Gary Barwin is a writer, musician and multimedia artist from Hamilton. His New & Selected Poems edited by Alessandro Porco will appear next year from Wolsak & Wynn.
Three Poems
Genre: Poetry
I Feel So Uneasy About
I feel so uneasy about the wind, my dress & the thighs poking from it, my hunger, how I look from behind, the sounds my shoes make even on carpet & carpeting, strangers, old friends, the stench of wilting flowers, cobblestone, the bars on city benches so that persons experiencing homelessness are unable to rest on them, rest, America, America, having children someday & childbirth, not having children someday & loneliness…
Safety in numbers
This place is out of reach. This case is minus two dollars and cents.
Windchill neg forty: raw blast force through bus hut for bodies. No
ticket. No wicket. No keypad. No quick mart. But car park. But rapid…
Bow
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.
Submarine Reflection
Rasiqra Revulva is a queer femme writer, multi-media artist, editor, musician, performer, and friend to cats. She is currently developing her debut chapbook of poetry and glitch art, “Cephalopography” (words(on)pages press, 2016), into a full-length collection acquired by Wolsak and Wynn’s Buckrider Books imprint for publication in spring of 2020.
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: