Sanctuary
by Dorothy Nielsen
 
I like to keep this bird magnet near – 
the one I didn’t remember to send to my mother
before dementia, the nursing home,
and then a quiet dying interrupted
long years in her own kitchen watching for the cardinal
that this magnet recalls each time I pull my fridge door open.
 
I would think of my fridge magnet when, one spring, I’d open
your Zoom link to a Covid-era funeral. Near
my study window, my own resident cardinal
was pouring out a heart-rending song for your mother
while miles away, watched by twittering birds it seems you’d interrupted
among the trees, you gently laid her in her final home.
 
My screen-gallery showed other mourners whose second home,
like mine, was once your mother’s kitchen – always open,
as my mom’s was, to our friends who so often interrupted
their quiet, ousting them, though still we sensed them near-
by playing their patient role of brooding mother,
which only decades later I realized had been a cardinal
                                                                                                              
rule of theirs. Now you tell me your mom loved it when a cardinal
caroled from the elms behind your home.
Studying my bird magnet today, I picture each mother
listening from her kitchen, window open,
watching for a flash of red as four o’clock draws near,
the hour her private dreams are interrupted.
 
When at last I was a parent, I saw how daydreams could be interrupted 
by another soul. And suddenly my first cardinal
appeared with his seeming frenzy to come so near
that he’d launch himself against the window, as if drawn to this home
I was finally making. To stop him, I’d have to wind the window open
wide on those long days of learning the secrets held by a mother,
 
such as, first: that something about being “mother”
might have settled the self, yet at the same time interrupted
those enclosed visions girls will spin, eyes half-shut, half-open
during dreamy years before they fly like a reckless cardinal
at reflections of themselves in the windows of somebody’s home,
crashing into a future they’d never dreamt was so near.
 
Or, second: once a new life has erupted to pry our hearts open,                    
we will need a resident cardinal for the home,                                                        
hovering near, to sing a sanctuary for the mother.

Dorothy Nielsen’s essays, fiction, and poems appear in many books and journals, including The Literary Review of Canada, Contemporary Literature, Canadian Poetry, Christianity and Literature, The Fiddlehead, and Traces Journal. She writes in a variety of free verse and traditional forms; most recently, her alliterative verse poem about the presentation of Christ in the temple was published by Forgotten Ground Regained. Dorothy serves on the advisory board for Traces Journal.

Missing My Dead Cat
by Brad Davis
 
Thought I spied a wet feral by the hedge.
It calmed me. And suddenly the desire

to make its acquaintance. Draw it in
with crumbs from my danish. But

it was cardboard, a crushed beer box
beside a tossed off plastic cup crawling

with ants. I wish it were so easy to make
treasure from trash. I would transform

all empties, all discards—like, say, those car
graveyards overflowing with parts—

perform the alchemical wonder, actually do
what the myths maintain will happen

in God’s good time. But I have only this
time, these conditions, that box and cup.

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).

Lamenti 
by George Elliott Clarke
 
(pace Franco Costabile)

My Dove!  Jesus!
Return, descend again,
like incarnate manna,
to remain with us—
O! Dove—
involuted in incense-swirling wind.

You daub us with myrrh  (befalling),
drench us with tears perfume-besotted,
waft—above us—ivory clouds pregnant with incense….

Dove, it ain’t possible, is it?
That Love can be ingrained in air
just as apple-blossom tinctures
permeate a May breeze
or flames inextinguishable, deathless,
house impregnable within a volcano,
is, realistically, the fact of Faith.

Yeah, Time does climax—and relax into Fancy,
as when I sleepily imagine
I navigate a white sanctuary of sunlight.

Then again, Pain rivets me—
as much as does Beauty
or Love….

Christ!  Lookit!

Thy nails don’t just spike my palms and ankles,
but also my twinned eyes,
turning prophecies irreparably bloody
as if Thy Apostle John
doubles as Jack the Ripper, eh?

No?

