The Call to Home
by George Elliott Clarke
 
(for The Hon. Mayann Francis)

My Utopia? A round stone tower
cobbled from marble and shale—
such lone, ocean-coloured scenery amid greenery—
the super-verdant Three Mile Plains—
a dreamy, supreme jungle—
green—as sumptuously green—as an avocado—
where red-breast robins and black-cap chickadees
stage a torrid clamour, strident canticles—
their songs raging impromptu, glamorous arias—
phantasmagorical cadences—
airs—
in my ears—
while perfume buffets my face—
the blossoming of apples, the tang of pine—
an unmistakeable honey
of unparalleled sweetness,
heralding persistent Succulence.

And indoors, tabled,
are pears from Nova Scotia, pear wine from Nova Scotia
(Morocco-adjacent is Nova Scotia)—
sanctified bottles—
an ambiance of cinnamon and lemons—
the oneiric music of Portia White, trilling—
an enterprise of light
profiting every window.

Here and now I awake, still adrift in dream,
relishing a lingo of vino and aurora—
seditious, gold-dawn Clairvoyance—
mandatory sunflowers preening in the garden.

And when I leaf my pages,
the verses embody a Pantheon,
and I’m a colossus of wine—
as arrogant as Champagne—
or Dylan Thomas-wild, Malcolm X-disciplined—
a gardener corralling a jungle.…

George Elliott Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1960. He was the 4^th Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15) and the 7^th Parliamentary/Canadian Poet Laureate (2016-17). An English professor at the University of Toronto, Clarke has taught at Duke, McGill, UBC, and Harvard. He has received the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellows Prize, Governor-General’s Award for Poetry, National Magazine Gold Award for Poetry, Premiul Poesis (Romania), Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, and the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (US). Basta!

Field Verses
by Sarah Klassen
 
Life is not as easy as crossing a field.
(Russian proverb)

Of what breadth and width is that field
you imagine you’ll cross? Half way,
hard ground may become quick sand
that grips you in its hungry vortex.

Or this: Beneath a child’s quick steps
undetonated rage lies sleeping.
Imagine this field--furrowed or unfurrowed,
sun-flooded or wrapped in mystery--
until the moment of explosion.

In August an acreage is ripe for harvest.
Your father stands chest-deep in it, his fingers
rubbing kernels from burgeoning heads of grain.
September rains pour, soil is water-logged,
harvest machinery bogs down,
yellow heads of wheat and barley rot.

And what about the property where someone
intending a quick crossing,
inadvertently stumbles on buried treasure?
How could any one pass lightly by,
or resist persuasion to sell everything
for that?

Even a field where lilies bloom is not easily traversed.
You’ll want to stop and smell. You’ll touch
the waxen petals gently, then, touched
by beauty”s brevity,
mourn.

One day there will be nothing
but dust, half-buried stones
and a few bleached bones
gleaming like pearls
in an otherwise empty field.

Sarah Klassen is a Winnipeg poet and fiction writer. Recent poetry publications are The Tree of Life (Turnstone Press) and New and Selected Poems (CMU Press). Awards include National Magazine Awards gold and silver and the Gerald Lampert Award. Klassen’s poems explore both the physical and spiritual aspects of life.

It's Come To This
by Brad Davis

I’m tired of caring whether a poem comes to enough.
There’s a subway on the bridge, and just south of it
a cylindrical metal chimney releasing what looks like steam
into the golden hour of sunset here in Brooklyn,

sixth floor, so roof level. I’m facing north, looking east,
and tired too of feeling what the poem really needs
is a quirky, post-post-modern diction or slant rhyme
or some gorgeous metaphor to distinguish it from prose—

as if delighting in the pan-urban palate of muted reds
and greys flattened in the view out the window weren’t enough,
and all of it laid out beneath a lavender, late January sky.

Is it because I am older than I thought I’d ever get
and live with knowing time is shorter than it’s ever been,
that I’m caring more about the moon, up now and full.

