Kim Fahner : The Widow’s Crayon Box, by Molly Peacock

The Widow’s Crayon Box, Molly Peacock
Norton, 2025

 

 

 

The Widow’s Crayon Box is Molly Peacock’s eighth book of poetry, and one that speaks to the way in which a person grieves a spouse. Historically, traditionally, black has been the colour of mourning, but Peacock begins this collection by drawing on all the colours in a large Crayola box, not the “eight child-colors of crayon boxes” which are “far too basic and behaved” for the “emotional shades” needed to best describe the depth of great love and loss.

There are four parts in this collection—"After,” “Before,” “When,” and “Afterglow.” Peacock begins after her husband’s death, documenting the ways in which grief often unexpectedly arrives, writing, “After you died, I felt you next to me,/and over months you entered gradually/into that lake and disappeared…you’re done being you, and my loneliness is so extreme/that I feel moved by almost everything.” She writes of “memory water” and “the widow cloud,” invoking the power of scent that remains on the clean shirt that “emanates a mix/of perspiration, cancer drugs, and mint—/the Dr. Bronner’s soap you showered with.” She also references the rainbow of colours and designs of “thirty-eight pairs of socks” that are put out on a table, “once paired with Asics, now part of your myth.” In witnessing what’s been left behind, to begin, the speaker begins to build a new world for herself, knowing that she has no choice but to continue.

The architecture of the book works as Peacock’s poems move from present to past and back to present again. After the caretaking, the section that speaks to death, “When,” carefully cradles four intimate and heart wrenching poems. Then, with “Afterglow,” the poet moves into a reconstruction of life for the spouse who remains. In poems like “The Afterglow,” Peacock writes: “I miss our wordlessness/The brief touch of the hand/Like a whisper, midback//Now I live in the afterglow/Purple and peach streaks/Behind the near-night clouds//But getting used to twilight.” Upon her husband’s death, she “got up afterwards/You lying there alone/I stumbling out alone.” In “Organic Sadness, Compost Style,” using the beauty of anaphora to create a strong echo in the reader’s mind, the poet writes of how sadness surges after loss: “Like music shredding, no shedding, its notes,” and “Like a lush everything into every other thing.” There is no escaping the loneliness of grief.

Loneliness is a subject that so many avoid speaking or writing about, but Peacock embraces her dance with it, accepting that loneliness does not mean an end, but rather an assurance that someone was loved, that two people shared a deep love for many years. She describes loneliness as an abscess, or maybe “a line of infection/from a poison bite up an arm” that’s coloured in purple. It marks, as she writes in “The Realization,” coming to the final realization that “my lifelong friend is gone.” 

Anyone who has been a caretaker to a loved one before they died will find this collection resonates. Peacock doesn’t shy away from what documenting what it’s like to care for someone’s failing health while trying to mind one’s own mental and physical health at the same time. In “Petting My Husband’s Head in my Lap,” the poet begins by writing: “When I am so ill, I hope I can be/as soft as you are.” In “Notes from Sick Rooms,” a sonnet corona, Peacock speaks truthfully when she asks the reader: “Who really wants to be a caregiver?” This is an honest question, as most who have been caretakers will relate when she writes “But I hated giving what I barely had away./Losing myself in the tunnel of need,/down the gravityless jumble of trays,/cups, pills, towels.” The work of a caregiver is about how “love and illness mixed,” and how “a caregiver really is a mother,” whether they are biological mothers or not. Peacock continues, “How exhausting it is to mix the roles up./Couldn’t I ever just be a lover?” Anyone who caregives becomes a sort of parent to whomever they are caring for at the time, regardless of the type of relationship that might initially bind the two people. The balance of the original relationship is so often upended by how to care for the ill person as they face death.

