3 Poems by Stephen Collis

your purists are where we are going

I cannot
forthwith
the mechanism
some clouds
new wind
all the change
we’d enable
comes out
carnage too
often abrupt
like shellshock
the hope of
no hope
in a file called
No File
we cannot open
or close 

loose regulators

When we
slow the crickets
down
tromp l’oeil
nuance of
nothing’s
as real as a
flash of lightning
image at a standstill
stormy or quill-bright
now and then
leaping forth or
dynamically holding
each other in the
wind a minute
sleet and the cropped
state of the world
wobbling reflection
in the pitcher we draw
valets to no powers 

placed a long time in the future

Seems like
furor now
off the temps
inside of us or
against half of us
such as no doc
or sans papier
what representation is
is a winter of
spent enclosures
unspecified seams
a firth or
gorge broken
open I give it
spatial egress
to walk into
there’s all of us
now grow 

Bionote

Stephen Collis is a poet, editor and professor. His many books of poetry include The Commons (Talon Books 2008; second edition 2014), On the Material (Talon Books 2010—awarded the BC Book Prize for Poetry), To the Barricades (Talon Books 2013), and (with Jordan Scott) DECOMP (Coach House 2013). He has also written two books of literary criticism, a book of essays on the Occupy Movement, and a novel. In 2014 he was sued for $5.6 million by US energy giant Kinder Morgan, whose lawyers read his writing in court as “evidence,” and in 2015 he was awarded the Nora and Ted Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy. His forthcoming book is Once in Blockadia ; he lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.