I recognize the Renaissance splendour—
Michelangelo-imagined—
of the divine Light
rinsing calligraphic Poetry
(scriptures, scrolls)
in gold-wash,
illuminated, enlightening.

My Dove, Jesus!
Return,
become incarnated,
reborn,
in each of us,
as Love,
thus grafting upon us wings.

[Cetraro (Italia) 25 mai mmxxv]

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!

When You Go to Weigh my Heart
by Taylor Marshall
 
will you hear the salty flesh
of crow in my mouth?

Pinot Grigio and tilapia
sitting cold and uneaten on the table:

A peace offering rendered:
undigested. Regretful,

yet, I can taste, so clearly – 
Chalky ashes filling up my cheeks.

My smile and yours,
Buoyed / only by

        these marigold–en glasses

and a kaleidoscope that
the Desert Jackal

holds between his hands.
How many kilograms

of scorched memory 
can one carry?
	
        I think, an endless pool.

Taylor Marshall is an emerging writer from Regina, Saskatchewan on Treaty 4 lands. Her work has appeared in Pinhole Poetry Press, Spring Magazine Vol.14, [S P A C E] Magazine, and Acta Victoriana Literary Journal. Her debut poetry chapbook, “Transits,” was self-published in 2024. Taylor’s writing often ruminates on mercurial possibilities of selfhood along with the accompanying internal and external metamorphoses reflective of grief, change, and rebirth.

my mother talks to the medical staff
by Jeannie Prinsen
 
we found metastatic disease, in other words cancer
	the Ds and the Fs were all coming in waves 
it doesn’t usually start in the liver so it might be elsewhere
	and I just didn’t know how to interpret that
so we can’t cure it but 
	they put these green leggings on me
we can give you the best possible life now
	well my legs were always my best feature
this is a student nurse working with us today
	all you gorgeous are so girls
she’s currently full code, we should discuss that because
	I wish they’d just tell us when the funeral will be
we are looking at days now, not weeks
	that’s the sign of the promised land 

Jeannie Prinsen lives with her husband, daughter, and son in Kingston, Ontario, where she works as a copyeditor for a local news organization. She can be found on Substack at https://substack.com/@jeannieprinsen.

Chapter 4, Ecclesiastes (translation)
by Burl Horniachek
 
And I returned and I saw all the oppression
that is done under the sun.
And, look, the tears of the oppressed
and they have no comforter.
In the hand of their oppressors, power,
and they have no comforter.
And I praised the dead, which are already dead,
more than the living which are still alive,
but better, better than both
is the one who has not yet been born,
who has not seen the evil work
which is done under the sun.
And I saw that for all his toil and all his skill in work
that a man is envied by his neighbor.
This also is wisp and chasing the wind.

A fool folds his hands and eats his own flesh.

Better one palm filled with quiet,
than both hands filled with toil and chasing the wind.

Then I returned and I saw all the wisp under the sun.
There is one alone and not two,
and he has no son or brother.
There is no end to all his toil,
neither are his eyes filled with riches.
For whom do I toil and deprive my being of good?
This also is wisp and evil misery.
Two are better than one
for they have a good reward for their work,
for if they fall, the one will lift up the other,
but woe to him who is alone when he falls,
and there is no one to help him up.
Also, if two lie together, they are warm,
but how can one alone be warm?
And if one overpowers him,
two can stand up against him,
and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Better a poor but wise youth
than an old but foolish king,
who will not anymore be warned.
For out of prison the youth comes to rule,
but then in his kingdom a poor man is born.
I saw all that lives, who walk under the sun,
with the second youth who is standing over him.
There was no end to all the people,
to all which came before him.
Also, they that come after him will not celebrate him,
for this also is wisp and chasing the wind.

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.

Stories of Durga: Differences
by Ayesha Chatterjee
 
His voice the vocals of a familiar song,
each word distinct. Behind him, drums:
new clothes, New Market, notun 
gurer sandesh. The muddy squelch of good

conquering evil. Still a messy business.
Still the mothballed, darkening chill.
Between victory and destruction, a lull.

