Vol. 1 / Issue 1
A literary and cultural review journal
Vol. 2 / Issue 3
Four poems by Elana Wolff
Luna
You are full of glitches and I write my little songs.
You grin like a backhand slap, I sit and scribble.
One in stone and one / aloneness; bed or breakfast,
which came first ... arm or harm or charm ...
The secrecies of outer / inner. Flips and language bits—
seeing these as p/art of poetry’s
work. And choosing from among the waiting words
to make them fit—in lines that might be said
to right themselves. I cast a piece with you herein,
your takes and your mistakes. You gave your face
for free, like Carrie Fisher signed her girlhood likeness—
Princess Leia—to Lucas. I claim your beauty too:
radiant in phases, grand and warm; at other times, ethereal,
oblique. I’ll see you at the waterfall tonight.
The song of falling water blankets the sadness. Yes,
I’ll be alone. You will be alone as well.
These Snippets, Lustrous & Doubled
Man in a dress-
shirt under the tent—attentive
& with questions:
What (from me) can he really want ...
I turn
& cough to my sleeve—
a past re-
peats (somewhat) like leaves ... & surely
as a pen is held
above the page, awaiting,
we share in our names a middle ‘a’—
like man—this man,
jackrabbits
& law.
Freedom,
fundamentally, is what
the law’s about, he says
the audience beneath the tent is listening
of their own accord.
We owe this
to the poems being
read, a woman’s will to connect.
This box of ‘Siamese
Cherries’ I bought for lunch at Market Square.
Every one of them lustrous & doubled:
two-conjoined-in-one-
continuous blue-
dark-reddish skin.
​
Three-prong Plugs Have Grounding Pins
Something above the window swings
an aleatory
shadow before
the towers across the street—they
block the daylight.
Vitreous floaters
double-
down
& the ficus trees—their eye-
shaped leaves are weeping.
If I listen hard to my feet, I hear the sinews
wailing too:
What is going on
inside this body?
My lower
lip has started to twitch I think
it must need water. I sit
to drink & drink the twitching
thankfully lets up.
The socket in the wall, I see: a perfectly
circular face,
two identical
spherical eyes, a mouth that’s moulded
into an O of wow or dread—
not dread—it has to be wow—
No nose
though it’s implicit. Pareidolia fills it in. The wall,
as wide as women’s wings. They’re beautiful,
so beautiful, that if I try
to write them down—to pin them into simile,
I’ll have missed.
Maybe I can swing one
into aleatory
shadow—
that’s a thing—
​
Docent
Stillman Secondhand Books closed up for good the week
before I arrived—looking to buy a novel to read to my mother
during my visit. I thought of Anita Brookner: Undue Influence,
Providence, Leaving Home, or Strangers. Something subtle,
elegiac, yet clarion. As I stood before the store—now grey
vacated space—a thin-winged docent: Monarch
butterfly brushed my cheek & fluttered up.
I felt bewildered, mystified—couldn’t say exactly what ...
Okay: de-
boned, shucked, un-
guided too, yet somehow beckoned ...
You never can tell if an odd surprise will make it
over into a poem. Like you can’t predict what you’ll do
if someone deep in your life says suddenly Go away.
It may be their way of saying Stay.
A switch can be
abrupt, & as moving as brush & flutter
Elana Wolff lives and works in Thornhill, Ontario—the ancestral land of the Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat First Nations. Her writing is widely published in Canada and internationally—recently in The Antigonish Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2024, FreeFall, Prairie Fire, Pinhole Poetry, The Rat’s Ass Review, and The Temz Review, among others. Her cross-genre Kafka-quest work, FAITHFULLY SEEKING FRANZ (Guernica Editions 2023), is the recipient of the 2024 Canadian Jewish Literary Award in the category of Jewish Thought and Culture. For more on Elana:​ Facebook; Guernica Edition