This concrete pastoral poem is a rift. This rift is in fact a river. The image was a collaboration between myself (Kaie Kellough), Laura Toma, and Kevin Yuen Kit Lo at LOKI design. It involved imposing text onto a mapped image of Alberta’s Bow River (which runs through the city of Calgary, where I grew up), then digitally abstracting the river-mapped letterforms.
Genre: Featured
fictional cities
The thrill of Emerald City was its strangeness
And opulence: houses carved from green marble,
Green jewels and street lamps, green inhabitants,
A single color dominating all the eye could see:
Somnambulant’s Song
He’s there again. I can hear him before I even look. It’s been two years that I’ve walked past this man playing the same tired old tune. The notes come out his strangled trumpet like shrill screams. The only time he’s gone is when it rains. Day after day, the same people walk by with their limp pockets and empty shrugs. Most times…
Easy
The old man unlatched the gate and slipped into the fenced yard, cooing at his prey. The first two he caught easily, one under each arm. Out by the chopping block he passed one of the roosters to Jack. Jack held the struggling bird like a bellows and prayed it wouldn’t wriggle free. He watched his grandfather press a slender head between two nails on the stump and heard the chicken’s shallow hiss. A jewel-like eye twitched. The old man turned to look at Jack.
Blueblood
The sky was the color of a healing bruise when we set foot on the shivering New Jersey beach. This sunset is the only time I can remember actually watching the night take hold of the horizon. Sky murmured in indigo and maroon like the tender skin of my knees. I had slipped perching on the shore rocks the day before.
Menus
A graduation and therefore a menu. How else to memorialize a monumental event if not a meal? We’ll start with fresh figs and goat cheese canapés and we’ll adjourn over a 1995 Jurançon. That sweet and nutty nectar of my birth year. Marker of milestones. A bottle when you turn eighteen, another for your twenty-first, he said and then delivered.