Farmers, somewhere out of sight, reap 
their harvest, locusts--that other 
percussion--having done their worst and fled.
The faint, unshakeable smell of burning. 

Born and raised in Kolkata, India, Ayesha Chatterjee is the author of the poetry collections The Clarity of Distance and Bottles and Bones. Her work has appeared in Magma Poetry (UK), Exile Literary Quarterly (Canada), The Moth (Ireland) and elsewhere, and been translated into French, Slovene, Russian and Bengali. Several of her poems have been set to music by renowned Canadian composers. Chatterjee is a past president of the League of Canadian Poets. She lives in Toronto.

The Museum Of Good Tries
by Brad Davis
 
“there is only the trying”

Like every last second dropkick that splits the uprights.
Or the glorious fifth section of Eliot’s East Coker.
Or Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor.
I nominate J. Berryman’s Eleven Addresses to the Lord,
and leave his Dream Songs for another’s vote.

I wonder, when the One who made me well
makes all things new, whether there will be a museum
on that fine earth for revisiting our best attempts.
The list of what would fail to qualify feels endless: like
whatever aims at contravening Creator’s will

to right all earthly wrongs and thereby free the cosmos
for continuing on its course toward divination.
Or is it flattery to attribute to our infinitesimal kind
the power to hold it back? Then why else the Incarnation?

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).

Writing the River
by Peter Stiles
 
(after a poem by Luci Shaw of the same title written soon after her sad loss)

I read this poem so many times, imagining you by Beaver Creek,
     the overflowing river rushing by your cabin.
I hear the torrent, like a metaphor, 
     cascading over rocks by night and day,
          signalling a movement on from loss, the singleness of sorrow.
Few years have passed since he has died, and now
     you stoke the woodstove on your own, chopping wood,
          splitting kindling, as dreams and memory mingle.
I read this poem so many times, the silence in your writing,
     the will to keep on flowing, like this river, window open,
         seasons knowing, change in Beaver Creek, 
            sometimes slowing to a trickle over pebbles
               summer’s showing, in water like dark tea.
I read this poem so many times, fine metaphor of sadness,
     pitting self against the years to come, alone by Beaver Creek,
          this liquid poem keeps speaking.
I read this poem so many times, imagining your grieving.

Dr. Peter Stiles graduated from Macquarie University with a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in English Literature. He then undertook a Master of Education degree at the University of NSW. After pursuing theological studies at Regent College, Vancouver, he completed a Doctorate in Literature and Theology at the University of Glasgow. His present role is Senior Lecturer in Education at Excelsia University College, Sydney. Peter has also lectured at Trinity Western University in Vancouver and Houghton College, New York. He has published three collections of his verse, entitled ‘Trumped by Grace’ (2015), ‘Surprised by Jack’ (2022) and ‘Galilee’ (2025). ‘Trumped by Grace’ was shortlisted for the Australian Christian Book of the Year.

Flowers in Bramble
by Taylor Marshall
 
     -   For Ann

Pale pink, deep magenta, dazzling white.
See the supine yellow buds peeking out
from a grainy, pollen centre.
The heavy blooms,
you’d think they’d droop to the earth,
But they exude, push, expand
their petals upward. Yet still,
recumbent angels,

opening from the grounding force
of their strong, verdant columns.
I help you water before supper at dusk.
It is the end of July, and the 
evening is slow and heavy with heat.
80% thunderstorms, tonight
rings out on the AM radio:
Tornado watch for Coronach.

School’s out, my wildness in bramble.
I am weightless, I am rooted.
Only your voice (diaphanous);
your home (cocoon);
your cooking (succour);
your hollyhocks (paragons);
buoy and anchor,
lift me up and then bind me
to the delicious dirt between
my toes. 

Your garden is your pride.
Saintly, seraphim vines of ivy cover
the fence as people stop in awe,
stare, and (if you have your way)
stay for a coffee and a chat.
The envy of all of Willowbunch.
This is not hyperbole, nor legend.
Even the Giant would be impressed.
Your maiden name was 
Flowers, after all.

