Emily Izsak
Six Plumed Bird of Paradise
Sleek re-entrance
to regorge prologue
only this cherry
stem dream catcher
can’t hold toothed beaks
specular puppets
for upskirt orthography
If I could rearrange the alphabet
I’d put cheep and chirp together
in rehearsal
or Butler sweeps
the snakeskin
dance floor again
Grebe
A little more than grab
and less than grub
decentres echoes
of composite fuckery
not his static atavism
at viscid tragi-comedy
but the divine synchro
red eyes and god water
A bird
of perfect
proportions
gobbles up drama
with feedback
troupes
who need
a theatre-
in-the-round
for coarser performance
Loon
Shtick offends
what the school calls
method splashing
her domino
money flipped
to say which
Hitchcock
wed the screwball
Water off a
thought experiment
If our
recreational opus
deprives another
sore homebody
would hindsight
oust the endoscope?
All this
approximate
subculture
and still the bookstore
partitions ecology
Sammy Blue Jay
Number one
ocular
gift
but every vest and
vengeance combo
follows the same
hypnotic wish
for friction
Origins
of underclothes go
back to green forest
Habitat the mother
of narration
scores a nut
without refuse
tells the paper rain
to hush up
or
next episodes
dubbed into
jay dialects
prize our failed
transformations
half out of harness
legs still
partial hominids
with neckties
Emily Izsak recently completed The University of Toronto’s MA in English and Creative Writing program. Her work has been published in Arc Poetry Magazine, The Puritan, House Organ, Cough, The Steel Chisel, The Doris, and The Hart House Review. In 2014 she was selected as PEN Canada’s New Voices Award nominee. Her chapbook, Stickup, was published in 2015, and her first full-length collection, Whistle Stops: A Locomotive Serial Poem, was published by Signature Editions in April 2017.