Conversations with the Cyclops: Needlework

Even this, simplest of womanly tasks,
eludes me: the union of button and shirt,
needle and thread. I can manage
an embroidery needle, wide-eyed, and thread stiff
with spit to ease it through the signatures
of a book-block, but not the finer work
of cotton. This is the kind of skill you need
in this climate; to survive
you need buttons that stick,
useful skills, a collection of sharp instruments
on a handy shelf
in case you are surprised at home
by a giant roaring through your keyhole
or a man, far from home,
cuffs trailing threads, and a pointed look
when he catches your eye.

Hello!

Hello May Day-ers! I am very pleased to be participating with you.

This is my first year doing the May Day blog. I'm Marika Prokosh, and I've just finished my English BA at the University of Winnipeg. I'm moving to Montreal to do my Masters in Library and Information Studies in August, so you may well be seeing some bookish/moving-related poems from me.

For the past year my main writing project has been a cycle of poems about writing and blindness loosely based on the Cyclops episode from Homer's Odyssey. I'm legally blind, and the cycle is a way for me to articulate the unsaid things about that experience through the Cyclops metaphor. I hadn't planned on blogging them for May Day because they tend to be slow coming and hard to manage, but wouldn't you know, one came today. I don't have any other thematic plans for the rest of the month, but I'm hoping to manage three poems a week. We'll see how it goes!

Hi everyone,

Glad to be back at MayDay this year! For those of you who took part last year, the boxing poems I was working on then are now part of a book that will be released from Anvil this fall. Since I'll be working on editing for that project, I don't expect my output here will be as steady as in years past, but I'll do my best. No particular goals this year, but looking forward to all the reading and writing. Happy times!

Nick’s Inn Good Food


Chocolate milkshake frostfroth
licks the lip of a skyscraper-tall glass
the waitress sets in front of you
(And beside it: a sweating metal cup
that holds the melty rest)

Just like when you’d come here as a kid,
meet your country grandparents –
a Sunday dinner compromise
between farm and city
And I’ve never seen a photo of her
but I imagine your grandmother’s
pale cotton dresses, sturdy purse

We came here too (short drive
from suburbs to outskirts)
bundled into the station wagon
with my sullen sisters
for burgers buried in chili
and my Grandad cracking jokes
with Nick in the kitchen
And grade 6 June,
my broken arm itching in its cast,
just me and my Mom and she said OK
to fries and a milkshake for lunch
But the salt wasn’t as sharp, the shake
not as sweet, withouth the thrill
of guarding plate, straw,
from pilfered bites and sips

Now I sneak fries off your plate
and you swat at me with the greasy fingers,
fierce irritation, of a ten-year-old,
the youngest sibling – defending, defining –
that we both become here

sapphire

J, the camas are in bloom;

mid-Spring bulbs fat, white,

burrow the black earth,

your home of tall Douglas fir

Arbutus groves, red strawberry bark

peeling renewal, a fleshing;

there are stars in long grass

the camas flocked

blue, blue as sapphires of KAF

blue blue as Afghan sky in May

blue blue as her body waiting

for you to come home to her

alive.

Neighbours

It's easy to think
we all want quiet,
we all want peace,
we all want to sink
into that soft bed
for hours, days
even before light has left
the sky for the night.

But it turns out
some of us want noise,
the clash of steel on wood.
Some of us want music,
shaking bodies windows streets.
Some of us want beer,
in cans bottles kegs.
Some of us want laughter,
echoing down the block.
Some of us want magic,
a certainly flow that only comes
deep in the night as we
stay awake until dawn.

Lynette

So cancer found me kneeling by the bed
of roses in my garden - I work hard
to raise 'em just like children. Damn, you bet
I know the meaning of invasion. Yards
and families need a fence around them. So
I guard the borders, watch the exits, keep
a detailed list of things I can't control.
My Tom, he's such a softy, starts to weep
in chemo, just like when the twins were born.
As if this body were unused to wear
and tear! True beauty's baggy, loose, well-worn
with years of wash: I know. I've done my share
of laundry, felt the heat of love's machine,
the steady thump of all that's good and clean.