Love poems like “In the Mood” and “Sex After Seventy” are reminders to live in the moment, to take pleasure in the shared moments. The poet writes: “Once it was clear that we could die,/we thought: Let’s make the end sweet.” There is yoga, squats, dinner, and then a dance to “In the Mood,” leading to “the bed! We reach for one another…If we can choose our end, we choose it this way.” In “Sex After Seventy,” the poem begins, “After we cleaned out our closets/we started on our sex lives…& met/as a long surprise of a spring afternoon arrived/through the threshold of the closet/on a spare bed we’d been saving all our lives.” What strikes the reader, when reading this collection, is that all the poems are woven into one another. Memory plays a key role, but the present nudges in to remind the reader that, while they can reminisce, they must also always move forward.

In the final poems of The Widow’s Crayon Box, Molly Peacock writes about the nature of the soul, the power of vivid dreaming, the beauty and strength of a long-lived love, and the passage of time as we grieve a great and close loss. The lessons she recollects, from her time as friend, lover, spouse, caregiver, and widow are poignant ones. In a world that all too often turns its head away from grief, this collection serves as a powerful reminder that it is all part of life, and that love continues to weave itself into the lives of those who are left behind.   

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her newest book, a novel, is The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). Her next book of poems, The Pollination Field, will be published by Turnstone Press in 2025. She recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. As well, Kim was named as a finalist for the 2023 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize. She is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. She may be reached via her website at http://www.kimfahner.com

Process Note #57 : Rachel Richardson

The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Rachel Richardson are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Dominican University. Thanks for reading.

 

Process Note by Rachel Richardson, Smother (Norton, February 2025)

 

“JDM automatically rejects any poem with the word ‘mother’ in it.”

Those were the words I had written in my notebook. I had been taking notes, like the diligent aspiring poet I was, at a publishing panel at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. One of the editors, J. D. McClatchy, of the storied Yale Review, had answered the audience question of whether there was anything he hated to receive in his submissions pile. Mother poems, he said, immediately and with glee. Anything with the word “mother” in it!

The year was 2009, and I had not yet become a mother, so I probably laughed in surprise, maybe felt slightly miffed on behalf of my gender, but didn’t think much more about his comment. I wouldn’t send him poems about my mom, then. Okay. Good to know. But the comment never quite left me because of its shrouded lesson that I hadn’t decoded: What was so automatically awful about a poem with a mother in it?

I dug up that notebook in 2020, ten years into motherhood, when I felt absolutely blocked from writing. The pandemic raged, so there was suddenly time to sort through all my years of thinking about poems. I went back, tracing my early education in the art, all the advice I’d taken in from poetry teachers and guides. I had never really followed McClatchy’s rule: once I became a mother there seemed no way to exclude this identity from my writing. My life was my material, and I saw the world from the position I occupied. But I didn’t proclaim it too loudly, either. The pressure between my artistic life and my parenting life was a source of burning frustration.

In McClatchy’s mind, I could now see, a mother poem was a sentimental poem. Whether the speaker was the child or the mother, if motherhood was invoked it became a poem of adoration and nurturing—or maybe resentment!—but never complexity of feeling, never surprise in the images. McClatchy (and many others, I now knew) thought that motherhood was a simplistic idea.

But wasn’t motherhood the site of all the most interesting conflicts? I loved my kids, but I wanted to run away to the forest. In motherhood I had found my most empathetic and most brutal selves, and they often asserted their claims in my body at the same time.

My book, Smother, began to be a book then. I had been writing about my life, but mostly I had tried to focus the lens outward: I told others I was writing a book about technology and wildfire. I finally realized I would have to bring myself in, and use McClatchy’s statement as fuel, not as a map of the landmines to avoid. Who else had written about motherhood? I was going to write the most mother-ful poem imaginable.

I have never had so much fun in an assignment—I collected dozens of poems about mothers, and eventually collaged many of them into a cento. Just the act of compiling all of this art made me feel I had gathered my people, and now I could see I had the bigger and more talented cast. I had Zbigniew Herbert, Robert Duncan, Sharon Olds, Saeed Jones. I had Louise Glück! Lucille Clifton! Sylvia Plath! Dismiss me, fine, but who could dismiss them?

At some point in this process I realized that I was writing with, and for, people who were interested in the real complex lives we could write from, rather than trying to gain approval from those who would assess my poems based on some external and likely patriarchal criterion for entry. I stopped thinking of my audience as a vague and judgmental general public, and suddenly I had a lot to say. I started writing poems directly to my women friends, calling them by name. I started invoking my poetry forebears—Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, C. D. Wright, and more—claiming a place in a conversation I wanted to join.

