Celebrating Women and Non-Binary Creators

poems for dear artist and writer friends

It’s International Women’s Day and I’m reading poems to a private group of civil servants. I am grateful to the Carleton Poetics Society and Flo Literary Magazine for the invitation and to Impact Assessment Agency for hosting the event. In honour of the occasion, I decided to write poems of celebration and of friendship to the women and non-binary creators who I adore. I don’t feel like we do enough celebrating of friendship and love and artists. Who do you celebrate? Write them a love poem!

Wake Lloire

storyteller, spoken word artist, former owner of Curious & Kind, now in Nova Scotia

of rainbow hues and rainbow moods

could make an orchestra out of

Valentine candy hearts on strings

in the wind

community builder, storyteller, parent

and film buff, imagination nurturer

I dream of the plants in your garden

do you greet a tiger-lily, a rose, a daisy,

 a violet, and larkspur

as Alice does in Wonderland?

I would travel the yellow brick

road of Oz to have tea with you,

or open the wardrobe door to Narnia

we would wear fanciful hats made

of squeaky fabrics and

built out of cut-out

invented alphabetical letters

have long conversations

over tea in China cups

some friends make you feel like you are home

this is Wake

michèle provost

Gatineau artist

I admire art that resonates with kindreds,

disturbs the comfortable and comforts the disturbed

that deviates from standardized norms

that doesn’t stick to walls but breaks them

that gives this world a future

that creates books we vastly need right now.

makers that push boundaries of art and literature

often get lost in the moment,

translating please don’t

into colours

outside the lines.

together we learn,

we bounce off one another

in conversation

art meets art

defiance is a field

where I’ll meet you

flower to flower.

you sculpt this raw material of words

into an assembly of embroidered

ticking clocks and bells,

a broken alphabet

of comic book ceramics

frantic poetry is often excluded

don’t let it be lost

in the jargon

Sandra Ridley and Christine McNair

local poets

sister poetesses finesse

I digress with sounds

a tigress bound

here ye, hear yeah

of lithe syllables

siren calls

sweet sounds

so utterly uttered

sharp in the mind

we were in a forest

so dark

we held onto one another

screeched fairy tales aloud

to ward off the wolves

we wore neon coats

decorated with spikes

of rage

our tongues rattled

all snake like

here’s the thing:

we sing we sting

S was in a lab coat

with a watch on a chain

in her pocket

we waded

into the lake

beneath a silver fingernail

of a moon

effervescent like champagne

Jennifer Pederson

local poet and musician

Piano Kate Bush

lush and low tattoos

Valkyrie viking ancestry

imagine you swinging

a sword, protector of those

you love, fierce, you pierce

the rhythmic stat we

stumble we karoaoke

our voices in harmony

little crinkles laugh lines

a few pints over lunch and

confessions it’s the laugh

that gets me you nurture

seasons, coaxing each one

into song, winter the blues

with guttural growls, summer the

trees into melodic harvests, fall the

fruit into sweet ripe orchestras

and slant the spring into marching bands

of slide, mud trumpet licious

natalie hanna

local poet

metal this moon, turn it shiny

with the persistence of being

wear a gown in a field of sunflowers

your gloves elbow deep in

hum electric guitar storm

of fight for those without fortune

and give them everything you have

once over hibiscus tea

favourite sweetness swelling

my heart vivacious

carry a flask of whisky close to the chest

let it bless the ground where the taffeta trails

shining up the tarnished yellow brick road

where Dorothy walked with three friends

Emily Falvey

former curator of the Ottawa Art Gallery, now at the Owen’s Art Galler in New Brunswick

if art is love and words on origami

paper trails can form a bridge

and tearing a whole chicken apart

to make several meals this is sheer

persistence not flight a good appetite steak

and wine outside on a Montreal

patio where there is blood there is

fire a desire to protect the film unravels

in easy beats where once a gallery stood

to ease the shoulds a fast paced walk

through neighbourhoods coffee coffee coffee

and sometimes

you just get someone and they get you

the gift card that paid for turkey and groceries

through december the offer to tear a new one

off the doctors if they didn’t bring me back

from the dead or to go to Persephone’s burial

ground and dig her up from Hades hands that

could tear a chicken into pieces would rescue me

from death

Katy Wimhurst

UK writer and visual poet

guardian of whimsy

daring world spinner

planet lover oceans of imagination

fields of starry inspiration

where we twinkle together

seas apart I clink my tea mug

against hers in admiration

Rasa and Mrs Framoth we create

together with other co-whimsy

enthusiasts where the green

turns aquamarine into flying fish

and shapeshifting animus we’re rampant

about what can move in the stillness

of convention it’s amazing, isn’t it, how distance

makes the magic realism grow

pushing galaxies out of black holes

there’s no writer’s block just a flock

of inquisitive ravens cawing intelligent words

and feathering volumes

A & H

two writers in Ottawa

repeating my favourite

proclivities tattoos

gowns made for operatic evenings

and poetry that hits

in the dark where the gut

lives towers of delicatesse

and shining shimmying language

mythologies resurrected

tell the names for the looming

birds, angels navigate quake and crevasse

tame fire gently with spells of alphabet

syllable breath secrets of braided rope

as talismans of love affection tokens

to pay the ferryman of metaphor

mercreatures are frothing up the tide

I hear them sing the intricate songs

that carve runes into vessels that decorate

endless night skies with constellations

VII

a poetry collective in Ottawa

disruption of painterly association

variation, organization, a cohort of friendship

begets inspiration, I feel a new generation of

literati it’s glitter with substance

they dance through the instrumentalization of air

on an evening of recent memory it seems so

sudden but time has passed

tallest raccoons are shapeshifters and editors

bicycles and big dogs named after characters

in films and Ottawa returns surprising and delightful

bookstore laughter and dark bars after readings and

in my late twenties I had a group too of poet accomplices

I recognize the joy of it as the photographer

snaps the line of amicable artists the glow

like a sky flows into the poemsphere

from stardust to material

good, the future, the now

Jacqueline Valencia

a Toronto artist and writer

tiny, a fighter, tattoos

protector of her kids

hair that changes colour

reminds me of my sister

who dyed her hair often

and taught me punk

fashion sense way better than mine

we commiserate over the appropriators

but don’t let them bother us an eyelash

running along the harbour

she gets it, I don’t call her Jackie because

I love the sound of Jacqueline, the leanness

of it, the bright yellow spiciness of it

she’s a luminous rocket to the moon

type speed of light quick

a dj that spins salsa beats a writer

that heats the pages with words

dates don’t have a clue

bon vivant making boeuf bourguignon

child of summer, worshipper of light

a willingness to disclose vulnerabilities

renaissance woman who decorates walls

in vivid paint flowering up routine

the anti to uncle drudge