It’s Time for the Pulp Literature Issue 39 Poetry Round-Up!

Burning Well

In Issue 39, Summer 2023 we brought you poetry by Elina Taillon, Haro Lee, and DS Martin that doesn’t just burn. It takes us to the moon — and madness. 

We are delighted to share with you the opening stanzas here.

---

Restraining order against the moon

because I saw you peering
a tunnel through the tree branches
yellow-eyed staring 
winking behind another building

and because I noticed you while sprawled
on the couch next to my charging
phone and laptop, corn chip dust
under my fingernails, and because

you have no business spying
now, or the time I ate macaroni
out of a wine glass, or when 
I cut my hair laughing, tearstained,
took fifteen minutes to open a can,
flicked a fingernail clipping
towards a pile and missed
and didn’t pick it up off the floor …

Elina Taillon is a queer, neurodiverse MFA candidate in UBC’s Creative Writing program and former managing editor at PRISM international. Elina holds a master’s degree in French literature from the University of Toronto. Elina’s prose is published in Déraciné and filling Station, and her poetry appears in CV2, The /tƐmz/ Review, and Grain. Visit her on LinkedIn.

---

Mattawa

          What is unseen is sometimes discoverable
          through reading the signs  
                                        A half-dozen crows
          startled into the air at our passing   return
          to the same   grassy ditch 

Deer remain beyond the tree line   their
conflicting instincts twitch   behind jittery eyes  
                                            the forward propulsion
the uh-uh up ahead
                     the pounding heart   the desire to dart
                                         the trickle of cool waters
the ugly scent of spent fuel
                     the perpetual image of canine pursuit
the naked opening
                                    the whisper of tender shoots
the wide   nowhere to hide …

DS Martin is the author of five poetry collections, including Angelicus (2021), Ampersand (2018), and Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis (2013) — all from Cascade Books. He is Poet-in-Residence at McMaster Divinity College. He is also the series editor for the Poiema Poetry Series, for which he has edited more than thirty poetry collections and three anthologies. DS and his wife live in Brampton, Ontario. Visit him at dsmartin.ca.

---

My Love Exhales on the Other Side of the Moon 

The gathered body upon bed: 
It desires 
in a river of dried amphibians. 

Its bones are the tunnelling pipes 
that rise from the river’s disuse
like waning moons
whose ghosts run through them now. …

Haro Lee is a Korean poet and English teacher living in South Korea. Haro’s work appears or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Zone 3, The Offing, The Indianapolis Review, The Texas Review, Anhinga Press, and others. Haro was the recipient of Epiphany Magazine’s Breakout 8 Writers Prize. You can find her @pilnyeosdaughter.

---

To read the rest of these powerful poems, pick up your copy of Issue 39, Summer 2023 today!