Two Dream Poems – Catherine Graham, VISPO – Robert Frede Kenter

West by Star

To cringe against
your thistle fist
I fix pandemic into dream—

hook inside hook.
Talk light. Pluck
air along edges.

Let seed-fields astonish
more messenger dreams,
flower brackets.

West by star, singe
puddles, a stream.
O skimming confession,

sun-chase of clouds,
go back to the box
before air fills with falling.

Horizon

In the disposable
nightmare of my dream,
the cloud,

a chase
of sunrise. Sky,
tender with

will as rings
in a tree
hugging themselves.

To extend
my horizon,
I navigate without

echoes edge
to a reference point—

knowing while feeling,
pushing through
sound—

your icy
love
casts
off.

---

Photo credit: Marion Voysey.

Catherine Graham is a poet, novelist, podcast host and creative writing instructor based in Toronto. Her eighth book, Æther: An Out-of-Body Lyric,was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, Toronto Book Award, and won the Fred Kerner Book Award. The Celery Forest was named a CBC Best Book of the Year and was a finalist for the Fred Cogswell Award for Poetry. Her debut novel Quarry won an IPPY gold medal for fiction and was a finalist for the Sarton Women’s Book Award for Contemporary Fiction. The Most Cunning Heart and Quarry were both Miramichi Reader Best Books and finalists for the Fred Kerner Book Award. She teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto where she won an Excellence in Teaching Award, leads the Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Book Club, co-hosts The Hummingbird Podcast—part of the WNED PBS Amplify app, and is a judge for the CBC Poetry Prize. Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead: New and Selected Poems is her latest book. www.catherinegraham.com Twitter: @catgrahampoet

Art: Constellations #5 and 22, visual poems by Robert Frede Kenter. Twitter: @frede_kenter, IG: r.f.k.vispocityshuffle, icefloe22.

Robert Frede Kenter is a writer and visual artist & the EIC/publisher of Ice Floe Press & curator of Geographies project. Books include EDEN (2021); work incl. recently in anthologies; The Chelsea Underground (Fevers of the Mind Press, 2024), InterPoem #1 (2023), Glisk and Glitter (Sidhe Press, 2023), Recalibrating the Pain Scale (Olney Books, 2023), Seeing in Tongues (Steel Incisors, 2023), The Book of Penteract (Penteract Press, 2022); journals incl.: Otoliths, Northward Journal, talking about strawberries, Writ, ARC, New Quarterly, Anthropocene, The Storms Journal, Black Bough, Street Cake Magazine, Acropolis Journal, Wombwell Rainbow, and numerous others.