumble to make sense of the world through similes and metaphors. Tape the word
writer to my skin and re-apply as
needed.” I find her collection of first-person narratives rather curious, and I’m
taken with the cadence of her prose poems. The poems here that are strong are
quite strong, and I look forward to seeing where else she might go with the
form.
Vancouver poet, reading series curator and editor Kyla Jamieson, who seems to have
published in a variety of journals to date, is the author of the debut chapbook
Kind of Animal, an assortment of
lyrics around survival and recovering from a concussion. I’ve been enjoying the
understatedness of her poems, striking just as one might not expect, and
allowing the wisdoms to quietly unfold. There are parts of this collection that
are extremely sharp, as her title poem opens: “sometimes it’s exhausting / to
be awake and alive // at the same time. with my / concussion comes tunnel
vision // this is not a metaphor. / the periphery disappears.”
I NEED A
POEM
Can we talk about the moon
tonight low and full
in the baby blue sky. Brigitte
at my door, the sound
of her laugh and well-loved
heart. I want to be held
up like that. I need a poem
about happiness that I haven’t
written yet, an ode
to the ducks in my neighbours’
pool, another for the pink
magnolias of spring—some trees
make it look so easy: yes,
I can hold all this beauty up
Originally from Winnipeg, Brandi Bird is a Two-Spirit Saulteaux and Cree poet who has
published in a small handful of journals, including Poetry is Dead and PRISM
International. Bird's debut chapbook is I Am Still Too Much (2019), a collection of first-person lyrics that focus on
navigating and negotiating the immediate of family, culture, tradition and
belonging, as well as a deep sense of loss. As Bird writes in the poem “Manitoba”:
“This is the Red / in springtime. It thaws slowly / and then faster. A father /
in an ice floe. A father as water, / faceless in the riverbed. Melting / like a
body into another / body and coursing north / like all rivers here.”
19
I triage the landscape. The prairies
are numb today and so am I.
I am too thin. Built
like I won’t explode on hot
afternoons, a mirror
to the sky. My body is a hurt
where tall grasses grow, where
clouds pass, where rain sinks. It
aches where I touch
aches where I touch
the ground. The prairies are split
into farmland locked in the control
of continuity and destruction. A plaque
of canola on my arm itches and
I want to scratch. Someday I will move
to where the land cradles me, swallows
me whole, erodes flesh from my body
in the surf. I can’t explain how I feel today
except: the wish for winter. Every season
an emergency, distinct but repeating
like the bones of my ribcage
or prairie highways in blowing snow.
I am the outline of a person
on the shoulder heading west, formed
into black plastic garbage bags. I am still
too heavy for the wind to take me
anywhere fast. I am still too much.
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