Brad Davis is a Canadian-American poet living in northeastern Connecticut. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Vallum, Traces, Image, Poetry magazine, The Paris Review, JAMA, Puerto del Sol, Brilliant Corners, Spiritus, and many other journals. Brad’s most recent collection is On the Way to Putnam: New, Selected, & Early Poems (Grayson, 2024).

Garments of Skin
by Jesse Keith Butler
 
Cast out from the garden
In garments of skin
We begged for a pardon
To enter back in
 
This wide world rests under
The thumb of its God
We set out to plunder
The wildlands of Nod
 
The seal of the chrism
The vellum stretched thin
We bind up our wisdom
In garments of skin
 
The prayer was impatient
So was the response
This civilization
We’ve hammered from bronze
 
This echoing tower
These wars we won’t win
When night comes we cower
In garments of skin
 
The sin that awaits us
Is crouched at the gate
We’ve lifted our faces
A moment too late
 
We passed from the garden
In garments of skin
As boundaries harden
The work can begin

Jesse Keith Butler is an Ottawa-based poet who recently won first prize in the ESU Formal Verse Contest. His poems have been published in a variety of journals, including Arc Poetry, New Verse Review, Dappled Things, Pulp Literature, and Blue Unicorn. His first book, The Living Law (Darkly Bright Press, 2024), is available wherever books are sold. Find him at www.jessekeithbutler.ca.

Voice: Ruin
by A. F. Moritz
 
My voice is a ruin of the great building
which was nothing but a hollow in the ordinary hills,
their streams and coverts, slopes and meadows.
It had been built by song beyond
all towers of materials that can be
mined and fused from a wasted ground. My voice
is a hollow grown from the long-ago, long-gone
coming of the poet whose voice was a song
of unaccustomed joy here
in the sky’s silence. In that ruin of a vale,
which is also a fallen building, my voice is the ruin
of one shepherd out of spirits, sitting on a stone,
wishing never to have to get up
and go where once were cottages and flocks
and at evening a woman by the low stone door.

A. F. Moritz has published more than 20 books of poetry that have received various recognitions, such as the Griffin Poetry Prize. His 2024 book, Great Silent Ballad, received the 2025 Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize. In 2026 he has published The Wren, poems, and a translation, Eternities (bilingual edition), of the 1918 book Eternidades by Juan Ramón Jiménez.

Biography of the Tyrant
by A. F. Moritz
 
Hell is like you: being nothing on earth
but terror others are absorbing—
digesting the maiming of their body
into the body of tomorrow, the beautiful one.
Hell is put down into the dirt to decompose
to a grain of the core—fire, that loam. Hell is your being
the will to ash and torture: dead from the start,
dropped in the dark, festering to feed
the ultimate root of the meditation of life,
the planet of health—the surface, the face,
flesh, skin of the planet far above the molten
generator. Hell is to be unwilling, unwitting,
a food of the green gold land, the blue
silver ocean, under the white and gold blue sky.

A. F. Moritz has published more than 20 books of poetry that have received various recognitions, such as the Griffin Poetry Prize. His 2024 book, Great Silent Ballad, received the 2025 Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize. In 2026 he has published The Wren, poems, and a translation, Eternities (bilingual edition), of the 1918 book Eternidades by Juan Ramón Jiménez.

Road With Cypresses
by D.S. Martin
 
You have not always felt   so straight & strong
felt more stable than passersby  
more revelatory than the crescent moon
in the inverted sky

You watch wheatfields waver with life & energy  
unnoticed by the preoccupied
Nothing is static   You see the curl of cinnamon
& gold   the swirl of indigo & sapphire

But tonight   bridging between seen & unseen
you stand   shimmering & alive
each heavenly light   with its own corona  
vibrates   as in your mirrored eye

D.S. Martin is Poet-in-Residence at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, the Series Editor for the Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books, and serves on the Advisory Board for Traces. His new poetry collection The Role of the Moon (Paraclete Press) is a Gold Medal Winner at the Illumination Book Awards, and a Finalist for the 2026 Poetry Society of Virginia North American Poetry Book Award.

