POEMLINK No. 5: Here Comes the Sun
Welcome to POEMLINK, a poetry roundup which is a curation of pieces that have recently caught our attention in literary journals and magazines online. POEMLINK aims to provide an eclectic selection of pieces we find special, innovative, or simply amusing. Let us scour the world of internet poetry so you don’t have to.
It’s only when the sun starts coming out in March that I realize how dim I feel in winter. And, as sure as the snowdrops creeping up through the grass, I find myself hungering for poetry in the spring. After two months of hibernation, there’s plenty to dig into — poems to celebrate spring, mourn winter, and bridge the strange mood of this transitional time with determination, aching nostalgia, and maybe even something like hope.
— Dessa
1. “Cantaloupe” by Hannah Shapiro, published in Bywords
“She is cutting a cantaloupe in her underwear / with a long knife— / the one that always makes me nervous”
Shapiro beautifully captures a fine line between sweetness and danger, between tools and possibility. She is afraid of her lover’s knife, but more afraid of how loss threatens to split them apart sooner or later. And who has time to be afraid when kissing your lover makes you feel as intentional and whole as “God dropping to his knees / careful as he drops the morning sunlight”? Writing beautiful poems is difficult, but writing beautiful poems tempered by the spectre of an uneasy threat, as Shapiro does here, is skillful on another level.
2. “nan kept my mother in” by Allie Duff, published in Canthius
“live fiercely, she said. get stung.”
A poem can only be exactly as long as it needs to be — and there’s no better example than Duff’s poem here, clocking in at five lines and 31 words. Somehow Duff builds not only an entire world in this poem, but fills it with a generational history. The result is rebellious, exultant, and determined.
3. “Meditations Between Emergencies” by Marika Prokosh, published in Contemporary Verse 2
“… for the first March in five years, I realized I am no longer waiting / for the catastrophe of my personality to appear differently / to me.”
Here, Prokosh plays with the transitional space of water and the ways it gathers together an unwitting community. How many connections spool out of a person, thin and strong as fishing twine? How many ordinary miracles are we likewise oblivious to — new vision after eye surgery, strangers in love, the hush of full dark broken by first responders rushing to save someone? Prokosh dives deep into uncertainty and emerges not only whole, but hopeful.
4. “Canadian Summer 2021” by Krishnakumar Sankaran, published in the Fiddlehead
“… rising from the burnt-rubber fumes of simmered asphalt, / your sense of place wavers. You remember now, the ground / is never still.”
Home is sometimes an unsteady concept — an anchor or a sail, depending on the time of day and your own “sweat-coiled / skin and shrieking joints”. Sankaran is caughtbetween “bleached-light / shop signs” and “the amber of this evening,” tossed around by the twin forces of longing and belonging. This tension proves powerful, like the smell of petrichor before a thunderstorm, until our poet falls into “the lambent snap / of a second, and home does not seem so distant”— a moment that brings relief sweeter than summer rain.
5. “Bee’s Tongue” by Joanne Clarkson, published in Juniper
“I once asked a friend, a botanist / how to locate the heart of a flower, / focus of life force, antiphon / of time.”
This poem is about grief in a way that hides its grief from view — a powerful mechanic of revelation that leads the reader along the same hall that Clarkson walks “twice a week / those months of autumn.” The room she reaches remains out of view for most of the poem, eclipsed by the framed artwork of a bee dipping “her long filament of seldom seen tongue” into the lip of a foxglove. What else might we gather in this hall? And where else might it lead?
Dessa Bayrock
lives in Ottawa with two cats and used to fold and unfold paper for a living at Library and Archives Canada. She is currently a PhD student in English, where she continues to fold and unfold paper. She was the editor of post ghost press for nearly three years and was the recent recipient of the Diana Brebner Prize. You can find her at dessabayrock.com or on Instagram at @dessayo, where she reviews books and posts anticapitalist memes.