In the house, green walls

Hello fellow poets.

I'm pleased to meet you all, mediated though we are by the internet. Hopefully in time I will have the pleasure of meeting each of you in person.

I have just moved into a new house here in Winnipeg, and am going to be taking the month of May off from all other writing projects in order to sink poetically into my new home. I will post as often as possible, and look forward to reading any comments you might have.

A bit about me... Just ten days ago I launched my first book of poems, titled To Speak. It was a good experience overall, though far more difficult than I expected. Ever since completing in The Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser University in 2005, I have been working toward having a book published. Now that that is done, I am trying to adjust to a new relationship with writing. I hope this month will serve to re-root me in a poetic frame of mind.

thanks for having me,
Michelle.

Hello

Hello from Vancouver. I'm Regan, I finished an MFA at UBC over two years ago, and I have been having trouble finding the time and/or the will to write anything new since I finished that up. I have luck publishing in the little mags from time to time, and I'm now working toward a manuscript civilised enough to take out on the town. (Getting there... )

I've been here for a few of the previous outings, and while I don't post often or comment extensively, I've always managed to get something good out of the process. At the very least, reading everyone else's new work is wonderfully motivating. I'm aiming for one poem a week, and I have no qualms posting fragments. Looking forward to seeing what everyone's got.

Northcote

Wednesday, 22nd April. Left Swift Current at 8 this morning and reached the river at 8 this evening, having halted about two and a half hours for dinner and tea. The trail was in splended condition for marching, but we are all pretty tired and a few of us used up...We boarded the steamer Northcote immediately...We are very crowded and have none too much comfort...Cartwright and I sleep on the snow among the oat sacks with which it is loaded

Dearest: read between the lines,
I am used up and have not seen battle.

We still take time for tea.

The flatness of this place surprised
gave rise to swells like the curves of a woman
now we rest in her valley, swimming upward
to our reward

There is no sight of the enemy.

I sleep on frozen oat sacks and dream of home.
Awaken stiff to find the landscape scarcely
changed. All is flat, even this boat; the paddle
wheel spins and empties hours
and minutes from narrow shelves.

So my life
may be poured out yet, but my greatest complaint
is this: Cartwright snores.

* * *
Duck Lake, a survivor

Since Assiyiwin was shot down, then Isidore
je n'ai pas le coeur
for this war

To shoot a blind Elder with
a white flag, extending his arm
in peace: there is death, and there's dishonour.

These two await us all. Riel rode, praying;
Laframboise went down beside him.
Gabriel's scalp grazed, him still shouting orders.

It was my idea. I told Gabriel
we should empty
the hostile merchant larders.

Bloggorous Joy of Poemeticals

Thanks to Ariel for this; I am andie and was here last year, and it was a Very Good Thing. I wrote and commented most days.

I'm well west of Winnipeg but well east of Calgary, and look forward to May.

I have my suspicions on what my poems will be focussing on, and I hope to hear some good news about this project in May; but in case I veer off course (or the news is bad or, worse yet, missing until June) I won't bother saying more.

I probably won't write a lot about: interplanetary communication, tennis rackets, radish stems, or foot fetishes.

But that's only a guess.

I look forward to Mayday, m'aider; and new & old poetic friends.

My body covets
desire — tempts eyes
that travel down plunging
necklines, sweeps across
a skirt’s hem.
Cock-tease, I think,
yet change nothing.
I could look dowdy,
wear matronly elasticized pants
with box-shaped tops.
I am a mother, after all,
yet refuse to cut my hair
in the mandatory mom-bob.
I wear blouses pulled tight
across breasts, shine my lips
with strawberry gloss
meant for girls half my age.

May Day Salute!

Hello fellow poets,

I will be posting poems in a random way from a new collection I am working on. I have yet to get my first collection published, but onward as they say. Looking forward to reading your comments.

Dawn

Hooray hooray for the first of May!

