folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets
Deluge
After
the first sentence, the following,
abrupt
stumble into mediocrity, thickening
plot,
exposition, then refraction,
lava
lamp, disco ball, then the phone number
of
the most beautiful woman
I ever,
the way her hand
Later
that weekend, Ellen describes
an
art exhibit in Venice, irradiated
yellow,
factoried conceptions, wheat,
semen,
a deluge of film; performs poetry
to
re-explain, taps a chunk of mottled wood,
percussive,
bark still on, a doorway
something opens, closes
I wish we had
Please hold
There is no bus to the Amazon
warehouse; you
have to be this independently wealthy
to get there,
can’t need a minimum wage job hunting
through miles of celebrity-endorsed
football jerseys,
polka-dot dog waste bags, cartoon
clocks, melamine
dinnerware, “Condoms prevent minivans”
decals
An implosion of billionaires squeezes
through the eye of a needle. Don’t
tell me the Earth has no sense of
humour;
she is laughing herself to death in the
parking lot,
each hacking plastic cough a forest
churning
grain into landfill, a distant square
of weedless Kentucky blue grass shining
on her horizon, luring consumers home
When I was in school, they told us the
answer
was to reduce the number of Africans
and Asians,
when what they meant was to decant
others’ resources
into European and North American
pockets.
As I write these words, my phone rings,
“You are
receiving this call from Amazon
customer service”
and I am not. This is another scam. But
please hold while
the revolution is coming. Just wait for
it. Wait.
At the moment, what I am working on is finding the lines, where to erase, bend, reinforce, in this cumulative life: the lines within poems, between poetry and fiction, between creating art and the art of creating space for others, between building infrastructure to keep community safe and learning when safety comes better from tearing down our barriers. I doubt I can figure it out, but, like with so much, it is the process that is the education.
AJ Dolman’s (they/she) debut poetry collection is Crazy / Mad (Gordon Hill Press, 2024). They previously authored Lost Enough: A collection of short stories (MRP, 2017), and three poetry chapbooks, and co-edited Motherhood in Precarious Times (Demeter Press, 2018). Dolman’s poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. A bi/pan+ rights advocate and founder of Bi+ Canada, they live on unceded, unsurrendered Anishinaabe Algonquin territory.
