Published since 2002, an Ocean and Pounds publication
Poem a Week
by Gary Michael Dault
Downsized
living partially
like any
cramped king
in an acorn
of infinite space
I gaze
at stars
one at a time
I read
hearty books
the size
of my thumbnail
I listen
to music
written in
poppyseeds
I eat pollen
and breakfast bowls
of spores
before they rise
into fat fungi
I go for walks
the length
of my arm
and sleep
soundly
nestled
in my own
palm
The Photograph
coordinated by Kamelia Pezeshki
Happy summer solstice, self portrait no.7 by Kamelia Pezeshki
Caffeine Reveries
by Shelley Savor
Grazing In The Apocalypse
Aotearoa
by Madeleine Slavick 思樂維
Winter in Aotearoa
A long dampness.
Greenwood
by Kai Chan
Spring Drawing 7, 2021 Watercolour on paper
DOUBLE DOUBLE issue 0618-2021
View Current Issue
https://oceanpounds.com/blogs/doubledouble/0618-2021
CONTENTS:
1. NIGHT OWL SONATA (in one movement), written by Holly Lee
2. front yard and the back alley, a prose-poem (in 42 photographs) by Lee Ka-sing
From the Notebooks (2010-2021)
by Gary Michael Dault
From the Notebooks, 2010-2021.
Number 90: Bird for Braque (June 18, 2021)
Travelling Palm Snapshots
by Tamara Chatterjee
Madagascar (March, 2010) – After several days aboard an interesting floating vessel, weaving in and out from the forested shores of the Tsiribihina, admiring oddly shaped foliage and a wide variety of animals. We landed in time for lunch at a bush restaurant; which served an interesting menu consisting of the days catch. We departed stomachs full for a an afternoon of chasing lemurs, just in time to provide docking space for a whistling fisherman hankering for some hearty fruit-bat stew.
ProTesT
by Cem Turgay
Some Trees
by Malgorzata Wolak Dault
Number 80
A sigh is little altered
Beside a slow oak;
As the rustling fingers
Of the sun
Stir through the silvery ash
That begins to collect on the forest floor.
It is the hour
When the day seems to die
In our arms;
And we have not done
Much that was beautiful.
Kenneth Patchen, "It is the Hour" in Hurrah For Anything, ( New York: New Directions, 1958), p.25.
The Raw and the Cooked, MYTHOLOGIQUES
(A column on the culture of eating and cooking)
Ratatouille
by Kai Chan
Ratatouille is a vegetable stew from the south of France. Apparently every household has its own recipe. Basically it is made with eggplants, zucchini, tomatoes, onions, garlic and herbs covered in olive oil and roasted separately and then all together. Since the animated movie, “Ratatouille” came out, it has been upgraded a fair bit. The French probably laugh at the fuss we made about this very simple dish. In the summer in the south of France, the eggplants would be tender, zucchini juicy, onions and red peppers sweet, tomatoes perfectly ripened by the hot sun, and there are plenty of herbs around, plus the best extra virgin olive oil. All one needs to do is to chop all the ingredients and cook them in olive oil.
Well, it is hard to match what the French could do, but we do try. A few years ago Melisa Clark wrote for the New York Times, a full page article with photo illustrations, to demonstrate the reason one needs to be rather fussy in order to make an excellent ratatouille. Since then I have prepared ratatouille according to her instruction; however, I have slipped a bit and modified her method. Here is the way I do it.
In the past summer I bought a lot of fresh plum tomatoes from the farmer's market and made them into tomato confits. First skin the tomatoes, remove the core, and put them standing on a roasting pan with chopped garlic, salt and olive oil, then bake them, at 270º F for 3 hours; baste the tomatoes with olive oil every 30 minutes or so. I use this tomato confit for my ratatouille.
In making the ratatouille, select the same amount of onion, zucchini, eggplants, red peppers and tomato confit. Chop all the vegetables to the same size ( about 3/4 inches cubes ), except zucchini in 1/4 inch rounds. Mix each vegetable with olive oil, salt and pepper with a bit of thyme and rosemary; spread each vegetable on rimmed baking sheet pans so that they would not be over-crowded, bake at 400º F for about 45 minutes, until the vegetables are tender and lightly browned at the edges. Once all the vegetables are done, combine them in a dutch oven, chop up the tomato confit and add to the baked vegetables. Add a generous amount of olive oil, mix everything together and simmer for 20 minutes. Taste and adjust the seasoning. It is good to have ratatouille cold or warm; and it tastes better the next day.
