Four for Rosmarie Waldrop
rob mclennan
It snows inside my body.
Rosmarie Waldrop, Love, Like Pronouns
Enticements. Listen, multiplied. Am ordinary, thickening coil. Same seeks, reaches out. Don’t confuse this. Mirror, mirror, landing. A tiny convention. The language of a long curved road. The body is not iron, painted, thistle. Not the only fact. One chooses what to hear, one does not choose to comprehend. Sign, please, at the dotted line. Clotted cream, and jam. We scone.
Light: colours, white through upstairs. At the margins, bleeds. All our comforts are foreign. The marginalia of distraction, depletion, deflection. One plus one plus one, plus. The infinite space of beginnings. Pushed to the viral, end.
Magenta, spills. We mark a path of warm. Would break. I can’t help but ask.
Driven. This is not my usual practice. A day of scrapped. Shirt pockets. What does sound make. Sink sink sink sink sink.
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles include notes and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014) and The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014), as well as the poetry collection If suppose we are a fragment (BuschekBooks, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds), Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com.
