A
thought, barefoot,
slips
along a
painter’s
tendon,
pools at the risk. Wrist.
A Tournament of Hunchbacks
Like a just-spent flashbulb in its concave theatre tiring,
Czesław’s mind incandesces, comforting the things
Of this tortured earth. When composing verses,
He abided by two virtues: dilligence and resignation.
“What is the etymology of literature?”
“Well, the word is of three parts: lit, terra, and tour.”
He was claimed by a Catholic crypt. Bene Quiescas.
And the page, equally supine, remains, dreaming,
Perhaps in chalk, of thistles, of dragonflies.
Astoria
It was in the house on Astoria––
“Don’t run up the stairs; the kitchen floor IS!”
––when my body was not simply a means of exhilaration,
but the boundary of the world’s novel menace. In winter,
we would test the ape of our suits by hurling and into
another’s coated and mittened body piled amidst sherry
laughter and our lungs’ recursions and knuckles of flash
-frozen ice glistering the great glory of their escarpments.
I had raced up the flattened-pale brown-carpeted stairs
into the enemy of myself and bled in the ambulant air.
Waking in the tight, starched sheets and the funny clothespin
on my pinky, I remember being told that I’d split my forehead.
A medical-liquid adhesive had been applied to “right here:
they used glue, like what you use in Arts & Crafts, but for medicine”
which had kept me from bleeding too broadly into the way
the world had become a navigable threat.
I remember feeling disappointed, as if in this one small way
I had failed to truly damage myself and was by some flash of irony
insufficient to our aptitude, unable to parade a beautiful white cast
which would magnitize the grace of girls I was beginning to notice
or offer the igneous stitchwork of another boy’s fame to inspection.
From my first foray into the storm of harms the world can be
I emerged with a desire, with me still, to have broken.
Echolocation
I worked all day and called half drunk the night
He won the Griffin asking whether they could write
Him notes excusing him from future parking tickets.
“No luck. They’re on me now to judge the GG next year.”
“It’s time to give only disputably accomplished poets
Your attention now.” He chuckled. “Looks that way.”
Two months later, at a literary agent’s party in Toronto
His wife took notice of me standing at the bar, explaining
On the wing, ordering two red wines, that she’d just seen
Her chance to rescue from a chatty hoard the kid, shyly
Flummoxed in his tux, for whom the party had been held.
Not since Dylan Thomas started one review I hadn’t read.
Turning, she asked, “When is your novel due?” “Last April.”
“The cruellest,” she winked and slipped across the room:
The second wine held forth was catching twilight on its face,
Then tux, then fingers as she whispered through the space
Above his shoulder, “You look like you need rescuing.”
slips
along a
painter’s
tendon,
pools at the risk. Wrist.
A Tournament of Hunchbacks
Like a just-spent flashbulb in its concave theatre tiring,
Czesław’s mind incandesces, comforting the things
Of this tortured earth. When composing verses,
He abided by two virtues: dilligence and resignation.
“What is the etymology of literature?”
“Well, the word is of three parts: lit, terra, and tour.”
He was claimed by a Catholic crypt. Bene Quiescas.
And the page, equally supine, remains, dreaming,
Perhaps in chalk, of thistles, of dragonflies.
Astoria
It was in the house on Astoria––
“Don’t run up the stairs; the kitchen floor IS!”
––when my body was not simply a means of exhilaration,
but the boundary of the world’s novel menace. In winter,
we would test the ape of our suits by hurling and into
another’s coated and mittened body piled amidst sherry
laughter and our lungs’ recursions and knuckles of flash
-frozen ice glistering the great glory of their escarpments.
I had raced up the flattened-pale brown-carpeted stairs
into the enemy of myself and bled in the ambulant air.
Waking in the tight, starched sheets and the funny clothespin
on my pinky, I remember being told that I’d split my forehead.
A medical-liquid adhesive had been applied to “right here:
they used glue, like what you use in Arts & Crafts, but for medicine”
which had kept me from bleeding too broadly into the way
the world had become a navigable threat.
I remember feeling disappointed, as if in this one small way
I had failed to truly damage myself and was by some flash of irony
insufficient to our aptitude, unable to parade a beautiful white cast
which would magnitize the grace of girls I was beginning to notice
or offer the igneous stitchwork of another boy’s fame to inspection.
From my first foray into the storm of harms the world can be
I emerged with a desire, with me still, to have broken.
Echolocation
I worked all day and called half drunk the night
He won the Griffin asking whether they could write
Him notes excusing him from future parking tickets.
“No luck. They’re on me now to judge the GG next year.”
“It’s time to give only disputably accomplished poets
Your attention now.” He chuckled. “Looks that way.”
Two months later, at a literary agent’s party in Toronto
His wife took notice of me standing at the bar, explaining
On the wing, ordering two red wines, that she’d just seen
Her chance to rescue from a chatty hoard the kid, shyly
Flummoxed in his tux, for whom the party had been held.
Not since Dylan Thomas started one review I hadn’t read.
Turning, she asked, “When is your novel due?” “Last April.”
“The cruellest,” she winked and slipped across the room:
The second wine held forth was catching twilight on its face,
Then tux, then fingers as she whispered through the space
Above his shoulder, “You look like you need rescuing.”
Kevin Heslop is a poet and actor
from London, Ontario. His first chapbook, con/tig/u/us, originally an
installation of 150 poems, was distilled and published by The Blasted Tree
Art Collective in 2018. His poetry has appeared in ISACOUSTIC, Juniper,
No Press, Puddles of Sky Press, is/let, NOON, Brick Books: Online,
Forget Magazine, in anthology with Baseline Press, and won Occasus
Literary Journal and Poetry London prizes in 2015. On stage, he has
performed as Creon, Katherine Minola, and Saul Levi Mortera. He organizes LOMP: reading series
& open mic and serves as resident interviewer for The /tƐmz/ Review.