Published since 2002, an Ocean and Pounds publication
Greenwood
by Kai Chan
"Free Fall" 2021 28 x 24 cm, thread, ink on gampi paper
ProTesT
by Cem Turgay
Poem a Week
by Gary Michael Dault
Red Bone
bone tough
red with age and ache
that smooth length
of bony boat
drifting towards the sunset
is me
shell as hard
as a refrigerator's
with a marrow
of minced red
bone tartare
cooling off fast
that's me
mindlessly
nosing up to the horizon
NNHD DISLOCATION
by Holly Lee
You always remember your friends, depending on from which point you are looking, east, west, across the North Atlantic or North Pacific, and regardless of distance in time or space, all the same you remember them, fetching back their faces, voices, and personas belonged to those absent years; the time when you left your city, a time when you’d just gone through your own life crisis, a time when life began foreign and anew here; horse races went on and night clubs stayed open back there; you remember them in memories stored in your brain lobes, home-made videos, images kept in compact discs and hard disk drives; in locked rooms as if, over the years, the doors have not been opened. Fine, the condition goes both ways, time missing is time suspended, nothing changed, like editing movies in the old days, cut and paste, splicing the precise moment and gluing it back in place. But the next second, seeing you face to face, those memories collapse, years melting away, and in less than an eye blink, twenty years vaporized, faces of our youthful past have waned, counting years in grooves, in rings, in twilight, in pale ink.
NNHD DISLOCATION is a column by the five committee members of 女那禾多 NuNaHeDuo DISLOCATION, a publication founded in Hong Kong in 1992. Blues Wong, Holly Lee, Lau Ching-ping, Lee Ka-sing and Patrick Lee.
DOUBLE DOUBLE issue 0326-2021
View Current Issue
https://oceanpounds.com/blogs/doubledouble/0326-2021
CONTENTS: (NuNaHeDuo DISLOCATION, 2 of 3) A Life in Publication. Written by Holly Lee
From the Notebooks (2010-2021)
by Gary Michael Dault
From the Notebooks, 2010-2021.
Number 78: Two pages from March 2021 Notebook: on the left, Reflective Bird, and on the right, Yellow-Breasted Harbinger (of Spring), both from March 19.
CHEEZ
by Fiona Smyth
Aotearoa
by Madeleine Slavick 思樂維
Scene II
This is one of the few factories in the town nearest to my New Zealand home. It’s a printing factory, and this is the canteen, as seen through the front window in the weeks leading up to Christmas.
Travelling Palm Snapshots
by Tamara Chatterjee
Uzbekistan (November, 2019) – After several days inside the Itchan Kala hopping around the historical sites, we ventured outside the fortified walls. Our first excursion simply for basic sustenance, we walked across the arcade down a rather dusty road. Eventually we were invited into a large communist Russian era dining hall, it was rather empty, lacked colour, style or any real interest apart from the rustic menu of local foods. It was a complete departure from the intricate textiles and hand painted mosaics in abundance within the boundaries of the Itchan Kala.
Some Trees
by Malgorzata Wolak Dault
Number 67
American poet James Dickey once wrote an 8-stanza poem called "In The Tree House At Night." The first three lines of Stanza One
assert that "now the green household is dark, / The half-moon completely is shining / On the earth-lighted tops of the trees." The entire poem is splendid, but, in the interests of space (and time), I'm skipping to the final stanza: It follows from the line "When may I fall strangely to earth...
Who am nailed to this branch by a spirit?
Can two bodies make up a third?
To sing, must I feel the world's light?
My green, graceful bones fill the air
With sleeping birds. Alone, alone
And with them I move gently.
I move at the heart of the world.
James Dickey, "In The Tree House At Night" in Michael Roberts ed., The Faber Book of Modern Verse (London: Faber and Faber,
1965), p.375.
