D.A. Lockhart : Aon

 

 

 

This inland fog dusts this day
like shadow darkens night, but
the light is ethereal, lustrous.
Traffic passes from nothing to
nothing are apparitions gliding
the sea of clouds between us.

                     Aon all the way far side of Chatham. The morning run
                     through Lakeshore pulls the humid edges of Souwesto’s
                     dirty south. Time itself has shifted in the manner that
                     assembly lines grind our days into individual pockets
                     of freedom myths bought on extended credit. Late stage
                     fall adles the earth between bronzes, golds, coppers.
                     And a gauze of water in the sky singly refutes all attempts
                     at motion. Light finds ways to attached to the sweep
                     of turbine blades, the naked branches of distant wood lots.

                               and the
                            distant folding
                                         of black
                               speckled startlings
                               above

                               

 

                                                              Michigan
                                                          Bound        rigs

                               transmutes from smoke burst to vibrant life
                     resolving                                                  to motion
                     in the sky                                               the adheres
                     to MacDonald                                                 Cartier Freeway.

 

 

 

 

 

D.A. Lockhart is the author of multiple collections of poetry and short fiction. His work has been shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award, Indiana Author’s Awards, First Nations Communities READ Award, and has been a finalist for the Trillium Book and ReLit Awards. His work has appeared widely throughout Turtle Island including, The Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, TriQuarterly, The Fiddlehead, ARC Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry, Best New Poetry from the Midwest, and Belt. Along the way his work has garnered numerous Pushcart Prize nominations, National Magazine Award nominations, and Best of the Net nominations. He is pùkuwànkoamimëns of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation. Lockhart currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong where he is the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press.

D.A. Lockhart : Three poems

Pigeon Medicine Dance Through Tunnel Plaza

          after Eminem’s “Without Me”

When I arrive know that it shall come with cursing and chest pounding gestures of primate dominance. Crossing this medicine line, tucked as it is beneath the upward glass claws of the Renaissance Center, is a ritual that amounts to calling intents in small distances. Inch the car forward, towards the barrier arm and booth border. This process the very outcome our great-great-great-grandparents warned would arrive because another blowhard chief willfully traded everything for a glorified QVC pitch about freedom and unending sunshine on the land. Nine cars deep of antsy lane watching, radio scans, and checklist of half truths prepared for an officer in uniform protecting families from families.  Feel the tension soon as someone mentions me. Pale skin Indians with a mouth as free as departed ancestors the tension that would start with a slow roll up, window down, and invitation. Here's my ten cents, my two cents is free .A nuisance, who sent, you sent for me? Ford Escape before me moves ahead to booth under a chorus of pigeon coos. From overhang, mottled pigeon flutters to ground before my car. Three head bobs it proclaims, I said, this looks like a job for me. So everybody just follow me.

          Border barrier arm

          sways in wind, Pigeon lands

          struts past booth.

They Shall Know Us By Our Motion

          after Jr Jr.s “If You Didn’t See Me (Then You Weren’t on the Dance Floor)”

When the ancestors fled Lenapehoking they hauled our relations bones across the mountains and brought them to dance before in the Big House on the new territories. Taken out at least once per year, they would return in shared dance from the great white way. You are supposed to surrender to the bass. You are supposed to blend into this place. Think of these moves as she strikes the forms new eddies and currents atop the Cobo Hall rooftop garage. This her homeland, this the air, winter earth she and her ancestors pull their movements from. Her eyes on me now that says you aren’t there for the noise. But these moves and the welcome that comes on in the earnest moments between and you hear in her gestures that you are supposed to pull her like the sun pulls the earth. Dance with her in those rooftop parking lot. Understand that the river flows and traffic moves clear and lonely down Atwater past the shell of an old hockey arena. And up here, it’s all views, and the white hush of persistent wind. And her dancing into the rush and noise of it all. You should know by now that we are just gonna keep on moving on.

                     Orange monorail car

          floats past Joe Louis skeleton.

          iron spine frames passage.

