"poem" broadside #304: Future Bakery: Interim Report, by rob mclennan

1.

Tumble awake, this morning. Start from fragments. A gauntlet. Urge others, speak slowly, more. Unity precedes. A cranial. Decline to leave names.

2.

Regular harbour, weave. Brunswick House, girlfriend. Ease down like an astronaut. What brief integrity, dialed. Composure governs. I pull my soldiered hands, small fortunes.

3.

Children, the frame. Agency of water, fresh and unremarkable, rare. Brace, with low chairs. The sun strikes everything, rattling plastic clouds. Who is this, really? Table this, divide.

4.

Windspeck, taste of rain. Illusions in this distance, blue. Compulsive fingernails. Battered, cleared and crawled. Hotel concordance, congress. In passing, spark tongues. Suppress. These rooms are legion.

5.

Mechanical lineage. By the way, no longer. Sorry flightless birds. Submit is not the word. The right lane ends. All these coloured pencils. A shelf-life. Blueprint grit. She worries: where we cease to be.

6.

A corkscrew, distance. Impatient, leaf. Sweet fragrance. Hotel, sustains. Time changes colour. Coffee cools, and something moves. Synopsis: boundaries. Hips and dashed integrity. Relieved, we plummet.

Future Bakery: Interim Report

by rob mclennan

Produced for small press fairs Toronto + Ottawa, June 2011

above/ground press broadside #304

Born in Ottawa, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. He is the author of nearly two dozen trade publications in multiple countries, including the poetry collections Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011), kate street (Moira, 2011) and 52 flowers (or, a perth edge) – essay on Phil Hall – (Obvious Epiphanies, 2010) and a second novel, missing persons (The Mercury Press, 2009). He is currently working to complete a third novel, various short stories, and a non-fiction project concerning grieving, loss and family archives, tentatively titled “The Last Good Year.” http://www.robmclennan.blogspot.com