I let McClatchy’s words be the epigraph to my book, in which I wrote the word “mother”—I’ve just counted—23 times.

Links:

https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101909267/in-smother-poet-rachel-richardson-balances-parenting-amidst-upheaval

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2025/02/a-poem-by-rachel-richardson-domestic/681646/

https://lithub.com/tamarack-fire-a-poem-by-rachel-richardson/

https://www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2023/04/14/856-the-i-want-song

 

 

 

Rachel Richardson is the author of Smother (W. W. Norton, 2025) and two earlier poetry collections, Copperhead and Hundred-Year Wave. She is the co-founder of the Berkeley, CA literary arts center Left Margin LIT as well as a former Stegner and NEA Fellow. In 2024 she was awarded an inaugural Artists-in-Fire Residency with the Confluence Lab and has now completed FFT2 wildland firefighter training.

Maw Shein Win's latest full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Her work has recently been published in The American Poetry Review, The Margins, The Bangalore Review, and other literary journals. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, and the 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Awardee. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco and in the Low Residency MFA Program at Dominican University. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a literary community. mawsheinwin.com

M.L. Martin : Revisiting the Two Worlds of Joseph Ceravolo

 

 

 

 

Upon revisiting Joseph Ceravolo’s The Green Lake is Awake: Selected Poems, I’m reminded of what Gertrude Stein said in “A Transatlantic Interview” in 1946 “it is impossible to put [words] together without sense” (Stein 989). Ceravolo’s poetry often bears out the truth of this maxim. However, even at its most disjunctive and oblique—such as the line “Border irrelevent sweet for wounds” or “grateful soccer monet churning oh savage” from “A Story from the Bushmen” (lines 57 and 69)—there is an urgency in the language, driven by a kind of linguistic searching, as opposed to the language of Tender Buttons, which often seems to be driven by a persistent objective to attempt “to make words write without sense” (Stein 989). The pleasure of Ceravolo’s poetry derives from the fact that its refusals to construct meaning, whether at the level of the phrase or the sentence, inevitably find reprieve in an epiphanic moment.

          More successfully than the later poems, his early poems enact a convincing and provocative struggle between perception and language which often unearths a small, well-earned—for the poet as well as the reader—epiphany, or what Ceravolo called a “moment of reality”(Ceravolo letter), as we find at the close of “Ocean”: “I couldn’t sleep, but a new / wave comes every few seconds// Yes! They end on the shore” (Ceravolo 24).  The verisimilitude of such moments is heightened precisely because it’s embedded in a variety of ‘unreal’ moments, ranging from disjointed syntax to non-sequiters to the surreal, as in these lines from “White Fish in Reeds”:

          Streets
have no feeling
Clouds move 

Are people woman?
Who calls you
on a sun shirt sleeves down his ecstasy
The hair you are
becoming? Mmmm 

That this temperature is where
I feed The sheep sorrel flower is
And I want to
be
among all things
that bloom
Although I do not
love flowers. (25)

          With these juxtapositions, which remain compelling, despite their indefatiguability, Ceravolo is able to deftly straddle two worlds at once — the mimetic, or “the imitation of ‘what is there,’” which we see both in the banal (“Who calls you”) and the psuedo-philosophic (“Streets / have no feeling”) and the meontic, or “the imitation of ‘what is not there’” (Perloff 31), which we see in the disjointed syntax of “on a sun shirt sleeves down his ecstasy,” or the strange meaning and disorientation that comes before and after the linebreak in “That this temperature is where / I feed.”  Ceravolo rarely strays too long in the meontic, the world that is not there, which saves his reader from total estrangement, and provides a stimulating backdrop for the lyric moment. Here, the clarity of “And I want to / be / among all things / that bloom” carries a profundity that perhaps would not be there if the moment were not embedded in this lush tapestry of strangeness. As such, Ceravolo creates the illusion that this epiphanic moment is created by the strangeness that surrounds it—that the syntax must be broken, that strange words must be fused together, that the frenetic, roving mind must rummage through the backwoods of language until it finds a moment of tranquility in the simple philosophical truth for which it hunted. What the reader finds gratifying in this illusion is her perpetual surprise as the surface of the mimetic morphs into the surface of the meontic, and back again—not unlike the phenomenom of the Möbius band—and what seemed like two surfaces reveals itself to be one. In his idiosyncratic manner, Ceravolo reminds us of what the Surrealists were enamored—that the waking life, the world that we recognize, is nourished by the dream life, the world that we don’t recognize.

