Published since 2002, an Ocean and Pounds publication
Caffeine Reveries
by Shelley Savor
Dumpling Dance
Aotearoa
by Madeleine Slavick 思樂維
It is the bud I love and the after-flower.
Poem a Week
by Gary Michael Dault
Raccoon
dark dandy
under a tinsnip moon,
the raccoon aches for food,
this black gourmand
of the velvet at the bottom
of your garbage can
the raccoon’s passion
scuffles through
your coffee grounds,
shines its flashlight
in your quaking windows
leave it alone
with its ballet claws
it scrapes your garden,
tearing the life back
into flowers
it looks with a mariner’s eye
on your leftovers
you must thank it
for its broken heart
for its ladder through the night
CHEEZ
by Fiona Smyth
DOUBLE DOUBLE issue 0604-2021
View Current Issue
https://oceanpounds.com/blogs/doubledouble/0604-2021
CONTENTS:
1. In response to Ka-sing's Twenty six recent photographs, a poem by Holly Lee 2. Lee Ka-sing - Ten photographs from TIME MACHINE series.
The TIME MACHINE series began in 2016. It is an on-going project, currently over 150 pieces have been created. Some of them were finished in mixed media of archival print and acrylic, each mounted on 7x7x1.5 inch hard wood as a piece of unique object. They appear also in the collaboration with Gary Michael Dault, in which the writer created HAIKU in response to some of the TM images. The collaboration can be viewed on this web page:
http://leekasing-tm.blogspot.com
From the Notebooks (2010-2021)
by Gary Michael Dault
From the Notebooks, 2010-2021.
Number 88: Electric Fan (September 26, 2016)
Travelling Palm Snapshots
by Tamara Chatterjee
USA (February, 2018) – I guess it really doesn't matter much where you are when visual intrigue and mindfulness collide, when the mind connects to something more profound than expected. It happen a few years ago when intersecting with Red Block. El Anatsui massive metallic tapestry; made of reused liquor caps and copper wire. The materials referencing the effects of colonialism; merging of global markets and loss of identity.
The Photograph
coordinated by Kamelia Pezeshki
Vortices of Light 1 by John Wallace
ProTesT
by Cem Turgay
Some Trees
by Malgorzata Wolak Dault
Number 77
'm very fond of this old cedar tree. Its bark is not as rough and petrified as the bark of other old trees. There is some almost linear softness as there is in a raw and woven silk shawl, a shawl that keeps on going until it meets the sky. To follow the lines of the bark can be almost meditative. The fluidity and silveriness of the bark is like a wall of a falling rain.
Greenwood
by Kai Chan
Spring Drawing 5, 2021 Ink on paper
Leaving Taichung Station
by Bob Black
The Only Scarf in the World, Most Beautiful
i
Close your eyes:
At first the child cannot distinguish in the early morning light whether the soft color at rest upon the sand is the discarded skin of fruit, worn cloth fingered expertly by some grandmother’s hand for the skull or a drift of shell surprisingly gold. Though he knows not yet the words, this child understands that the morning light, like confusion or stupor, is neatly democratic. The drunken green waves, the jade clouds, the juniper hills, the sage seawood, the parakeet heart climbing up his throat. Without question, he admits to himself that the golden object is all he needs this day, running before mother and father have awakened and particularly each moment, dazzling in the winds. In fact, it is a simple scarf, perfumed with a familiar scent, the colour of spring pineapple freed from the night before. He entangles himself with as if made for his neck, but he intuits that it was meant for a woman and he bends, like willow or crabgrass in offshore breeze, bowing his body as he stares at the cloth, the sea, the sky and horizon calling and in that moment, this six-year old waits and listens. The world expands, in that moment, with the sea.
Along the beach, teachers coaching after-school activities are toasting fire to the limbs of driftwood and the wind whistles toward 千里眼 and 順風耳 as Mazu sits upon her onyx throne listening to the sea and waits as folk bring to her home-grown bananas and red candles lit with devotion: Dragon's Blood, Frankincense & Myrrh, Patchouli, Precious Lavender, First Rain, and White Sage. Shrimp being hauled up from the sea’s belly, lovers stealing kisses in front of the vendors, grandmothers barking out instructions between bite and laughter and the little ones refuse to listen as they await their mothers, their fathers already drunk on warm beer. And the light dampens and the day sings obsidian.
