guzzle XIII
balcony
collapsing, the roof rotting through,
low rent; i’ll live here as long as i can.
nowhere to turn to that isn’t the world.
the sink empty, the knives washed clean.
do you believe we were made in the image
of something who needed to make something else?
I’ll polish my eyes on red leaves, the black wind
this could be the world and
it is
sleep
lowers its oars into the singed river.
i love the word sheer, the phrase, no wonder.s
sweet rot of autumn rising from tall cosmos
a bee dead or sleeping face first in a bloom
guzzle
XV
but who wouldn’t want to be wielded by sky,
to be the night air scrubbed clean of symbols?
heart
palpitations, the ghostwritten rain.
g-d drifting up in the cup of crushed sleep.
Yves Klein called the women he smeared in blue paint
his living brushes. a gallery placard calls this female agency.
no one ever taught me g-d was a man,
but the vapour of pronouns hung everywhere
an empty shirt fills with wind on a clothesline.
i’m looking for anything to pull me through its sleeve.
guzzle XVI
isn’t uncertainty the meaning
of prayer?
think nothing of nothingness writes Hafez
pillbottles chirp on the dusty
dresser
hard rain in the maples, my sleep lathed
to stones
we dream or don’t dream
either is the mystery
the technician sets my blood in thin candles
feeds me to a lab and finds me mostly water
time disappears, but when i open
my eyes there is snow
.jpeg)
Madelaine Caritas Longman is the author of The Danger Model (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), which won the Quebec Writers’ Federation Concordia University First Book Prize and was longlisted for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in PRISM international, The Ex-Puritan, Vallum, Room, and elsewhere. In 2025, she was awarded the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Literature. She lives in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal).