Engine Block Love at All Night Coney Island

          after the Detroit Cobra’s “Hittin’ on Nothing”

Before us, a city that approaches creation with engine block love. Each of its movements the result of metal on metal collisions, each with growing entropic heat, brattles in, releases in Ford Avenue traffic. Late night parade of taillights between suburban tavern stops, late night pot dealer runs, and the hot clumsiness of dark bedrooms with the right type of strangers. This the back story to the Bell’s Two-Hearted fueled moves I make on the improbable brunette with the cardinal arm sleeve. She answers my moves with a look that speaks to third law  thermodynamics and the soft way strong women answer “you can keep your sweet talk.” National Coney Island dinner stools our post-bar early morning anchors to a world that shall move behind closed eyelids. Two plates of coney detritus and in the glimmer of food cooled blood, I can hear in a cockeyed smile and arched back tease, you ain’t hittin on nothing unless you got something for me.

                     Pies orbit around

                     fluorescent light tubes. Two

          sugar pie slices, removed.

D.A. Lockhart is the author Devil in the Woods (Brick Books, 2019), Wenchikaneit Visions (Black Moss Press, 2019), and Breaking Right (Porcupine's Quill, 2020). His work has appeared widely throughout Turtle Island including Best Canadian Poetry 2019, The Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, TriQuarterly, The Fiddlehead, and Belt. He is pùkuwànkoamimëns of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation. Lockhart currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong where he is the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press.

D.A. Lockhart : The Algonquin Park Experiments, by Brittany Renaud

The Algonquin Park Experiments, by Brittany Renaud

845 Press Chapbooks, 2019

There was a time, decades ago, that I lived close enough to Algonquin Park and that near north of Ontario that I would often find myself slipping up the highways past Bancroft, past Maynooth to that great wild place that seems to rest at the centre of Ontario’s notions of itself. And it was as glorious and breathtaking as the best A.Y. Jackson or JEH MacDonald painting, but it was also mundane, infuriating, and full of the humour and pleasure of being loose in the world. I suppose if one were to experiment with the physical place that is Algonquin Park and do so in the form of poetry, one would only be successful in doing so by encapsulating all of that in words. And this is precisely London-based writer Brittany Renaud accomplishes in this deeply experiential poetry chapbook.

          I say that the work is experiential in that Renaud utilizes the truly everyday aspects of our speech and writing acts to craft an ongoing engagement with the physical place of Algonquin. These pieces come in the form transcribed snippets of conversations, receipts from travel, lists, and notes. Take for example “Camping by the Numbers 2016,” in which the speaker lists dates, times, prices and items in transaction lists that while odd in first light give way to an arching narrative of a voyage. The reader revisits this camping trip in the very familiar fashion that often follows campers or travelers around for years. This is the receipt trail we often carry with us. Each one of them glimmers to the experiences around those transactions. 

           Make no mistake that these are not just simply found poems, but rather wonderfully constructed engagements with their subject material. We as readers are brought through their familiarity to the experience of an act visit and trip through the park. Yet the strength and reliability afforded to the collection of these foundish poem moments opens up a seeming veracity of more sustained prose sections such as “It Was a Dark and Scary Night.” Here we witness the absurd violence that Canadians often hint at existing in the woods. With flesh hungry trees and flamethrower toting park rangers, the exercises reads as possible, somewhat horrifying, The form here does mirror the campside joke and story telling experienced in campfires. And in the end we are left with the hazy sense that even most absurd could be real because it was spoken into the world.

          In its experiential and rooted nature I see much in common between Renaud’s work here and the great American nature poets of Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. All three of these writers take us along on their voyage into the world outside our towns and cities. Although Renaud’s work does not follow into the romantic vistas of zen infused nature of her American counterparts, there is an openness to her work that lets the experience of it all to filter in between what is being shared and who is receiving it. In this way the work provides for the same sort of meditative space that the physical space of Algonquin affords all so many of her visitors. And in this, I would say that you would be remiss if did not spend time with this work by emerging Souwesto wordsmith.   

D.A. Lockhart is the author Devil in the Woods (Brick Books, 2019), Wenchikaneit Visions (Black Moss Press, 2019), and Breaking Right (Porcupine's Quill, 2020). His work has appeared widely throughout Turtle Island including Best Canadian Poetry 2019, The Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, TriQuarterly, The Fiddlehead, and Belt. He is pùkuwànkoamimëns of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation. Lockhart currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong where he is the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press.