          Unlike the Surrealists, of course, Ceravolo brings both ‘worlds’ into the poem, and his transition between “the imitation of ‘what is there’” and “the imitation of “what is not there’” Perloff 31) is made seamless by the melopoeia which often seems to propel the poem from one realm to the other. Indeed, it is often when Ceravolo’s logopoeia and phanopoeia are most fractured that the rhythms of Ceravolo’s language rise to the level of music:

    O sun with the dreadful
of kind                   Man! full! of the organ
                                         of move
Shoulder are the vines
are the plus are the
autumn of found are the fallen
blank are the aussi
          the loping soon
                     the wet
blank the soleil les fleurs
the Force of rainbow
          shout the fishing
quell quell. (Ceravolo 77) 

Ceravolo’s exclamatory “O” is often an ecstatic lamentation, as here, where the rhythms in the syntax create a puzzling catalogue of psuedo-definitions (“Shoulder are the vines”) and Socratic categories (“of the organ / of move” and “autumn of found”).  The cadence that he builds here culminates in a nearly logical resting place in the repetition of “quell quell.” The rhythms in the language of this passage feel as if they are moving toward meaning, and in that sensation the reader finds affirmation that this is not an alien world, but a necessary and luxurient strangeness that breathes life into the world we know. 

Works Cited and Consulted

Ceravolo, Joseph. The Green Lake is Awake: Selected Poems. Ed. Larry Fagin, Kenneth Koch, Charles North, Ron Padgett, David Shapiro, & Paul Violi. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1994. Print.

---. “Letter to David Shapiro.” 29 June 1965. “The Lyrical Personal of Joe Ceravolo.” Jacket2. 2013. Web.

Perloff, Margorie. “Unreal Cities.” The Poetics of Indeterminacy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. p. 31. Print.

Stein, Gertrude. “A Transatlantic Interview.” 1946. Robert Bartlett Haas. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol. 1. 1973. Ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, Robert O’Clair. Third Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003. p. 989. Print.

North, Charles. “Wild Provoke of the Endurance Sky.” No Other Way: Selected Prose.   Brooklyn: Hanging Loose Press, 1998. p. 25. Reprinted. The World. July 1976. Print.

 

 

 

 

M.L. Martin is an interdisciplinary poet and translator whose current work aims to revise the critical interpretation and reception of the enigmatic Anglo-Saxon poem known as “Wulf and Eadwacer,” and to recover this radical female text to the feminist and experimental canons to which it belongs. Her translations can be found in Arkansas International, Brooklyn Rail, Black Warrior Review, The Capilano Review, Columbia Journal, The Cortland Review, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review Online, The Literary Review, Poetry in Action, and elsewhere.

          Her chapbook of ekphrastic prose poems, called Theater of No Mistakes (Anhinga Press), is in conversation with the work of the American Surrealist painter Philip C. Curtis and the mise en scène of the Sonoran desert, and contains a feminist ecopoetics—from an oblique angle. Her poetry has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Diagram, Event Magazine, The Fiddlehead, Interim, The Massachusetts Review, Prism International, and many other Canadian and American literary journals.

          An editor for Asymptote, with grants from Bread Loaf, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship, she’s the founder of the Translation Now! symposium. Find more online at M-L-Martin.com.

