Foreign
construction;
Mirrors
cling to past images,
Smooth
edges recite falsehoods
Fraught
with mixed emotions.
Dissociated
desire;
Fractured by efforts to complement the landscape.
this poem by Jessica Goldson was inspired by Juan Travieso’s “The Monument”
New Blue Eyes
This Sudden and Correct Amount of Mirrors for The Modern Age
Agoraphobia: Nature Is A Solid
Slum Knock
Shame Follows Intellect: Home Edition
The Foulest Ball
The Curtain No Longer Drawn, The Yard Dreaming Itself Into Rooms
…Now Throw Your Rope
Jealousy: It’s What’s In The Mix
convins me ths flor is betr sharp
Approaching Grief (When You’ve So Long Been Stone)
Clear Tape Need
“Through Ares’ Ire, The Whole Of Mars Made Snow Globe”
Pearls Remember Glass
Squirrels Run On Power
So You Think You Can Dance While Burgling?
Saskatchewan Kaleidoscope
PATTERFALL
Chaos Tracing Hot Heart Shapes Into Stuck, and Disparate Trees
A Single Sailing Arrow
Was A Secret
Commit To Pieces
Peter’s Gate
Portrait of an Artist as an Old Photo of My Dad Leaning Against His Siren Red Chevelle
“Move Me And My Dead Starling To The Sill For One Last Look At Those Avocado Trees”
Everything’s Coming Up Dustpan
A Handy Guide For Zero
Not For Solitary
A Garrison Tinkle
“What’s A Former Square?”
word, “Pieces,” by Justin Million, inspired by the colour, “Yet to be titled,” by Koka Nikoladze
Those people who latch on
for stability.
What good is it to you
to bear the weight
of their despair?
Forced down
by the pressure of shared frustrations,
strapped to the same sinking ship.
Sure, blueberries can float in water…but can we?
word by Jessica Goldson
colour by Mi Ju
The now empty halls
a Dublin asylum
on Lower Leeson Street
you did what they said
carry the “fallen”,
Keelia, birthing a daughter
treated as defiled.
1941, aged 16,
there was no time to say goodbye
behind monastic walls
a bedroom, a cell
iron-barred windows
in each dream walking along:
“Ma, where am I going?”
but always wake up crying
bear pages of thick ledgers:
“You disgraced us!”
Unpaid workhouse
shapeless, long brown dresses.
The sound of hand-scrubbed linens
if you listen you can hear
the abbess and the nuns
on cold winter mornings
face shrouded in black veils
girls marching to six o’clock Mass
beyond, the ordinary, everyday world.
Pruning of an old mulberry tree.
Shrews, and lizards,
the nameless.
I was known as number 26.
these words by Ilona Martonfi were inspired by the colour of Alison Gildersleeve
1.5 million pounds of soil raised
to the 4th floor of Calgary’s CORE
shopping complex supports an inner-
city oasis. The Devonian Gardens
are open publically during mall hours.
Oil executives employed nearby
visit the green-space on lunchbreaks,
eluding the paupers of Stephen Ave.
in +15s returning to work.
As children we attended summer camp
at Lindsay Park Sports Centre,
belayed each other up its rock walls
shouted chicken on the high dive.
Kids today learn to play water polo
in a pool named by Talisman Energy.
Since 2002 the City of Calgary has
sold naming rights to the company,
20 years for 10 million dollars.
Fish Creek Provincial Park is the largest
urban park in Canada, abutting the
Tsuu T’ina reserve in the southwest.
Roughly 12% of the city is stewarded
by Parks Calgary, the highest ratio of
green-space per capita in Canada.
Rumors of a horse found dead
in Sikome Lake are merely rumors,
but a person did drown in its weeds.
Within the cemented waterways of
Century Gardens a man offers me
beans from an unlabeled can. He was
bitten on the leg by an unleashed dog
and chased into the park by police.
Concealed behind a bench and a
juniper bush, each donated by the
Devonian Group, we leave him sitting
in darkness atop the Brutalist landscape.
Later that year a decentralized dance-
party develops in Century Gardens,
culminating down the road under the
spotlights of Millennium Skate Park.