Taylor Marshall is an emerging writer from Regina, Saskatchewan on Treaty 4 lands. Her work has appeared in Pinhole Poetry Press, Spring Magazine Vol.14, [S P A C E] Magazine, and Acta Victoriana Literary Journal. Her debut poetry chapbook, “Transits,” was self-published in 2024. Taylor’s writing often ruminates on mercurial possibilities of selfhood along with the accompanying internal and external metamorphoses reflective of grief, change, and rebirth.

Mad Gals
by Pamela Mordecai 
 
why a child of thirteen, 
maybe fourteen, 
her blood just managed, 
her eyes never scandalized 
by a man’s nakedness? 
why give a teenager dread 
work carrying a belly
through the neck-jerking 
natter day by day ballooning
of her baby bulge?

the fancy messenger
made up for it, did he?
that’s assuming he came
in frippery. those guys
have been known to arrive
looking well very earthy

baby-making might 
have cost her life and limb 
death by stoning prescribed 
for both adulterous 
parties by Deuteronomy 
and Leviticus she 
standing in the door
of her father’s house
and him? well nowhere
near most of the time

as in this case he was not... 

God Almighty making 
a joke as so often
knowing most 
of us won’t get it...

wouldn’t someone older
with a bit more experience
have been less at risk?

but maybe recklessness 
was the point
Eve one kind 
of mad gal
Mary another?

Pamela Mordecai is a Jamaican Canadian poet who often writes in Patwa or Creole inflected English. She writes across genres — long fiction, short fiction, poetry, plays, non-fiction — for children and adults. She has published nine books of poetry, most recently A FIERCE GREEN PLACE (New Directions, 2022) and DE BOOK OF JOSEPH (Mawenzi House, 2022), third in a series in Jamaican Creole about the life and death of Jesus, DE MAN and DE BOOK OF MARY being the first two books. All three books are subtitled: A PERFORMANCE POEM.

1 September 1864

Small Indian kite. Sunbird.
by Ayesha Chatterjee
 
One named for god, the other 
borrowed from the sun. Both 
female, perhaps. Myth 
and religion would recoil, yet 
here they are.

She whinnies as we imagine 
god might do, a thin, 
cold cry. 
		The sun slips
like a leaf. She sings too.

I'm not wanted here, 
the terrace shining in the dry 
March morning, a pair of stone 
eyes (not just govinda but also 
pariah) circling steadily above me 
until everything is as it should be.

Born and raised in Kolkata, India, Ayesha Chatterjee is the author of the poetry collections The Clarity of Distance and Bottles and Bones. Her work has appeared in Magma Poetry (UK), Exile Literary Quarterly (Canada), The Moth (Ireland) and elsewhere, and been translated into French, Slovene, Russian and Bengali. Several of her poems have been set to music by renowned Canadian composers. Chatterjee is a past president of the League of Canadian Poets. She lives in Toronto.

The Street of Decrees
by Brock Eldon
 
I dreamed of a street in snow
dressed in decrees,
pages nailed to doors,
red ink bleeding through drifts.

The wind cracked each notice
like a sermon inverted,
the words biting my tongue
with the taste of iron.

I turned away before the square,
for the city was already a ledger,
and the people’s breath
already filed and gone.

Brock Eldon 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 is a freelance editor and his work has appeared internationally, in publications including Salmagundi, The Metropolitan Review, and Bad Clown Books. He is the author of Null Point and The Commonplace Book on Substack.

Centre
by Sarah Klassen
 
For everyone

The swimmer’s moment at the whirlpool comes,
But many at that moment will not say
“This is the whirlpool then” (Margaret Avison, “The Swimmer’s Moment”)

Time, endlessly circling,
spins off long geologic ages,
historic epochs, a lifetime
or just one day, one single
moment in which the wirling
world could come undone.
a business venture fails, friendships unravel,
rain spoils the weekend at the beach.
Surprise and disappointment come
for everyone.