Stan Rogal : [on first looking into] Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology, second edition, 2013, edited by Paul Hoover

Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology

edited by Paul Hoover

Second edition, 2013

The events leading up to and what revealed itself to me:

While cruising the book aisles of HMV, pre-pandemic era, I stumbled upon a used copy of the above stated anthology and decided to give it a read. I had, some time prior to this, paged through an edition of Norton’s Modern Poetry [the copy of which I still retain] and — for whatever curious reason — casually made comparisons between the two, as one does when one suddenly has time on one’s hands, in isolation. A number of things initially struck me as noteworthy.

Firstly, images that repeated. Dogs — especially barking dogs — were of equal abundance in both volumes, which I easily accepted as a reasonably commonplace occurrence, given: pets, utility animals, dogs existing in both city and rural areas, et cetera, so, okay. Next, the colour orange (or oranges, the fruit), I noticed was quite popular within the modernist group [which surprised me, somewhat, that this colour, ‘exotic,’ really, as opposed to…y’know?] while the colour blue [more conventional, mundane, even, yes?] appeared most often within the postmodernist collection. Fine. Remember, this is merely an informal observation. I leave any psychological and/or zeitgeist interpretations to the varying specialists.

Secondly, more women and cultural/ethnic minorities were featured among the postmodernist group. Not overly surprising, given the cultural shifts that have taken place over the time period. Speaking of which, two Canucks were invited to join the ranks, the editor saying: “The work of two Canadian authors appear because they have lived for a significant period of time in the United States or been intimately involved in the development of a new practice influential in this country.” Bravo, Christian Bök and Steve McCaffery!

Thirdly, a majority of the poems/poets deal with urban issues/themes, with nature acting as an adjunct [necessary, yes, but…] to the environmental construct. For example, in the poem “Under the Bright Orchards” Gustaf Sobin opens with: “…ink’s for the / phosphorous white eyelets, for sprinkling the / pages with / blown / phonemes, a counterworld.” Where, in God’s name, is the orchard? It’s been turned into language, the written word, a very urban [urbane?] and [a sadly, regularly ridiculed] intellectual pursuit. The poem ends: “yes, here, in a shiver of / blossoms, gloss of / winds, draws us — in / the / hollow coil of our own scribbles — past.” Speaking strictly formally/structurally/verbally/imagistically, I [personally] think this is a fascinatingly beautiful passage, beyond anything it might ‘mean’ or ‘represent.’ In fact, I am content to simply read and re-read it for its innate beauty; its crafts(manship). However, at some other [perhaps further] point of, I dunno, contemplation, part of this beauty [for me, again] is the fact that the passage is open to interpretation(s), as: what does [for one small example] the term ‘past’ mean at the end? ‘Past’ as in time past? ‘Past’ as in past scribbles? ‘Past’ as in the wind blowing past? Or…? Intriguing.

In Marjorie Welish’s poem “Possible Fires” she writes: “Let a leaf be cultural in this world; then, let a leaf’s waxy index of antihistamine eventually be an event it (the leaf) might not have issued.” Here, something as innocuous as a single leaf becomes [in a flash!] a cultural event, a work of art, through the act of writing.  

Among the postmodernists, Charles Bernstein writes: “The text calls upon the reader to be actively involved in the process of constituting meaning… Reader as a producer and consumer of meaning.” Robert Palk states: “It is not enough to let a poem echo through your being, to play mystical chords upon your soul. The poem must be understood and felt in its details; it asks for attention before transport.” This, following T.S. Eliot’s earlier dictum [I paraphrase, purposely]: “Art should be an escape from personality, not a wallowing in it.” 

Paul Hoover (editor) explains that postmodernist literature grew out of Dada, Situationism and Oulipo, into language poetry, conceptual poetry, Newlipo, cyberpoetry (including Flarf) and into the postlanguage lyric, with much of it being an attempt to “do away with the author.” Kenneth Goldsmith says: “With the advent of internet, it’s all fodder for the remix and re-creation of works of art: free-floating toolboxes and strategies unmoored from context of historicity.” In fact, Goldsmith’s writings consist of exact reproductions of previously written texts. He “wrote” and published a 900-page book in which he retyped a day’s copy of The New York Times. He teaches a class called “Uncreative Writing” where students are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Why go home and write something à la Gertrude Stein, say, in order to gain insight into her style? Isn’t it better — and more advantageous — to copy out eight or ten pages, exactly, if you want to truly experience the ‘Gertrude Stein’ method and manner? After all, isn’t this what musicians and artists do all the time, copy, until they eventually create/develop their own voice/signature?