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.
CHEEZ
by Fiona Smyth
Leaving Taichung Station
by Bob Black
Illuminated Jars
“有時，紀念是最卑微的抵抗形式之一”--吾爾開希·(多萊特)
"Sometimes remembrance is one of the most humble forms of resistance."– Wu’er Kaixi
I
Of all the flowers and fields, of all the roads and ravines, of all the thickets of forest and fawn, is it that place, sightly above the slow creek behind the bend in the acre not yet parched or your long-ago backyard, left like a scar on Mai Huyền Chi’s shin, that place that sat like a chime above the muck and ducklings, the place formed out of the one day when we leapt and broke away the tickle of the water and family and county and cares, when she chased us and our parents broke, when the government cared and that flowered twig, the long chalky bone, longum and femur, which reached out with its small patella of a thorn: aucht and ache. The thorn, the patella that kneed my ear and torn heart, a long last scratch of her.
Do you remember?
The leaping out of and into the wide raft of things, our conjuring of living, bewildered things and their casting.
Leap
And then, opened
Of faith.
Of faith and the going, forever gone.
II
the difference between our appearance and the size of our encapsulated lives
among the herd, as we avoided people like falling stars, I spot a small red umbrella like a beacon in a sea of forgetting. And I for a moment was softened by this port light.
he salt in your hair, the brine on your tongue and your hopes marine kissed.
Beneath the arm of a cradling, stretched birch
Wind plants being upon all our bodies
Prostrate to receive the combing leaves
The dip of a snapped knob of knotted toughness--
Child or birthing twig.
In the twilight we wither longer becoming
grannies feeding pigeons from the library and the park,
Bent over and our hearts swaying in the long shadows and heat.
Soon, men gather recognition from their solitary soliloquies
Their voices coaxing them to fever or nostalgia for bravery
While women gather the still white bark in their fingers,
Webbing milk and spun thread from tree spiders and hope
Knowing long before the creak that their lives are disappearing into song.
In the cul-de-sac twilight, a lone Birch grows suspect of the jade turtles beneath his scalped roots.
Have you noticed, beneath the sea of the sky transfigured
How snowy our hips carry the weight of the shore’s crown and the solitary tree
Melted to sugar and tossed along, as if leftovers,
The narrow spine of nostalgia’s house
Smoothed down by the throat of a roof gutter
And shorn along the soft chest of the porch
The architect of memory—
The child in the front room togging and tucking
Soft inside and trolley clatters beyond clutter of the narrow street that overlooks the sea.
Kiss-fed lips, as a pebble fell from the roof and our heart and life broke wide open,
Long the green eyes, the temperamental duration of elements:
The heart of the matter is the same and, slips quietly
Gone.
Still.
III
She dreams all this up, like an heirloom recipe
The hammering of plants builds from cypress or the figuring
Of claws etched along the history of a tin room
Wood instilled from the scratches of patients
Dream known, as the rhythm of a loom.
And upon reflection bent back as if a reflection,
From country of old to filed inside of new:”
Who will lift the child out rom amid
The constellation of his heart?
Dreams fast slip.
Still beneath Birch, the tree limbs and the breath of night,
Your mother’s warmth and the tears that usher you as in a funeral.
Then is this: late summer and the scent of cool, damp grass in the twilight,
This child, that you once were,
Gazes into the kingdom of an illuminated jar.
IV
You, unstill’d, are incandescent, the dusting up of the world,
The world of coat and cum and cantor caught in your beautiful mouth—
The language of meaning.
Once you chased luminous night bugs in the grass forest and glowed, incandescent.
Is this not your heart?
Is this not your wobbly bone-work and fever,
If only your parents knew.
the balance the of the world, determined by the bite of the stretching tee,
by the lap of the licking toad, nearly lost in your lap.
The lightning bug’s arched their small tails of fire against the glass
a constellation against the clarity of the bottle,
The arithmetic of things.
The light and the silent scratching recalling his name
Staining his lips with that biological yellow chalk and the buzz.
Do you remember this, with
The insects phosphoresce rubbed and marked against your skin,
Aglow.
Was this not the first time you understood you were alive and had a heart,
Broken.
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
mail@oceanpounds.com
mondayartpost.com
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