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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

Festus, Hansel & Grendel

 

I.

 

Live music

from a storm window

 

What gardens, these?

What Victorian mansions?

 

Past a memory

of Saint Paul dying

in John Doull’s Bookstore

 

What City is this what street river square?

What plan?

 

A seagull gorges on a starfish

beside the casino funhouse

arching its mouth

its neck full

of chronicles

of harbour

 

idiotic laughter drifts

from inside

 

Lo, the Citadel a skull,

a ship carrying us

inland

away from dreams

 

us beggars

us Lebanese falafel vendors

us charlatans

us strung-out mothers

us parricides

 

treading lightly

where once were landmines

hearing the steady heart-

beat of the good Town Clock

east side of our hill

Golgotha of the Maritimes

 

I stand

at the City’s highest point

locked out

 

II.

Then came all the troglodyte tribes of Supernova Scotia

to festoon’d Festus, digressive descendent

o’ George Dunk (videlicet, Lord Halifax,

sponsor to Edward Cornwallis,

1749)

— spake they,

“Behold, O Festus,

we are thy bone & thy flesh!”

 

“Nay!” saith Festus mallslayer.

“My bone & flesh are memory.”

 

The populous howled:

“In this apogee of the age of Festus

have we taken refuge in you,

our captain, as streams of water

gushed from the sun & moon,

as Park Lane married a streetlight,

fertilizing the void with kinescopic sight,

as inconceivable tattoos unfolded

in the sky over Bayer’s Lake. Now,

again, lead us across this fog of memory!

Protect us & help us & feed us!

Where have the cows gone, our cattle

that once grazed on Citadel Hill?”

 

Festus bullshithater

made this answer —

 

Zealots, I am as scared as you, blown

by the wind of the poem

to the backside of a river,

 

cowboy

on the night

of a new constellation

— so familiar

but I don’t know what it means.

When, zealots,

you set out on my journey, a caveat:

your heart is an amulet you carry

through the forest of memory.

Hold the amulet to your naked chest

or the trees will show themselves to be devils

& the owls on their branches

will speak your dossier to them.

 

Do not trade your amulet for gold

or love or hamburgers. Close your eyes —

see how it glitters?

 

John Wall Barger’s third book of poems, The Book of Festus (Palimpsest Press), was a finalist for the 2016 J.M. Abraham Poetry Award. Work appears in American Poetry Review, Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and Best of the Best Canadian Poetry. His poem, “Smog Mother,” was co-winner of the Malahat Review’s 2017 Long Poem Prize. He is currently living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is on the editorial board at Painted Bride Quarterly.

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