Sky Poem
After Psalm 19
by D.S. Martin
 
Silence speaks   a cascade of stars  
wordless words   verified by seen & unseen things   
formed with intent   sent   to sing   
to present themselves   to make evident   all the entire firmament brings   
utterance only half heard   by those 
not yet in tune with all it means   The sky poem   
breaks forth   as the sun   rising above the horizon   seems 
to blaze benevolence across the world    beams 
substance    & all its energy hurled    Nothing misses
the warmth   or leaves each silent word unheard   
or lets the invisible go completely unperceived

What is it that has been established   preserving our earth   
despite our contrary actions?   Does God send instructions
for salmon to struggle upstream   for the moon
& the tides   & the grasses   keeping hillsides
from washing away   & the sustained momentum 
bringing on another day?
Are not the instructions of the Lord right
bringing light to the eyes   strategic
in the precision of savory beauty   shining bright  
showing us what to do?   Like the flick of a blue jay's tail   
the pieces come together   beyond our comprehension   
more subtle than the satisfying click   of a brick 
slipping into place    a salve to our wounds
a blaze marking the trail   the morning's 
first sip of coffee to the tongue

In the dark    as I drive the king's highway   
following your signposts    how can I keep
from veering off course   from landing deep in a ditch?   
How can I discern my own errors   before I've slid
to either side?   Direct my steering   my words   my calculations    
Once I arrive at my destination    I look up   
marvel at the stars   consider all they declare

D.S. Martin is Poet-in-Residence at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, the Series Editor for the Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books, and serves on the Advisory Board for Traces. His new poetry collection The Role of the Moon (Paraclete Press) is a Gold Medal Winner at the Illumination Book Awards, and a Finalist for the 2026 Poetry Society of Virginia North American Poetry Book Award.

On Returning to Lightning Lake
by Charlene Kwiatkowski
 
This time, we know to walk clockwise.
Pack granola bars and water. Anticipate
a noon arrival at the rainbow bridge whose
curved, wooden beams span the narrows
like jewellery on a woman’s neck.

It is quiet. Gone are the daredevils
climbing the apex in swim trunks
to make thunder with the water. (You
were one of them.) There is no countdown
from three. No laughter, no explanation
to our crestfallen niece that rainbow
can mean colour or shape and wasn’t
the long walk around all worth it?

The mountains today look conflicted:
heads speckled white, bodies a deep green,
covered and barren as if nature has run out
of spray paint. The snow collapses
beneath our feet as we trek across
the lake, feeling supernatural.

The rainbow bridge arcs under a mountain
of its own, has succumbed to winter’s dress code.
The brown frame barely visible, we quicken
our steps, tread between beams of puffed sleeves,
stop in the middle. The lake, trees, and sky
still meet at the same angles. But they also surprise.
You and I turn to each other, unable to explain
how everything feels familiar yet foreign this time.

Charlene Kwiatkowski is a Canadian writer whose debut poetry chapbook ‘Let Us Go Then’ was published in 2021 with The Alfred Gustav Press. Her work has appeared in Ekstasis, Crux, Arc Poetry Magazine, Vallum, and elsewhere. In 2020, she won Pulp Literature’s annual Magpie Award for Poetry. She works in communications and occasionally blogs at textingthecity.wordpress.com. Charlene lives in Port Coquitlam, BC with her husband, daughter, and twin sons.

Final Chapters
by Doris Fiszer
 
Each morning, I watch the sky at dawn.
A maple leaf floats in the bird bath.
I’m having a life, isn’t that enough?

I’m not sure how to get it right.
The world is aching as it falls apart. Still,
kindness somehow seeps through
the fissures.

Each winter reveals more frailty.
Even at ten below, the breath
will rise and fall.

Doris Fiszer is a Canadian poet. Her publications include If I Were A River and Locked in Different Alphabets, which was a finalist for the 2021 Archibald Lampman Award. She has published two chapbooks, The Binders and Sasanka (Wild Flower). Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies across Canada and the United States.

Everything
by Shane Schick
 
Then Peter spoke up, “We have left everything to follow you!”
                -Mark 10:28
 
Mortgaged for the next two decades to come,
 
with a single car bearing a scrape in the shape of a grim mouth
 
and a tax bill for which the late fees accumulate like snow.
 
