PROSE POETRY
CONCETTA PRINCIPE
WHERE ARE
Where are your lips as you read this do you follow me the way my father follows English in The Globe or any newspaper mouthing the words to slow the river of
letters, quietly humming as if in prayer, each vowel and phoneme and muscular silent ‘ough’, like Nichol’s ‘daughter in slaughter’, what about laughter, dipthongs
and silent ‘t’s of listening. Lis-ten to me. Or lately, K-nife. K-night. K-nih-gt.
The silent colours that collect around a field in winter.
You need the horizon to know what I mean.
Vast wintered field at Downsview hangar rising up from where the boys are playing soccer on Saturday night.
The up of sky and the thick overhang of cloud, let me say about that
Let me me say that this day day is everything that world that world has an up up and down it has this, this let me say is the gravity of that matter
Do you follow me, up the down and then down under the great hole of this pome-granite?
letters, quietly humming as if in prayer, each vowel and phoneme and muscular silent ‘ough’, like Nichol’s ‘daughter in slaughter’, what about laughter, dipthongs
and silent ‘t’s of listening. Lis-ten to me. Or lately, K-nife. K-night. K-nih-gt.
The silent colours that collect around a field in winter.
You need the horizon to know what I mean.
Vast wintered field at Downsview hangar rising up from where the boys are playing soccer on Saturday night.
The up of sky and the thick overhang of cloud, let me say about that
Let me me say that this day day is everything that world that world has an up up and down it has this, this let me say is the gravity of that matter
Do you follow me, up the down and then down under the great hole of this pome-granite?
Concetta Principe is a writer of poetry and creative non-fiction, and scholarship on trauma and literature. Her recent collection of prose poems, This Real (Pedlar Press 2017) was long-listed for the League of Canadian Poet’s Raymond Souster Award. Her creative non-fiction project, Stars Need Counting: Essays on Suicide, is forthcoming with Gordon Hill Press March 2021. Her work has been long-listed and short-listed in creative non-fiction awards at The Malahat Review and The New Quarterly, and her poetry has appeared in recently in The Capilano Review, experiment-o, and Hamilton Arts and Literature. She teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Trent University and York University.
