yet this Lenin likes to gaze into the distance
yet that Lenin dislikes Futurism
yet this Lenin likes white wine with his caviar.

The lake, stagnant in its worsening, dust what blows
across the algae as a plume of white smoke billowing formats the night.

A language of landscape figures prominently in the work, one where the ‘trace’ of Tracelanguage gauges Celan’s music amid the rubble of its German, post Shoa.

Driving that train. The words book. You stare glassy eyed at the onrushing terrain. Ain’t no more cane.

This chapbook contains “Prince George, Part I” and “Sixty,” two poems from a larger collection McKinnon has been working on for a number of years.

05/09/04 Now she is blogging. Now she is sitting on the black couch listening to the sirens wail and the rain fall. Now she is thinking of oysters. Now she is wondering why this is worth sharing. Now she is thinking, how decipher what is worth reading? Who is to say?

You’d better get on side! But we won’t say which one. We’ll trust you’ll read this useful guide to picking one.

Kemeny Babineau has attempted to create a tri-language collage of then and now called VDB Wordlist.

A DOG FIGHT

A fragrance of wild mint
beneath the twilight ladder
there must be a language one can use
to say things as they are
neither more or less
there must be a hole in the lid
of the body so it can rain
into the heart
an evening of granite of nothing.
The dogs are fighting. Goodbye sugar
sprinkles onto the bittersweet fax.
We must have many housed
so death can lose itself.
Everything is here a little while longer yet
and the horseradish is in flower.

EPIGRAM

You can spend an entire life
in the company of words
not ever finding
the right one.

Just like a wretched fish
wrapped in Hungarian
newspapers.
For one thing it is dead,
for another it doesn’t understand
Hungarian.

The poetry of Weight is situated on the sharpest available intersection of two extremes: the blandly narrative, and the wildly disjunctive and polydimensional.

Welcome to Earth : poem for alien(s) muses on displacement, estrangement, and discovery. it began with a “what if?”: what if we were trying to describe “life” to an alien? how do we break down the complexity of living into essential elements? perhaps the poem could be seen as a kind of creation myth. perhaps life begins with light.

on cowardice

i used to think i was a
coward it started when
i believed every lie i heard
but one summer day a
guy on hastings street yelled at
another guy for crossing on a
red light & the jaywalker strolled
back knocked him down then
cut his ear off &
i thought gee i just don’t
think i can do that.