But also all this wealth, including the long-term investments
 
that are our kids, munching their dinner at the table every night,
 
the golden strands flickering in the clean darkness of my wife’s hair,
 
how I walk with the same freedom of movement as the ants.
 
I know the price of admission, and I know what I can afford.
 
My mistake is to approach the needle’s eye as if I were thread,
 
looking so closely that a camel appears small enough to pass.

Shane Schick has had poetry published in Ekstasis Magazine, The Clayjar Review, Hearts of Flesh, Macrina Magazine and many other publications. He lives with his wife, an Anglican priest, and their children in Whitby, Ont. More: ShaneSchick.com/Poetry.

false interiors
by A. A. Kostas
 
the womb is the only
real room, all else
is false interiors
drywall and paint and
blotting out of the sun

you were born from
the inside out and you will
spend this life demonstrating
your will to return
from the outside in

we are no longer formed
and breathed into, we
are nestled and grown
thieves of the life-force
that sustains, prometheus
all of us

all divisions fictions
false walls that bear
no load, no weight
this world is fallen glory
which prepares you
for glory still

A. A. Kostas is a Canadian-Australian poet, writer, and lawyer, currently based in Singapore, and he writes the Substack newsletter Waymarkers. His writing has been published in The Republic of Letters, Apocrypha, Inkwell, New Verse Review, The Clayjar Review, The Rialto Books Review, After Dinner Conversation, Vessels of Light, and Calla Press Journal.

In the Long Quiet
by Brock Schnurr
 
The river comes down in a brown stagger,
shoulders hung with tin and glass,
a shutter clanging warning,
the mitten of some child in its teeth.

Yards lean toward the current,
the bank crumbling as if the water
remembered an old quarrel.
Across the bridge houses flake to bone,
rust ladders the doors,
rails drown in their beds.

Virtue came like weather—
an unseasonable warmth leaving the ground soft,
prints of strangers filling with melt.
They brought paper tongues,
hands faint with the scent of coins,
spoke in the register of promises
no one meant to keep.

We learned the trick of nodding
while the knife turned inward.
Nations die like that—
one winterless year at a time.

At night the lake grows a second ear,
cocked toward a shore that does not sleep.
Engines turn there in the dark,
slow and patient as a grindstone.

We face inland,
stack our mercies to the eaves,
tell ourselves the ice will hold.
But the thaw has begun—
and the river drags its catch toward us,
what we drowned ourselves to forget.

Brock Eldon Schnurr earned his B.A. in English Literature from Western University and his M.A. from Queen’s University in Canada. He has taught English Language and Literature across Asia, including in South Korea, China, and Vietnam, where he currently resides in Hanoi. In addition to his teaching career, he serves as an editor for C2C Journal. His work has appeared internationally, with a forthcoming essay in Salmagundi and a poetry collection, Dominion Ashes: A Book of Decline, forthcoming from Ballerini Books Press. He is the author ofNull Point and The Commonplace Book on Substack.

3:45pm on a May afternoon in a coastal city. An aspiring playwright from the prairies, Vanessa has just learned her first script will be produced. Exultant, she walks by a beach, and watches an old sailor, Enoch, playing with his young son after school.

Vanessa skips south to the waterfront 
to feast her eyes on the wheat-like waves — 

slips off her Vans to walk the wet sand
discalced. Prostrate waves adore her soles,

their chill labia licking gooseflesh up her legs.
She hums country songs from home about love 

“higher than the pine trees growing tall 
upon the hill,” worries why she doesn’t feel 

like that, and maybe never will.  
       	    			                       Enoch 
and Samson watch crows pick through ficus tide rows

for tidbits. The sand’s bleachers of stranded logs 
are occupied by off-work ESL 

instructors passing flasks from fist to fist,
ogling Vanessa as she treads the ocean’s lip 

with lilac flats dangling from pink fingertips.
Jeans rolled up, father and son footrace 

in the greasy surf like Achaeans, skip 
stones like little boys. When driftwood floating

in the shallows is revealed as a dead seal,
Samson’s appalled, but Enoch rolls the corpse

by one rubbery flipper until he sees
red seeping through the silver pelt.

