Archive for February, 2020

feeling small in the big easy

Posted: February 25, 2020 in janice macdonald
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At Graveyard Number 1, the guide spoke of the water table under New Orleans, the city that floats between Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico. Conventional graves couldn’t be dug, so these were built up, like coffin-sized ovens, and used over and over. Families gave notice that a funeral would be taking place, and the graveyard keepers would precede the cortege, pushing the previous occupant’s meagre, baked remains off the upper shelf down a space at the back of the mini-mausoleum.

People came, he said, to see where Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda freaked out in Easy Rider, or to kiss Marie Laveau the voodoo queen’s grave, but he was proud of his hometown and wanted people on his tour to experience far more than the frisson of ancient folklore. As he said, people came to his city for the party or the jazz or the voodoo history, and while all of it could be found, packaged and price-tagged for the tourists, it didn’t fully represent the city he loved. So he guided these tours in the hopes he could paint a clearer picture of the Big Easy for those who came with eyes to see.

She strolled back to the hotel, down Royal Street, avoiding the drunks on Bourbon Street. She bought a print of an old French Market Coffee sign in one of the galleries, and the owner showed her the courtyard where Steinbeck had been married, and offered to take her photo there. Back on the street, she spotted green Mardi Gras beads in the gutter, bought in some souvenir shop so far from Lent, and she felt so far from home.

 

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Janice MacDonald is best known for her amateur detective, Randy Craig, who stars in the first mystery series set in Edmonton. She has written non-fiction, children’s fiction, short stories, plays and music. https://janicemacdonald.ca/

 

 

More about Marie Leveau, the voodoo queen

—  & a song in her honour (happy Mardi Gras!)

 

 

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Up Next:

“No one wants to be an it but don’t gender them. Imagine them instead as adversaries—”

 

the future

Posted: February 7, 2020 in ronna bloom
Tags: , , , ,
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I saw the icons of my generation trashed, pounded, run over.

Sunlight, Madge, we were soaking in it. That box that held our kisses

was flat. Lifestyle came undone so that life was hanging on by the grate

and style underfoot. What happened and is it everywhere?

“The future is in plastics,” said the man in The Graduate and it is.

 

One night in the last century, I dreamt I sat on a high wall an open book

on the ground and the sea rose. Be careful the book! I called.

The water came anyway. What is precious and who cares and how much?

To each her own footwear in the apocalypse. It’s not just the litter it’s the latter.

But some people notice. Someone took these pictures.

 

In Australia, fire eats the houses and the vines in California.

In Venice, someone’s couch was swept into the water, someone’s tombstone.

Tourists looted the Vuitton store and swam away with the goods.

Tom Waits is not dead yet so I ask him what am I seeing?

Misery’s the river of the soul, he says. Everybody row.

 

The young are out mopping because there’s no school

when there’s no school. And the old, well, it doesn’t matter how tired and dazed you are

when you’re up to your knees. All you can do is wait. The tide will turn.

Sunlight. The real thing. Until the next siren. Fire and water and so on.

Sisyphus that old trooper. Sisyphus is us.

 

♦

 

Ronna Bloom is the author of six books of poetry. Her most recent book, The More, was published by Pedlar Press in 2017 and long listed for the City of Toronto Book Award. Her poems have been recorded by the CNIB and translated into Spanish, Bangla, and Chinese. Ronna is Poet in Community to the University of Toronto and Poet in Residence in the Health, Arts and Humanities Programme. She runs workshops and gives talks on poetry, spontaneity, and awareness through writing.

https://ronnabloom.com/

 

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Up Next:

“People came, he said, to see where Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda freaked out in Easy Rider, or to kiss Marie Laveau the voodoo queen’s grave…”