(As an aside — did you know; were you aware? — that one can paint as many exact reproductions of Picasso, Bacon, Kahlo, or whomever, as one wants, even sell them, so long as one signs their own name. It’s only a forgery and a crime to sign the original artist’s name. It is the signature that is the true work of art, legally and commercially speaking. Whereas in music, use more than two words from a popular song and lawyers are on you like shit to a shovel. Why? Copyright law as it relates to money. Which is the beauty (and freedom) of poetry: there is little (if any) money to be made, ergo, no one bothers you, ergo, feel free to steal away!)

Following the sad fact of no monetary gain and slight recognition…

Fourthly, reading the bios of each poet it was quite clear that the vast majority of them teach (or taught) in colleges or universities. Moreover, not only were the younger often mentored by the older, but each served to publish the other, either in small magazines or anthologies or even in small presses built for the purpose. In other words, many of these people would likely never have been published if it wasn’t for the fact that they created opportunities for themselves (and friends/associates) to support this type of literary engagement and provide necessary platforms, whether within or outside the academic walls, for them to participate. Fine. This is a tradition that applies to every sort of experimental art, those of which would languish and die as yet another “exquisite corpse” if left to depend on mainstream media, conservative mind-sets, and public taste for its only survival.

Which brings me (us) back to our two Canucks, Christian and Steve, also teachers practicing their craft within the ivory towers along with a... Well, who and how many, no one knows, because there are few presses/magazines in Canada that regularly publish anything even remotely postmodern [huge kudos to those that do! (you know who you are)]. And when, on the rare occasion, it does happen that an anthology appears showcasing a small number of these relatively obscure personages [Christian was involved with two that I’m aware of, one co-edited with Margaret Atwood, the other with Greg Betts], it was more a bewailing than a celebration, more a dirge than a paean — and not without a strong sense of apologia, I might add — the volume clearly citing the general lack of support and/or appreciation for such literary endeavours and their authors.

To be fair, I don’t claim to love [or even enjoy] all of the poets or poems in this volume. As well, when there is any attempt to package an individual poet into one group or another — language, cyber, conceptual — the lines frequently blur. That said, none of them are “wallowing in their personalities,” as is often the case with a great number of so-called poets. I mean, really, let’s admit it, as a rule, poetry is the lazy person’s art form: mix a few clichéd images with an over-abundance of similes, a great dollop of heart-felt, gut-wrenching personal sentiment, a sexy theme-du-jour, add Evian water (flat) & stir: voila, a poem! Or endless poems. If these same people were forced to [instead] write an essay or a short story or [God forbid] a novel based on their particular angst-ridden, too-serious-by-half, subject matter, where they’d have to employ some semblance of rigor, skill and knowledge of craft, they’d pack in their writing devices early and go back to watching re-runs of “Friends” or making a show of trying to slash their ankles with dull plastic knives. Whereas, there’s enough well-wrought and stimulating stuff in the Norton’s to keep an open/curious mind pleasantly occupied for hours. And who can’t love the term Flarf [Gary Sullivan claims to have found the word online, on a police blotter, where some stoner had described marijuana as ‘flarfy’] used to label a legitimate poetry movement, defined by Drew Gardner as: “A smutty, expressive swan-bear hybrid at a clam bake,” the motive of which is “the pure amusement of the online carnival.”

Not me. Send in the freaking clowns.

[Hey, now, what’s that sound? Outside the window: packs of orange and blue dogs barking the wilderness.]           

Stan Rogal's natural habitat is the wilds of Toronto where he exists mainly on a diet of roots, berries and red wine. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies throughout the known (and lesser known) world. He is the author of 26 books, the most recent being a novel, titled The Comic (Guernica Editions), not so funny given its arrival coincides with the "Age of Isolation and Physical Distancing," a Kafka-esque sort of humour.