new from above/ground press: Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright, by Jérôme Melançon

Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright
Jérôme Melançon
$5

Fifty-Three Kilometers

Emptied of the May snow
The branches across the highway
 – those branches still articulated
    without any exposure of cartilage –
Will find their place in this impatient
Thrust upwards of the Shield.
An ornament on its edges perhaps.
In the meantime the path winds,
Mattawa a distant memory: no one
Would even try to turn around. We come
Close to stopping to move one that had
Snapped – one branch that might have held me
And entire families, unlike those bent in a bow,
Ready to shoot back up and bury
Whatever leaves itself within reach.
The lack of agreement in seasons
Hides the reversal in the motives for this trip.
A coming death, spring already verified,
Leaves grabbing on to the snow out of curiosity
A desire to be transformed, exhaustion
Already. I see hares, living in a future
Landscape, foraging for what’s left of this
Forest’s promises in each other’s shade.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
April 2022
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His most recent poetry collection is En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). This chapbook is a supplement to that book. He is also the author of a bilingual chapbook with above/ground press, Coup (2020), and of two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018) and a bunch of different attempts at figuring out human coexistence in journals and books nobody reads. He’s on Twitter and Instagram at @lethejerome and sometimes there’s poetry happening on the latter.

This is Melançon’s second above/ground press title, after Coup (2020).

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