Centripetal force impels a thing
toward a centre. An eddy draws a brown oak leaf
nto its tiny vortex. Satellites in endless circuit
are pulled by gravity toward planet earth.
When a gust of wind becomes a gale
the water’s surface turns from
mirror-smooth to storm
and churning turbulence
just when, for some,
the swimmer’s moment at the whirlpool comes.

Who hasn’t been astonished by an artist’s mastery
of colour, texture, form?
Think swirls of blue, green, yellow.
Think van Gogh’s Starry Night.
Who hasn’t gazed in wonder at that haloed moon
set in a cobalt sky. Those undulating hills, the milky way,
dark cedars, spiralling stars.
All the beauty of the universe
in glorious grandeur displayed.
At that moment some will say
beauty is all there is. Truth is,
The Scream, through line and colour,
tells a different story. Did Edvard Munch think this
one painting’s horror could contain the whole
of what there is? Is there not at the centre of the hurricane:
a steady, quiet eye? In Galilee when
Jesus walked on water, Peter, quite unravelled,
leapt in. A swimmer who’s tested the current’s force
and understands the chances, can
say, undismayed: This is the whirlpool then.

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.

Fox Hollow Ravine
by Dorothy Nielsen
 
One spring among old fallen leaves we found 
the purple trillium we always seek
in early May along the snaking creek
at our old haunt – this bluff we’re skidding down, 
uncertain what we’ll meet on stony ground.
It seems we never know from week to week
or year to year what waits in the oblique, 
deep shadowed valley. Memories of the sound 
those days our son went flying down this hill
for tadpoles? Or an echo flitting from
the greening leaves: a girl’s soft laughter starts
and stops – so does my pulse – till all is still
where we had found the purple trillium,
and once bore ashes for the bleeding hearts.

Dorothy Nielsen’s essays, fiction, and poems appear in many books and journals, including The Literary Review of Canada, Contemporary Literature, Canadian Poetry, Christianity and Literature, The Fiddlehead, and Traces Journal. She writes in a variety of free verse and traditional forms; most recently, her alliterative verse poem about the presentation of Christ in the temple was published by Forgotten Ground Regained. Dorothy serves on the advisory board for Traces Journal.

Robin Call
by Gabriel Sayers
 
I practiced mimicry in the silver mirror,
reciting the robin’s call
as if it were essential learning—
a raw decimal edge,
a red siren in the pine.

It was first a gift
when I wheeled Michael
through a collapsing forest,
its wings spread like a copper gully.

The cedars, bronzed fingers
on the earth’s underbelly.
We were black smudges
emerging on the road,
past green wolf-blankets of ivy
into the gorse-lined footpath.

There the puttering of robins—
or rather felt than heard.
Notes twirled in the wind,
a warmed arpeggio beating
quiet as a clock.

Over red breasts
slung worms from the soil,
ribbons coaxed up
by the steel gale.

On the horizon,
a blushing spirit lit the city,
pillars of orange
birthed quietly.

We kept walking,
the robin’s call still burning
in the air,
a small forge
opening to its swirling flame.

Gabriel Sayers is a fourth-year Indigenous student at the University of Victoria, where he studies Anthropology and Environmental Studies. His writing is shaped by a lifelong fascination with the beauty of the natural world and by his grandmother’s gentle, persistent urging to write. His work has been previously published in Grain.

Monastery Stones
by Meg Freer
 
Hurricane Lorenzo travels farther east and north
than prior strong storms, then weakens and takes on
a comma shape, at its tip a slim jet of gale-force winds
that bites and bellows as it hits land, topples trees,
causes flooding. The remains of hurricanes
track across Ireland more often now.

Clonmacnoise, no stranger to ruinous squalls—
invaded, raided and ransacked by Vikings,
Normans and native Irish, its buildings
demolished and rebuilt until English soldiers
took all they could move, even a large bell,
smashed what remained, left only roomfuls of sky.

Ancient believers sat in stone chairs to relieve
sore backs, drank water pooled in cow tracks to cure
tooth pain, leaned into a chapel alcove to ease headache,
bestowed their ailments there in circles of pennies,
buttons, pebbles. Modern visitors still do the same,
weaving a spell of gratitude into the worn stones.

