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From the archives

Object Lessons

Lisa Alward’s debut collection

The Other Side of “Irish Eyes”

Brian Mulroney abroad and at home

But Is It Trash?

Evaluating art in the age of conspicuous consumption

There’s No Such Thing As Blue Water

 

I’ve been thinking that montage is a mental technique

for accepting unity as a convulsive illusion. I feel sick.

I hate it when my stories have holes, though I suspect

there’s where the truth leaks out. So go back to bed.

Maybe it’s laziness, maybe the delivery system is flawed.

If life is a movie, then I’ve spent years sneaking out

for smoke breaks between takes. I do violence to myself.

I imagine the ones I love dead in their favourite chairs,

dead in distant car crashes. Who are those girls who wear

lipstick to watch TV? The women I know go shut-in,

sleep in their clothes for days in a row. A self-help author

revealed to me with great confidence that life is swinging

from branch to branch in a fog. And I thought of course

he’s right, of course, he’s wrong. Let’s say we are always

at Point A. From space, the ocean is only a mirror.

 

Damian Rogers is the poetry editor at House of Anansi Press and the creative director of Poetry in Voice/Les voix de la poésie, a recitation contest for high school students in Canada. She is the author of Paper Radio (ECW Press, 2009) and the forthcoming collection Dear Leader (Coach House Press, 2015).

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