So begins his day.
ii
His mother saunters into the light, wearied from the drinking the night before and watches him kite over the sand, not in the naming of light uncovered on a beach but in the pouring of tea, rich and chartreuse spreading warmth in a room that has cooled throughout the night, her body and head opening cavernous and unmistaken. Knob of honey, her tongue the taste of salmon soup and salted squid and forlorn kisses slipped away and swallowed between the closing of the refrigerator door, the dressing prior of the dreaming beach-bound child’s simple lunch and the remembrance of the dog’s name, last night run away. Somewhere, sometime, she will recall without labor the stony taste of Yilan whiskey, but for now a time-country away. But the taste will remember her. Count on it.
And she says, low as the horizon, to herself, my bloom fades quickly in the milky morning though I wish to flower as long as the kneeded soil, fecund and carving time and shadow running deep through Mama’s milk, blazing to the fall of the last sound as the scarf later recalled when slightly panicked in the morning shower. She will recall that she had misplaced her anniversary gift but has forgotten where. Last night, a month previous, a year, this eternity? Its loss will not trouble her as this moment, for her heart, as she looks out the window, as rusted silver because she cannot recall when and now where, a token of what was dreamt of by her mother-in-law and promised by her husband, a gift foresaken. And Fear awakens and washes up, she thinks, as laughter. But these are thoughts which occur to her hours long later, when the tea’s scent again returns to her tongue and reminds her of burnt bamboo and riche damp in the banana leaves. But for now, she can only attempt to see and listen for him from the blown open window, trying to recall the dog’s name but then tripping as she sees him racing over the rocks and sand and she hurdles through the front door. Soaring.
So begins her day.
iii
He is never so complicated nor softly complete.
He awakes to the scent of apricot, dried toothpaste and carnivorous dreams, both his son and wife gone, this simple life. So, he kicks himself out from underneath the sheets warmed by the Spring sun hung high already as the goddess razors his boat in the port worrying, shaking as if a dipped in the icy Pacific, cold as the pears in December groomed by sea water and mountain outpouring. His feet, numb, touch an even cooler tile floor and it only gets simpler, he thinks, and watches himself waver in the plum mirror of the television still buzzing news, his reflection stolen as the light in the subway window above the streets in the long lost city, soot for eyes, smile for tears, his desire battered between the drive from Su’ao to Taipei. Then the spreading sound and he hears his son’s voice across the rocks, skipping upon the beach clutching to something his eyes cannot quite focus upon. “It must be a scarf, most beautiful” though he does not at first understand why he says this to himself. He can hear his child’s wildly expectant voice reach and then in the distance it closes and his heart drops, in that instant, something has left and he sees his son grown up, racing over the hill far in front, far in the distant, far ahead and he realizes he will never catch him and he wants to scream how much he loves him, how much he has pancaked his life to this moment and he will never express it more precisely. My son is growing and leaving and my heart will never be so strong again, as I age and lose that which I love more than the roots of this land. And he sits down in front of the wind and catches his wife, she too running toward the swell, and he suddenly, without expecting, weeps.
So begins his day.
Shale shell the night song, the summation amid the normal that has broken free and he is afraid.
Open your eyes.
iv
But that was long ago—
The vanity clear through the wires transmitting prayers overhead, winged words in the shape of evening birds at sea, the sound of the floor boards tapping the chirp of the heart, the soul trembling and yet life still occasions the miraculous, still occasions the voices weaving about the autumn grass on the hills, small pebbles hardening into mineral and rattling like a cup of teeth in the fishermen’s town, bricking and braking inside the circumference of each of us. The beach treasure-hunter child now a man and that morning, a opaque memory that he tries to piece together as he sits and writes, words and body close together, rivering through death toward life, in the blink of an eye. He says to himself, open your eyes. They are gone. They shall not return no matter the algebra of your wanting as the sky opens, again, as body green with hope and he turns to the light and he pivots an alphabet in his mind and, though now tears are welcomed, he realizes that moment and forever forward, he is finally
Opened.
For: Wan-lin Young and Ling Ang
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.
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50 Gladstone Ave, Toronto
416.535.6957
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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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