Meg Freer grew up in Montana and lives in Ontario, where she is a mother, writer, and arts administrator. Her prose, poetry and photos have appeared in journals such as Ruminate, The Madrigal, and Phoebe, and she has published Serve the Sorrowing World with Joy and three other poetry chapbooks. She is a contributing editor for Traces Journal, is poetry co-editor for The Sunlight Press, and belongs to the League of Canadian Poets. Find her published work on her Substack blog, .

On Nicholas of Cusa’s Mission to Florence,
Interrupted by His Sudden Death
by Theresa Moritz
 
They rattle around
ill-assorted beads strung
on my surprise, found and lost
in my choosing, as if an oddity
shared more with another oddity
than it did with what it was
the darkened mirror of.

Sometimes I think an afternoon
will offer itself for taking them,
each for its own sake, from the string:
Aquinas’ hand his sister loved,
the black death of the Black Prince’s
maiden wife, the artificial myrrh
that survived Bernard’s unearthing,
Nicholas of Cusa’s Italian itinerary.

If we only knew,
they are the proof.

They are the salted drops that seep
through the seals of the past an ocean
they burn the eyes
they are a trickle
that may lift the body up
to ride for a long time
on its liquid origins.

Theresa Moritz is a poet and author who has not yet published a book. Her poems and stories have appeared in The Dalhousie Review, The Queen's Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Capilano Review, The Windsor Review, The Prairie Journal, Prism International, Canadian Literature, The Antigonish Review. She is now circulating a book of poems, In the Care of This Good Mother, and a book of linked short fictions, A Gift and a Baby Crying.

The Mother of Guido Watts-Russell, Papal Zouave
by Theresa Moritz
 
She kneels outside there, waiting
for your answer. May she ascend
on her knees, tearing her silk stockings,
the hundred rocky steps that will lead
her into you? It’s a task she has,
left to her because she does it well,
until she can do it perfectly
without succumbing to a certain weakness
of the lungs shortly after.

If you let her in, prepare yourself
to be a shrine
to find the stigmata growing
in your palms. She does this to you,
even when she’s gone. The feeling
keeps starting low inside you
and moving upward until it rests
behind your eyes and looks out frightened
for the way back down.

She makes you serve as Lourdes
or some other stony grotto of the ailing
and you can no longer bend
your own knees, you assume
the substantiality of the rocks,
and the children, without her,
are dashed against you, even poor Guido,
in his uniform of the papal zouaves.

Theresa Moritz is a poet and author who has not yet published a book. Her poems and stories have appeared in The Dalhousie Review, The Queen's Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Capilano Review, The Windsor Review, The Prairie Journal, Prism International, Canadian Literature, The Antigonish Review. She is now circulating a book of poems, In the Care of This Good Mother, and a book of linked short fictions, A Gift and a Baby Crying.

Sake of a Seiche
by Pamela Mordecai
 
I don’t care
if is sake of a seiche 
dem fishing-fellows
suddenly find a fund 
of fish to fill up dem net 
after dem sit on Kinneret 
one whole long night 
and never get nuttin

him who make sea 
and seiche never
need to search for
fecundity in a sea
him same one make

dat no plain?

and de fellows
was going to fish in 
de end not for finned
catch but dem as have
foot and forehead
forearm—and folly

best dem know
bounty is a blessing
bestowed

Pamela Mordecai is a Jamaican Canadian poet who often writes in Patwa or Creole inflected English. She writes across genres — long fiction, short fiction, poetry, plays, non-fiction — for children and adults. She has published nine books of poetry, most recently A FIERCE GREEN PLACE (New Directions, 2022) and DE BOOK OF JOSEPH (Mawenzi House, 2022), third in a series in Jamaican Creole about the life and death of Jesus, DE MAN and DE BOOK OF MARY being the first two books. All three books are subtitled: A PERFORMANCE POEM.