The Photograph
coordinated by Kamelia Pezeshki
This is the first photo in Anne Bayin's new book "Covid Behind Glass”. The book is a unique take on Covid, a journal in photos and spare text about a Toronto senior flying solo during lockdown. It speaks to serious issues of mental health, loneliness, seniors but with a light touch, using the device of plexiglass to express surreality. It’s endorsed by artists, editors, health professionals, the CEO of United Way and an Olympian.
Caffeine Reveries
by Shelley Savor
Under the Bridge
The Raw and the Cooked, MYTHOLOGIQUES
(A column on the culture of eating and cooking)
Eggplant
by Kai Chan
We can get eggplants year-round now though the best ones are found in the summer when the farmers have the fresh and bright shiny ones in the market. It is a very versatile vegetable that one could be bake, grill, boil, sauté or stuff. Most recipes suggest to salt the eggplant before cooking. Julia Child said that there are three reasons to salt the eggplant: to remove the bitterness, to remove the excess water and most significantly, to prevent the eggplant from absorbing too much oil or fat.
There are many recipes in preparing eggplants, most of them ask to have the skin peeled. However, I like to keep the skin on as its taste and texture compliment the smooth softness of the flesh. Here are two of my favourite recipes.
In the first one, cut the eggplant cross the globe into 1/4 inch thicknesses, salt them for about 30 minutes, then pad dry with a kitchen towel. Then fry each slice in olive oil with some chopped garlic for a minute or so until golden, and do the same to the other side. This simple dish is delicious.
The second recipe is to cut the eggplant into half inch cubes, skin included, and mix with a tablespoon or two of salt, let them sit in a coriander, with a heavy plate on top to let the juice drip into a sink, for about 30 minutes or so. Cook chopped onion in olive oil until translucent, then add the drained eggplant cubes. Let this simmer for a few minutes, add some white wine to help steaming, as well as to form a sauce. Some spices like chilli fakes, paprika or cumin may be added, plus some chopped parsley. This would make a a nice vegetable dish or as a wonderful sauce for a pasta.
The Raw and the Cooked, MYTHOLOGIQUES is a new column on the culture of eating and cooking, with contributions by various authors. The column name is borrowed from the title of a book by Claude Levi-Strauss. It is spontaneous, a little amusing but serious at the same time.
Leaving Taichung Station
by Bob Black
Versts: Версты
“It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.”—Schiller
I
Love leaps over the wall between us, like two birds in flight over the distance,
Grew into a dream both of us had long-ago packed liked repaired socks into our shoulder bags,
Ruminative and interrogating one another as we grew, both, up and separated by land and time.
I learned to sew on the long trip where I lost myself for two years in Asia,
Sewed both cloth and sorrow while Mama awaited my return in Jerusalem.
While you mapped out your aging anger and grief like broken bones from fallen fight,
Bones kept in a jaw in the garden because they could not be buried but bruised from the sunlight.
One night, as a child, I listened to you bark at me in the drunken night and shadows:
‘Leap out into the wide raft of things, conjure the living from the fallen dead and wicked—waving.
Bewilder yourself and cast off the clothespins."
The rusted pomegranate stains on my pants, the dandruff of time left on your shoulders,
the children I brought into this world, fearful.
Would they carry more of you Papa than of me, the gum, gulp, the gapped beacon:
The arbour aired all up in a ball of twine and feather.
And so I fled you and myself for the false mysteries of travel,
The stroke and strap of Motion and I bulleted.
I ran until I finally found myself exhausted, dirt washed and waiting
In the interminable terminal of refuge: Aeroport de Paris-
Charles de Gaulle, expecting
the thief of sleep to gamboling toward me and so
Amid that clacker and murmuring of broken syllables and trapped syntax,
I closed my eyes and my children, quickly, slipped their home and swam toward me in a
dream:
Click.
II
I dreamed that I reeled my child into my arms and pulsed his thirsty mouth against my cow-licked breast
Bowed my arms around his clavicle and sured up his papyrus spine,
Whispered to him,
As if milkweed settled upon the skeleton-stem of a green root,
Some lost story of the calligraphy of maps and torn curtains
And I rose, red as a Chrysanthemum, into the air, spinning,
My heart a coda aloft and going,
That fulsome pitch and panting pating
The spin of a hymn, tendering my dream wings, watery and wavering and
then
Slowly, inexorably, his voice appeared and I opened my eyes.
