new from above/ground press: Now You Have Many Legs To Stand On, by Ashley-Elizabeth Best

Now You Have Many Legs To Stand On
Ashley-Elizabeth Best
$4

He's Not Out There Looking For Me


Stand up and name your text, I remind him.
He thinks I hide a surplus of love.

I offer him approaches on how to behave,
but he is young and led away by little
sorceries, practices conjuration with spray
cans and bird bones.

The moon is rehearsing its postures,
a cratered canvas to skeleton the night sky.

I'm so tired of my whole life revolving
around my body.

He won't rise again.

He cost me much, but I wish he lived
to cost me more.

Bruised present. You cannot wait
for things to name themselves.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
August 2015
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Ashley-Elizabeth Best is from Cobourg, ON. Her work has been published in Fjords, CV2, Berfrois, Grist and Ambit Magazine, among other publications. Recently she was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Her first collection of poems, Slow States of Collapse is forthcoming with ECW Press. She lives and writes in Kingston.

This is her first chapbook and second publication with above/ground press, after the "poem" broadside "from Algonquin" (#315, 2012).

[produced as part of the above/ground press twenty-second anniversary reading and launch, also featuring Hugh Thomas and Amanda Earl, August 27, 2015]

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com