|
New poetry from Canada Jennifer Footman.
|
|
|
Welcome to my work
|
I am a poet and fiction writer.
I consider myself a radical feminist who uses her commitment to feminism in all her work. How old fashioned!
My work has been widely published in the US, UK and Canada in literary magazines and anthologies.
Briefly about myself:
Originally from India, I spent most of my life in Edinburgh and am a graduate of that university, coming to Canada in 79.
I have won several competitions including the Canadian Authors Okanagan Award and the Alumnus\Scotia McLeod Award.
Through a Stained Glass Window. Published by Envoi Press of Wales in 1990 isbn 0948478 65 9
$7.00 Cd. inc pp
Gathering Fuel in Vacant Lots. HMS Press of London Ontario in Dec 92. ISBN 0-919959-82-X
$7.00Cd inc pp
St Valentine's Day Broken Jaw Press. ISBN 0-921411-45-6
$14.00 Cd inc pp
Mix Six Mekler and Deahl 1-896367-06-2
$10.00 Cd inc pp
All available from author by email.
Dali's January Moon
In this pitched vacuum
rainbow lunatics
circle a hungry moon.
White edged mouths
suck drips
from empty time.
Against shadows of bare maples
tendril fingers sweep
barren fields.
Silver road stretches
--lazy elastic coming and going--
from licking light.
We play hide and seek
with the ringed moon
while frosted hounds
their hoary mouths
green fanged, howl
at misbegotten moon's quickening light.
A beat fills thin air,
dimly wakes shadows
lurking in mined depths.
Everything waits
the one
final excavation.
|
|
|
|
|
Another poem. In-law
|
In-law
My father-in-law was deep
under some sea in a submarine
when he was told
about the deaths of two of his brothers
within a week of each other in France.
Soon his father too
died of loss, of dying.
Today I stroke the hollows
and bumps of my husband's
head and feel the skulls of two young men
shoddy teeth missing, a jaw here or there.
I see their bones mixed with those
of German, English and Scot
fertilizing that sour French soil.
Within a year my father-in-law married
then fathered eight children in ten years.
My guess is that in the soft
silk crown of each new baby
he felt a brother's heartbeat;
my guess is that in the curl of new fingers
he felt a man's grip.
I paint my sons' bones
the way white shines through beige light
the way that they are mine.
He had nervous breakdown
in his thirties, sat in a corner
sat in a corner, little Jack
Horner sitting in a corner
looking at the meeting of four walls
the corner where dust and flakes
of skin gathered
and he was just
the point of that corner
and nothing more
but the point of the corner.
When he was old
and in the ward of twenty old or mad men
the nurses complained
that he would expose himself
to all and sundry. They tied
his hands together
so he could not expose his dick
to the good clean people coming to visit
the sick.
One time I was there
and freed his hands
and he stood up beside his bed and peed
round and round and round
his urine yellow on the sheets
concentrated
making daffodil maps of the world.
|
|
|
|
|
I am Kali too
|
Kali
I scoop your brain,
lick grey fingers
search some taste.
My tongue chills
on this insipid mash.
I suspect no lake
of salt could season it;
know it to be tasteless
no matter
how adulterated.
This is hell we live in
here and now.
We circle it
it circles us.
When we die
if we perform well in this hell
we get to heaven,
Good bodies us.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