See this? Enoch says, pointing at the bullet hole,
Some fishing boats still carry shark rifles

to cull seals, afraid they’ll steal salmon, rip
expensive nets.
                           Moved by pity, Samson rests 

his palms on the fur and tests the whiskers
on its upper lip with childish fingers. 

Enoch nods his approval, recites words 
he lived by long ago: 
		                    Most would rather 

judge by sight than by the touch; for everyone 
may look, but few may touch and feel; all can 

perceive an appearance; few can grasp 
what really is. 
	                 Samson is agog: his father 

never speaks like this to him. 
			                            Watching 
father and son from the tideline where she 

stands, Vanessa’s eyes sting with a need 
for meaning and she gasps when they stroke

the seal as sad children stroke dying dogs
goodbye while a vet preps the fatal

shot. Soft saltchuck pulsing in ripples
around the trio and her own fingerprints

prickling like battery contacts in a charger, 
Vanessa rethinks energy and transformation 

in her play, wonders if Viró can devise 
special effects — clouds, flames, winged things

unfolding into being when a flap is flipped
like pages in a pop-up book. 
			                          Enoch and Samson

solemnly strip to skivvies, wade into surf 
with the buoyant body towed between them, 

then swim side-stroke until the tidal rip 
accepts their gift, drags it from their grips. 

The water transmits Enoch’s homily to the shore
as they swim back:
	                          Going to the sea…

The neatest, cleanest funeral in the world,
except it’s free. When it’s my time, I hope

you wrap me up with stones to help me sink,
send me down to the crabs to pay my debts 

for all I’ve taken out by line and net.  
Vanessa makes a mental note of the old man’s words,

and again, as man and little boy 
huff and puff in the shallows, stumble 

and shiver up the sand, she notes the schematic
of muscle and bone they share, one version

waning and one waxing.

Daniel Cowper’s poetry and critical writing has appeared in numerous publications in Canada, the US, Ireland, and the UK. His poems have been collected in The God of Doors (winner of the Frog Hollow Press Chapbook contest) and Grotesque Tenderness (MQUP, 2019). His latest work is Kingdom of the Clock, a novel in verse about urban life. He is a contributing editor with New Verse Review, and lives on Bowen Island with his wife Emily and their children.

Ball’s Falls
by Lori Vos
 
Each spring brings a heightened roaring.
The stream, snow-swollen, rushes
toward its plunge over shale-stacked cliff
to pool and rocks below. Today a drop
spins out, a-dazzle, floats suspended,
a sun shaving colliding with a flick
from the fingers of the sea.
Tiny bead of liquid light holds
all waters, radiance from every star,
like each one of us, a fleck of joy
flying from the Son.

Lori Vos writes short fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction, publishing Coming Home: A Spiritual Memoir (Shanti Arts) in 2022. She teaches academic writing at Queen’s University. Living her life on the shores of Lake Ontario has given her a sense of the wide view that speaks of both rest and possibility.

Nocino
by Jessica Walters
 
Each year he says he should really pick the green
walnuts on the eve of the feast of San Giovanni
but they do not ripen as they do in the old country
so he must pick them in late summer.

He will promise to share the nocino at the annual
bonfire, says it will taste of smoked walnuts and maple
syrup. He promises even as he climbs the ladder
and disappears into the tree with leaves as big as spades.

But he will not share. He will savour the liqueur
alone. It will taste of a memory of a longing
for a far off country he has never known.