Despite the armed chaperones, shouts
emanate from a parking lot around
the corner at Mewatta Armoury. I try
to tell a girl she doesn’t have to go with
the guy gripping her by the shoulders.
Public gardens in Calgary are closed
from 11 pm until 5 in the morning.
When cops caught us hallucinating
after midnight in South Glenmore Park
(you in my driver’s seat, our drugs
on the passenger floor), they left
us with grins and a warning.
We were two blocks from where
I taught you how to drive a stick-shift.
After ditching my red Ford Ranger in
the grafittied enclosure for road debris,
we climb the dam on Elbow River. A
glassy reservoir reflects streetlamps
to the West as the artificial cliffs arc
down in the East. The capacity of these
sloping concrete channels have been
exceeded but twice, causing damage
to the riverfront properties.
All the black squirrels in Prince’s Island Park
will follow you along a path at dawn.
It must be a cold summer’s day
before cyclists and yoga seminars
arrive to claim the green-space.
Watch deer and geese retreat downriver
from a window of the Route 3 bus,
I’ll greet you soon in Votier’s Flats
with a cold 6-pack of beer.
these words by Kyle Flemmer were inspired by the art of Allison Gildersleeve
curating colour requires
knighthood, rescuing a coloured image
restoring it to a coloured name
in the woods there is more than colour
the texture of bark, bitter acrylics
the labour beneath
the layers
if an idea is painted, a history, a desire
a colour is not just a colour
orange is not colour
merely
it is instinct, fang, rupture
awakening
a devouring (of roots)
of tigerhood
flesh open skin peeled back
slow and half at ease
the bones remain
uttering a different story
the pain is a ghost language
*
once upon a time
I came I saw I assimilated
trapped in the woods
I use white words, leaving a trail
of crumbs in circular argument
I write I grieve I love
in
more than
colour
but wielding a sword in white space
is easier
than cutting down
bark
these words by Lily Chang were inspired by the colour of Tran Nguyen
word by Boris But
colour by Alex Andreev
The obsidian titan looms from
Below, a weary vision bestowed
On the fallow dreamer dreary-
Minded by the sea.
st-petersburg montreal
Your quiet eyes pace through
My possessions: strangling rope,
Brine-soaked pages, symbols of the
Lost hope of an exiled meanderer.
st-petersburg montreal
Dear stranger, learn of home
And sing of it. When us strangers
Gather on stranger seas, we
Recall a home we never see.
st-petersburg montreal
Tale by tale you regale of the forgotten,
The sea-tossed bottle lost in tribal
Misunderstanding, a tongue
Lashing at hollow space,
st-petersburg montreal
Our anguish laid bare in mutual
Vulnerability, pyrobabble in place
Of a strange silence. Your eyes
Glimmer beneath a buried quaver,
st-petersburg montreal
A ripple pulsing from an unknown
Provenance ripping apart
In a fear or pain
Lost to a generation unto me.
st-petersburg montreal
My adrifted mind scrambles for some
Consolation of storied survivors or
A measure of a distinguished nature, blessed
By the godliness of constellations above,
st-petersburg montreal
The mortal shipwrecked sands below.
But let me rot here with you
Borne in eternal entropy,
Born to be forever forgotten.
st-petersburg montreal
Do dead men cry? Do words die?
Who swims and who sinks in your currents?
This home will be home again. Welcome,
Old friend, and dare not stay silent.
st-petersburg montreal
word by Boris But
“What stranger does not first appear to be alien? Inspired by Alex Andreev’s masterful piece and anguished by the refugee crises and the oft-overlooked diaspora of vagrants everywhere, I crafted a poem about two strangers, perhaps parallel images, making a common home. What estranges people is the failure to recognize humanity in what we find unfamiliar. Stories imbue us with a transcendental magic, building homes where nothing should be.”
colour by Alex Andreev
“Alex Andreev lives in St. Petersburg, Russian Federation.
He’s been drawing, painting and doing graphic design over last 20 years.
He works as art-director in advertising agency and as senior concept artist for movie and game production. Born in 1972, Russia”
wordandcolour 
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