You Don't Own Me

mother figures

last night i watched a meteor shower

and wished on every glowing trace

for us to be strong, and bright and pure

and for me to be shot like a light into space

i could almost outline the shadowy figure

i want to believe that we’ll win this race

and for you, our future, to come true

may the extra terrestrial firings grace

my heathen prayer from the observatory

to see your precious martian face

Ladies Who Lurch

A Wing and a Prayer From Oprah

by Emmy and Ellie Anglin, written at Mother's Pizza in April 2018

O, Oprah, give us wings...

I'm praying that you'll give me my first public forum

but first forgive my sinful decorum

give me a wing - mild, BBQ or plain

and if you don't lift me up, I'll go insane

I know I'm acting like a common fan

but i want chicken so small it'll fit in my hand

If you won't make me famous at least give me wings

but of the two we prefer the first of these things

the first, figurative wings, will set our careers in flight.

the second, finely sauced, will at least set us up for the night

Between these two desires we are torn

but if you give us our own show, we'll give you our first born

Apartment Search, by Emily Anglin

Poem, Apartment Search, by Emily Anglin. Illustrated by Ellie Anglin. 

The Cave

The Cave

Living in a cave, dripping grey

with glow worms and lamp light

your neon strobe light 

makes me feel so 

masochistic

spiritually shooketh

weak as a kitten

I can't get over it

spelunking psyches

wandering strange-wise

remembering memories wrong

dancing sideways

measuring years of time

managing hours minutes days

dying somebody else's death

doing it my way

Sleeping With You

your eyelashes are still black and gold

even when I’m so scared i don’t know

what to do 

your chin and cheeks and nose are still so quiet 

when you sleep so deeply i get scared,

i get scared.

i check your chest to make sure 

and i feel like dying right now just to 

postpone my awakening

your hair points in the middle like a v

they call it a widows peak

and sometimes when you sleep i want to cut it off

because the idea of being your widow

makes me weep

makes me feel

too weak

inside it’s awakening.

(written for Andrea Hawkins (my now wife) in 2015). 

Emily Anglin

A poem by Emily Anglin.

Material

When you have swaddled your head in vermillion

linen to block a glint that widens like a coo

into a dim room striped with amber light;

when you have lain below a sink, hooded by an apron of

mauve lace, and peeped through eyelets at high panes

dappled with yellow and lime;

when you have sat on a bathing house step in the late-winter sun

and bundled your brow in a rough wool scarf

steeped to a sea green as the wind rushes;

when you have leaned against the bleached stone lion that guards

the coast, and wound yourself in sacking, 

binding your own wrappings

with twine,

as the gusts lift past a scrubbed seawall—then,

set,

bonneted,

tied

and laid out on the cool salt shore,

flat under bright sun you can slowly tune

a white light for shut lids to become.

For Betty

You died as a flower does:

petal by petal.  

When my body returns to clay 

I hope to feel your fur once again

with my celestial hand. 

My hand is not unlike your paw.

Your paw is not unlike a gentle budding branch.

Betty Anglin, 1998 - 2012.

May you rest peacefully, you were the delight of my heart and days.

Dance Against Death

This was another magnet/sticker we created to pay for SoMM printing.  We (myself and my SoMM co-creators, Caroline Wesley, Meagan Snyder, Amy Egerdeen and Eftyhia Lucas) used to just glue lines of poetry and other writing that our genius friends wrote on simple collages or just plain prints of famous art works.

These lines are from an incredible prose-poem/letter by my sister, Emmy Anglin, that was featured in SoMM.  My sister is one of the most talented writers in the world!  This poem was inspired by a period in which she was living in the first floor of this kind of bone-chilling house in a really creepy neighbourhood (near skeleton park!) of Kingston, Ontario in the dead of winter.  She was doing her PhD at the time (which she has since finished!  Hurray!) and there was a single guy living in the apartment above her. This guy worked in a kitchen and would arrive home from work every night at around 4am and would blast techno music, and he would pull her "from the leaf-covering of sleep with irregular pounds of a dance against death", at which point Emmy would get out her ceiling-prodding broom, and he would turn it down, and the next night they would do it all over again.

Dear Ryan, 


Opposing futures fight each other in my mind, extinction against hope.  I'm sorry your cat went pee-pee on you when he got out at 5:00 a.m. and you had to corner and grab him outside my window, but you shouldn't have gotten him declawed.  Then he could safely go outside.  Enough of my philosophies.  You seem like a kind-hearted person, and I almost loved you in the breeze of what felt like the earth's last heavenly afternoon (a post-script, a nostalgic favour), when I dozed in my chair over my book, the door open, the shadows pressing their epigraph against the gold of street and grass.  I heard your voice drift from the window above; you sang "Blowin' in the Wind" with such sincerity that I almost loved you.  But then I remembered the night before, when you pulled me from the leaf-covering of sleep with the irregular pounds of a dance against death.  The only shades in the house were the frail insights that hang invisible in the light but radiant as skeletons in the half-dark.  Please give me back the illusion that our days are different, that they end with sleep and start again. We need new chances.  Please, Ryan, or one of us will somehow have to go.  


Have a good day. 


Your downstairs neighbour,


Emmy.  

For My Cat Geoffrey

"For My Cat Geoffrey" Poem by Christopher Smart, Collage by me.  2008. 

I Work For Nasa

Astronaut is the Latin translation of “star sailor”. 

I think that’s very poetic.

I am not an astronaut but

I work for NASA.

My eyes follow blips across

the black void of a black box

and from my mouth into my headset

drip monosyllabic directives.

Still, I appreciate moments of poetry just like any other man. 

Yes, I work for NASA

 here in this place we call the Lone Star State.  

Not so long ago there was a day.

not unlike this day

on a planet no bigger

in this ever-expanding universe

than the gravy stain on my work shirt.

And on this day there was a moment.

I have read that by Rabbinical reckoning

a moment is 43 milliseconds.

This moment may have been more.

But I made a note of this moment in my log,

because there was a big smile slapped on your face

and your teeth were shining with spit

and there were something like stars in your eyes.

Waterloo, January 15, 2009