Sophie Klahr : Maps

 

 

The story of a young man who walked through the world sleeping. People would come at all hours of the night for the young man they called Buddha, hollering his name from the sidewalk. On one side of his place was ours, and on the other, two black hole rowhouses that spat out teenagers then swallowed them up again. A heavy woman with stringy hair and close-set eyes seemed to keep watch over the brood, but it was hard to imagine her mother to them all. In sun or sleet or snow, one scrawny boy with a shadow-mustache walked a grey pit bill mix, and when the dog shit on the bricked sidewalk, the boy ignored it, he and the dog equally ill-kempt, their eyes and mouths drooping like caricatures, boy and dog each always scratching some scabbing scrape or cut. A girl no more than twelve wandered the street on balmy days, wearing a helmet, sometimes riding a bicycle like a lazy fly, asking at houses containing children—could so-&-so come out and play. She lingered on stoops and curbs, sometimes simply standing in the middle of our cramped street, staring at our other neighbors coming and going, standing too close to their parking or leaving cars as if waiting for an invitation. There was a day when, arriving home, I gave her an empty notebook from the back of my car, silently congratulating myself for the impulsive benevolence. What should I do with this, she asked, and I suggested drawing a picture, maybe drawing flowers, it being spring and all. Hours later she rang our doorbell, reciting that her mother had directed her to bring the notebook back. In our rowhouse, my fiancé and I had papered one entire side of a hallway with maps, and when we broke up, I tore them all down, to shreds. Even though I was the one who had broken us. True story.

 

 

 

 

 

Sophie Klahr is the author of Driftwood (Gasher Press, 2027) and a number of other chapbooks & books. Her writing may be found in The New Yorker and elsewhere. sophieklahr.com

Shelagh Rowan-Legg : On Writing Co—Star and Response

 

 

 

 

My parents had a subscription to The Globe & Mail, and as a tween, I would regularly check my horoscope. I’m not sure how much I believed it at the time; perhaps too much, as I tried to convince myself of its veracity and explanation why I was a strange child without many friends; I was a Cancer, and therefore a homebody, like a crab, moving sideways away from people. Except that I wasn’t, and over time, I realized the limitations of such predictions. There are too many factors over which we have no control, too many variables in our lives to think that the alignment of stars and planets at the minute we are born are a template set in stone.

So it took a few glances at the Co—Star app before I paid attention. Yes, it asked for your birthday, location, and time to send its daily words of wisdom and do’s and don’ts. But its odd phrasing and its what felt like more left-field advice was less to do with any adherence to a chart and more to make you think about your life, or a moment in your time, differently. Over the course of several months, I wrote down some of the single-sentences of advice that would pop up on my lock screen, ones that felt like prompts, and wrote a series of poems. Each was phrased as an instruction, or a reminder; a plea, or a compliment. Perhaps that was just my interpretation, so depending on what each would make me think of, the poem would either be in the first or the second person. That second person might be me, or it might be the reader.

Part story, part meditation, part advice column. To myself of the past and the future, to anyone who might take something from it. 

 

 

 

 

Shelagh Rowan-Legg is a writer and filmmaker in Montréal. Her poetry and short stories have been published in numerous journals such as The Windsor Review, The Ampersand Review, and New Poetry. Her chapbook CO—STAR & RESPONSE is newly out from above/ground press. Her short films have screened at festivals around the world, and she is a Contributing Editor at ScreenAnarchy. Find her at shelaghrowanlegg.com and on Bluesky, @shelaghrowanlegg.northsky.social.

Adriana Oniță : How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

 

A poem begins în suflet, in the soul, sunt sigură. Poi, “da cosa nasce cosa,” as Bruno Munari said. One thing gives birth to the next—a smell, o amintire, a feeling, another beginning…

I’m drawn to François Jacqmin’s idea that “dès que le poème est fait, je me rends compte qu'il y a, à l'intérieur de ce poème qui est terminé, un autre poème qui est à faire”—as soon as the poem is finished, I realize that within this completed poem, there is another poem waiting to be written.

There’s an echo here with Farah Ghafoor’s thought that “the most enjoyable poems begin, I believe, in other poems,” and with Misha Solomon’s sense that “a poem for me is an ending followed by a beginning. There’s a freedom in that reversal: something that’s over before it begins never needs to end.”

So poems begin in poems, which begin in the soul.

But from a practical, pen-on-paper perspective, I’ve had to learn new ways of beginning a poem since becoming a mother. I used to start—or re-start—my writing with long solitary photo-walks, makeshift afternoon desks in the middle of the forest or the city, spontaneous sketching sessions, or workshops with other writers.

Now, I write with my feet while chasing my son. I compose in the quaderno of my mind while breastfeeding him to sleep. I transcribe the day’s thoughts with a voice note to myself at 2:00am in a fit of “revenge bedtime procrastination.” 

I begin with frantic lists. I write about not starting any poem. A recent poem of mine is called “De ce n-am scris azi?” (Why didn’t I write today?), a catalogue of everything I did instead. Another poem, “obiceiuri și formule” (habits and formulas), is essentially a checklist of what actually leads me to write and what does not. For instance, after I translate or draw, I almost always want to write; but after I curate or coordinate, I don’t write for weeks. 

Even the language I begin to write in has changed. I now write more poems in my mother tongue of Romanian. It’s not my dominant language by far; it’s actually my weakest, but I am trying my best to teach it to my son, so writing helps me.

Beginning to write in Romanian pulls me toward rhyme (a choice contemporary poets in English tend to scorn, for reasons I haven’t yet understood), toward surrealism, and toward the old proverbs that shaped my childhood. I test each line out loud, waiting to see if the rhythm sparks my son’s curious carita de wonder. His laughter is the truest measure I have. A recent brief poem of mine goes: “mama umblă danga-langa / mama umblă teleleu / pe cărări de vis se plimbă / cu gândul zburând mereu.”

This poem is about a mother who wanders aimlessly, roaming through dream paths with her thoughts flying everywhere. I love it because (I realize now) it holds both the writer I was before Rafael—roaming around Edmonton in search of a brief outdoor desk to write or draw at—and the writer I am now, wandering with him through different cities, and through dream paths when I can no longer take my long solitary walks.

 

 

 

Adriana Oniță [photo credit: Shawna Lemay] is a poet, artist, educator, editor, translator, and researcher with a PhD in arts-based language education. She writes and teaches in English, Romanian, Spanish, French, and Italian. She is the author of Descântec For My Split Tongue (Palimpsest Press / Anstruther Books, 2026), Trace Amounts (Agatha Press, 2026), Misremembered Proverbs (above/ground press, 2023) and Conjugated Light (Glass Buffalo, 2019). Her multilingual poems also appear in CBC Books, The Globe and Mail, The Ex-Puritan, Canthius, and Tint Journal. As founder of The Polyglot, she is proud to have published more than 250 writers, translators, and artists working in over 60 languages. She is the editorial director at the Griffin Poetry Prize and lives between Edmonton and Italy. Discover her work at adrianaonita.com.