Hello all! One of the inaugural May Day-ers, I've participated in four of the five previous rounds and am ever so happy to be making space for poetry this year after far too long away. Thanks Ariel for pulling this together again.

My creative efforts these days are given mainly to helping others tell their stories (in the media of film and television) so it will be invigorating/challenging to give myself a chance to tell my own short unevenly spaced stories again.

I look forward to reading your creations!

Hello

Hello everyone! Some of you I know; some of you I don't. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Ian LeTourneau. I currently live in Athabasca, AB, with my wife Sherry Coffey and my son Wyatt, but I'll be moving mid-month to Fredericton, NB. I teach English Composition at Athabasca University. My first book, Terminal Moraine, came out with Thistledown in 2008. Before that Gaspereau Press published a chapbook Defining Range. I'm working on a new manuscript right now, called Interregnum, which is almost done except for the title poem, a long poem that will be the centrepiece of the book. So I hope to post a few times a week with drafts. And I look forward to reading all your work and commenting. Happy writing!

Right now I'm reading Jim Harrison's memoir Off to the Side: it's a fascinating, well-written book.

hurray for may!

hey poets,

just a little note to say how pleased i am to be here! my plan is to use this space as a daily exercise in mandatory productivity. most of my poems will likely come from a new series i'm working on that focuses on the lives of the main characters in ABC's Desperate Housewives. yes, you read that right, Desperate Housewives! so unless i get sick of traipsing through the online archive of DH (unlikely), ya'll will see a lot of the women of Wysteria Lane.

a little bit about me...i am one spanish class away from finishing my BA in english lit. this fall i will be moving to the Tdot to become a master of english literature at the UofT. my poetry has recently appeared in CV2 and is forthcoming in Room Magazine. when i'm not watching, or writing poems about Desperate Housewives, i'll be studying spanish and/or working on my novel-in-progress, which, unfortunately does not take place in spain or any other spanish-speaking country.

Salut ]

The year between has found my creativity in need of different borders. I have had to sacrifice art for life if that makes sense (I’m not at all sure that it does, really.). And so my spirit is dry of, and starving for, ImagInatIon juice.

Here I am then, back at the page for my third May Day, hoping for a flood!

Vous pouvez m’aider, chers ami(e)s?

O May O May Day O May

I thought I was done. but here I write. again.

letters. letters. letters. to you.

o flight over red desert. o shiny white sun.

o black Kuchi tents.

o dust devils beneath my whirly bird.

o recce sitting so gorgeous

on the end of my bed

helping strap my helmet, my frag,

my ballistics on.

urging me to fly deep into country,

he'd just strolled in from.

deep into you, beloved,

o blue fault, o folded earth,

Afghanistan.

May Day-ing Again

Hey all,

I'm sorry that I've been so slow in getting going this year. But I'm here now and apparently we're all meant to write/post starting tomorrow...heh.

It should go without saying that I look forward to our fleeing little community, now that we're six years in.

But to those of you returning this year, welcome back! And to those poets joining May Day for the first time, double and triple welcome!

My writing/posting goal for this month is 3/4 poems a week. Said goal might be jettisoned when I launch my book next week. Or when I'm at the Canadian Mennonite University the week after that, doing the poetry section of their School of Writing with Barbara Nickel.

But I'm oh so glad to be back here. I've got a manuscript I need to jumpstart after months and months away...

For those of you not already firmly acquainted, here's my official bio:

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg-based writer whose poetry has recently appeared in print, on-line, and even circulated on buses in Manitoba and Alberta. She recently won the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer at the 2010 Manitoba Book Awards. Hump (Palimpsest Press, 2010), her first full collection of poetry, will be launched May 5 at McNally Robinson Booksellers.

I'm looking forward to finding a voice for the events of this past year. Writing has stalled completly and cancer has swept my family like an invasion. One sister dead and two of us left without a kidney. Two sisters spared. All on high alert. Life is trying to declare it's fragility and uncertainty. Poetry remains.