Falling, Floating
David Barrick‘s hypnotic ‘Recurrent Dream #79’ won first runner-up in our 2021 Magpie Award for Poetry, and appears in Issue 32, Autumn 2021.
Final judge Renée Sarojini Saklikar had this to say, “Wonderful poem! Reminiscent of poems in John Berryman’s fabled Dream Song sequence and Stanley Kunitz’s The Testing Tree — high praise indeed. One stanza, five perfectly balanced sentences constructed over twenty-seven lines. Impeccable grammar and precise line breaks. I loved how the first line neatly frames the question posed in the last line, and the way the title itself embeds the answer. Not to mention the gorgeous imagery.“
We are delighted to share with you a sneak peek from David’s forthcoming book Nightlight, to be released this spring by Palimpsest Press, and now available for preorder.
As David tells us, “‘Long Range Forecast’ offers a different kind of dream, an allegory for a world spinning with uncertainty.”
Long Range Forecast
by David Barrick
The sky is falling and so am I. We’ve been falling together for a long time now. Other things are falling too: a potted fern, a lawnmower, a cow, newlyweds. Everyone seems pretty calm about it, as if we’re fully committed to where we’re going. The sky whiffles along our limbs, a refreshing turbulence. The newlyweds hold hands, their formal attire rippling like parachutes, and the lawnmower purrs. Really, it’s as if we’re all just floating in midair. Could we live here? I close my eyes and make my house appear. I open the door, inviting others in for a continental breakfast. I flip on the coffee maker, snap linen over the kitchen table, set the fern on the windowsill. Outside, the cow is still falling — spinning end over end, losing her milk, mooing softly, a storybook sound.
To read ‘Recurrent Dream #79’, and for more from Issue 32, visit our bookstore!
And for your chance to appear in the pages of Pulp and on the blog, enter the Bumblebee Flash Fiction Contest, open now until February 15th!
David Barrick is the author of the poetry collection Nightlight (Palimpsest Press, spring 2022), as well as the chapbooks Incubation Chamber (Anstruther Press, 2019) and Two Dreams: Stratford and The Copyist (The Alfred Gustav Press, 2022). His poems have been published in The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, EVENT, and other literary journals. He lives and teaches in London, Ontario, where is managing director of the Antler River Poetry reading series. Visit him on Twitter.
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