The dream was gone. My son was gone and I was no longer floral.
And there he stood:
And I was bewildered.
How could I have known he would arrive, I had not wanted nor expected him
To meet me in this place and at this time and of this wielding—
Haunted mendicant or haunting pursuer.
The shock of what we know yet never anticipate but can never deny.
His instructions lingered: “ Son, it IS me.:”
At first angered, then confused, then drifting toward some green distance, I blossomed neither field or story or his humid words, in that cold airport.
Name it fear.
Name it Versts.
Name it love
III
When I got up, he spoke to me simply, exhausted and aged,
“I’ve come to hold you Son. Not, to look for you or after you but to see
Because I miss your anger and rebellion.
I miss your argumentative heart dipped in the ink of our Russian night.
I miss your compassion and the scent of your refusal, after all you are my son.
I flew across the world to greet you in this over-romanticized city, where they celebrate the lights more than the true shadows.
Im the scent Saint Petersburg, we are Гопник.
Not poet on the boulevards, nor noble, nor madman.
Give me a vodka and your voice, a broken dream and your mothers anger over these expensive poets and and clean scarfs of this city of Lights.
I have traveled versts to smell your story again. You are my son.
I need to hear your drunken voice before I leap again away.
We are separate but give me that.
Later, we drank in a cafe candled by old men and the smell licked of burnt leather
And the Дача’s garden still long on his breath.
The shadows of the cafe, the old French men’s voices reminded me of how old he actually was,
How much he had given up, and the splattered loss.
Grief ages, Love veins, light and dark the garden of our undoing.
Then he asked me to carry his bag toward the metro as he needed to head to a different airport.
I held him and he tucked in just a moment or two too long,
My heart skipped a beat and I forgot, in the instant
Forgot to say, люблю Bас
And in the cavernous space of the underground stairs, heard only
Bас.
And we tributaried into different directions, down different steps and stories,
As I stood waiting for my train to return to the airport, I counted the scratches on my worn shoes
As lines in my father’s palms, as the engraves on the walls of a prisoners cell
And I thought:
How could he have met me? How could have he known?—that terminal at that precise time.
He had not known I was flying to Paris from India to thread up the journey and return to Jerusalem.
But then, just then in that moment, I looked up, across the opposing platform, and there he stood, ghost, delirium, imagination, my father
A stuck bird, a man for whom getting on the train seem a life’s journey and so far away.
And yet, he stood, wordless, wordless and he waved
bye or was it hello or was it both.
And he vanished in the train and into the hungry mouth of the subway tunnel.
He was gone and I was still there standing.
Love knows no algebra nor accuracy nor true stillness
and we survive
The leap and the broken now.
We bend toward the home of our ripening, bruised heart.
We bend toward home.
He was gone,
Mama was waiting.
And I was there and would always be there, even moving
And to this day I have remained, Песок,
Of you.
On that platform, dreaming and missing your voice
I am and forever will always be
Of you.
For: David Dector. This poem is based on a true life meeting, in where he met his father in Paris after returning from a 14 month trip through Asia. Most of the poem, I imagined.
For: Robert Anthony Black and Dima Black, my father and son, men alike.
STAY WITH ART. INDEXG B&B
(Breakfast area and small shop)
Located on the second floor of an art space, INDEXG Bed and Breakfast has 4 guest rooms, all with ensuite bathroom. Since 2008, INDEXG B&B have served curators, artists, art-admirers, collectors and professionals from different cities visiting and working in Toronto.
INDEXG B&B
50 Gladstone Ave, Toronto
416.535.6957
indexgbb.com
MONDAY ARTPOST
ISSN 1918-6991
Published on Mondays, with columns by Artists and Writers
Published since 2002, an Ocean and Pounds publication
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