new from above/ground press: Never Have I Ever, by Emily Izsak

Never Have I Ever
Emily Izsak
$5

Gone Skinny Dipping


        Water striders
        promised    
                   immovable family
        rose gold charms
        for each third time

        but   leftover flood
        lusts after reproductive
        achievement

                It’s survival
                of the fishes

        if they scripted   
        a biblical litmus    for naked shapes
        and blue-green algae

        Pessimists cry
                                out   it’s a buoy  
                at the mikveh
                in the middle   of the highlands

I am neither rock
                nor island

        though flagrant waves
        flush Garfunklian noise  wasted
        on next year’s negative
                                              dip

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
September 2021
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Emily Izsak’s poetry has been published in Arc Poetry Magazine, The Puritan, House Organ, Cough, The Steel Chisel, The Doris, and The Hart House Review. In 2014 she was selected as PEN Canada’s New Voices Award nominee. Her chapbook, Stickup, was published in 2015, and her first full-length collection, Whistle Stops: A Locomotive Serial Poem, was published by Signature Editions in April 2017. She also has an earlier above/ground press chapbook in the archive called Twenty-Five (2018). You should check it out. It’s pretty cool.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com