POETRY

Grotto

Pain of release,
is worth a thousand haters

mothballs, humidity
hang in heat fill; broken generator.

Whizz-whirr of insects,
at worst tilted by staccato pops.

We scratch surface until wounds burst,
her touch is cold against my socks.

Sap weeps from tall serrated sheaths
aromatherapy, in disguise;

our hands, stained red with grease
sticky with the tar of their lies.

Blink
and the Bay recedes
molten ice, choppy green;

holds enough plastic to gut a fish,
weaned on a diet
spoilt milk, benzene.

Winner: Vallum Award for Poetry 2019
Presented by Vallum Contemporary Poetry.

All we are, are cavities
for Abbas Akhavan

Witness beauty, in the push
--pull of mutual desires
and spaces, mutated.

Stones rippling in casts
of folly, mimicry of
the sacred, sound.

Speak, of rituals and
mythologies collected
bathed, in lilac permed green.

Walk beyond
brass, boughs broken
past the bones of discourse

imagined, mur
mured echoes
of the mis--

remembered.

Winner: 2020 POWER OF THE POETS Contest
Co-presented by The Power Plant & Toronto International Festival of Authors. April 2020.

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