Jessica Walters was a hobby farmer in the Fraser Valley where she raised chickens, foraged for turkey tail mushrooms, and pruned apple trees. Her work has been published in The British Columbia Review, The Brussels Review, Agape Review, Scintilla, Solum, Foreshadow, and her short story “Glass Jars” was shortlisted for the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Writing. She is the review and fiction editor at Radix Magazine. When she is not grading papers, she can be found walking alongside an arm of the Chilliwack River or gardening. Website: jessicamaywalters.ca

Benediction
by Mirjana Villeneuve
 
The evening sun breaks its heart open
on the hard edge of the world.
Red soaks the loose threads of cloud
caught in pine boughs, pools in the cup
of the valley where the river ripples
whispered vespers. Barefoot in a patch
of wild thyme, I watch
the spilling out.
Brush a stray ant from my ankle,
rest my chin on my knees.
I would let the sun draw me to itself
if it wanted to. I would lose myself in the blaze,
go up in midday flame, blood and bone
adrift in the embers
of twilight. I long to love
so openly. I long to be claimed
by a beauty that keeps its promise
of return.

Mirjana Villeneuve is a writer and High School English teacher in Ottawa. Her work has appeared online and in print in Presence Journal, Prism Journal, the Lake Effect 9 Anthology (Upstart Press, 2019), Restoration, and The Catholic Millennial.

Psalm 42
by Burl Horniachek

For the choirmaster. A Maskil for the sons of Korah.

As the deer pants for the water of the brook,
So does my soul pant for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?
My tears have been my bread, day and night,
While is spoken to me all day, Where is your God?
This I remember and I pour out my soul within me,
For I went with the multitude;
I accompanied them to the house of God
With a voice of joy and thanksgiving,
A multitude making observance.
Why are you cast down, O my soul?
Or unquiet within me?
Hope in God,
For I will again praise his presence’s salvation.
O my God, my soul is cast down within me;
Therefore I will remember you from the land of Jordan,
Of Hermon, from Mount Mizar.
Deep calls unto deep at the voice of your springs;
All your waves and billows rolled over me
In the day, Yahweh commands his mercy;
In the night, his song is with me,
With a prayer to the God of my life.
I will say to God, my rock,
Why have you forgotten me?
Why do I go dim with the oppression of the enemy.
With a sword in my bones, my enemies revile me.
When they say to me all day, Where is your God?
Why are you cast down, O my soul?
And why are you unquiet within me?
Wait for God, and I will again praise
His presence’s salvation and my God.

Burl Horniachek is a Canadian teacher, poet and translator, and the editor of To Heaven’s Rim, a major anthology of world Christian poetry. He was born in Saskatoon and grew up south of Edmonton. He studied Ancient Near Eastern Studies (Hebrew/Ancient Israel) at the University of Toronto and creative writing at the University of Alberta with Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott. He currently lives near Winnipeg, with his wife, a surgeon, and their two kids.

Origin Story
by Charlene Kwiatkowski
 
Back when dreams were currency
and beauty could save the world

a firefly landed on the moon
the earth twitched in her sleep

and gardens grew.
A lover whispered in the dark

I can see all of you
and the words touched

the spine of happiness.
Nights were warm but not hot

a breeze sang
through the open window

and time was measured
in tides.

Little was required
at first light

save a greeting
hands cupped to receive

the day’s offering
small as an insect’s wing

fluttering against a force
that pulls

and pulls.

Charlene Kwiatkowski is a Canadian writer whose debut poetry chapbook ‘Let Us Go Then’ was published in 2021 with The Alfred Gustav Press. Her work has appeared in Ekstasis, Crux, Arc Poetry Magazine, Vallum, and elsewhere. In 2020, she won Pulp Literature’s annual Magpie Award for Poetry. She works in communications and occasionally blogs at textingthecity.wordpress.com. Charlene lives in Port Coquitlam, BC with her husband, daughter, and twin sons.

Lectio Divina
by Mathew Escott
 
In Greek the word for poison and cure
is the same. The thought that occurs to me
as I drag my heart across the page
waiting for the catch, hoping for a nail
not quite flush, jutting up,
a word or image or phrase
(charis, krisis, agape)
that snags and tears me open, dividing sinews,
remembering too that bruises are also wounds
that just haven’t broken through.

Matt Escott lives in Toronto with his wife and 7 year old twins. For the past 10 years he has worked with youth experiencing homelessness, and is currently developing a mentorship program for youth in foster care. He has been published or has work forthcoming in Ekstasis, OneArt, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Amethyst Review, and Tabula Rasa.