My Mountain
a shopping mall that autocorrects to sufferinggarlanded with acronyms: h&m hmv kfc bmv
its scree: crushed McDonald’s coffee cups,
condom-strew about the parking lot
its flora: brad nails and rust debris
and fauna; seagulls pecking at discarded pizza crusts,
after-dark rodents, a maim of pigeons in their makeshift dovecote
empty beer bottle talus, scintilla
of deciduous thought-streams
smatter rapidfire beeps and chimes ka-chings
*
We are in a tree now, an atelier of newly pickled walls
a frown of intended garden
one last cicada seize left behind after the hegira
catkins tremulous between our eye-ear
someone else’s already a cacophony
a practiced memory of fiction and wood
This night the bulb becomes physical
sinister geometry – a migrant wile
becomes populace arms swinging at different velocities
How the moon looks annoyed
because they took too much off the top
won’t accept her mane, her wane, her come-nots
her violent greens cracking through
How the pen writes blue and what language
leaks out or this or that glides
Where are the words, Wilhemina?
Be prepared to fall!
The wrapper grows among crumbs
a new era born on its tenth avalanche.
Speaking in Tongues
Once in the face of gnawing, a ravethe corner sunsmash bugaloo of home
the mesh bus stop: a shell of world
disappeared, taken as mother and city
as urdu, russian meaning borrowed
beside the b-side the delicate horror
of lacrimal ducts, windows
roughed out of cahoots, a little segue
humming vignettes in situ –
and from the south a violating light
wraps hard doesn’t leave
a pillow for memory the so-called
bedouin scraps congregate
re-vowelled into supple topography
Please hold the handrail
The warm rubber of morningtells me where I am and how I travel
How to build a god –
mix match morph
an operatic truth we can’t unriver
clinging madly [magically?] to a million grasses
the nudge of the escalator
looting memory to constitute a present
Minimalism is a mistake – like slow-cooked roses
– concierge of the mind’s dirty laundry
She on the stoop combs her eyebrow
into place
a portrait of constant recognition
the epistemic aha!
when the head is a heart and the heart ahead
dwarfing a lion imagined as dog
or crooner of yesteryear’s pop
One building past
a geography of waste: pock-marked plastic, injured vinyl
fragments once a melody or a line dance
The strays on the street won’t come too close
but we share a secret
miscegenated handprints
blue until the afternoon
windexes them away
an intimation of clear water
Jaclyn Piudik @jpiudik is the author of To Suture What Frays (Kelsay Books 2017) and three chapbooks, the corpus undone in the blizzard (Espresso Chapbooks 2019), Of Gazelles Unheard (Beautiful Outlaw 2013) and The Tao of Loathliness (fooliar press 2005/8). Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including New American Writing, Columbia Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Burning House and CV2. She received a New York Times Fellowship for Creative Writing and the Alice M. Sellers Award from the Academy of American Poets. Piudik holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from the City College of New York, as well as a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto. She hails from New York and currently lives and works in Toronto.
Banner Art: “Toronto Take #2” by Robert Frede Kenter
IceFloe Press 