rob mclennan
from Fair bodies of unseen prose,
Sewn arms.
Walked into, often. Don’t underestimate muscles. Intermittent, me. In pieces, folly. Then moves. Translated, groundless. The written word: misleading, voice. A womb’s end. Yes, yes. You. A pencil, narrows. This nakedness. Statement: a sunlit slope. Of pure salt, bawdy. Body. How well the approach. Command, the pilfered pen. What empty mind. Two voices, paged. There is no fiction. Damn your aesthetic. Horizontal, scorched. What flame. Fireworks, this eastern moon. Powdered. For that reason. Anything, my tongue.
—as in the subjunctive.
Ambition, harvest. Ruined. Word by word, as circulation. Forms. Heave out, hell. I am older than I’ve ever been. To emulate, portrait. Capsize. In order to clarify. Depending. I have learned to suppress. What will become of my work, my work? At a table, with others. A finger, points. What appears to be moat. The tasks of culture. Calm, rejoice. Avoid repetition. Each paragraph. The how, has cast. To remain, without character. Of particular form. An anecdote: cold to the touch.
Bone with sentence rupture.
This clean break, powdered. Representational. Biographical machine, it reads. What classical elegy. What discomfort. Than have I ever. By means of tone. Tenor, edged. Spills. Lick, so clearly. Over the house. Salvage, salvage. Heat pollution, proportion an accident. Electrodes, tyrant. Carnival. A motion of vessels, a vanishing frame. Points, knots. Bandwidth. Loaf of black bread. Coordinates, rather. Reduced to unknown, corporeal. Articulate space. To the stars you’re a match, lit. Refract. The moment clings.
Writing was concentration.
Ask anything you need. In any centre, center. Could not distinguish a room. This furious pace. Continuous. I remember. Wheat fields, wonderful scraps. The limits of a few thousand feet. I remember. A cool day, time. And, secondly. If you can’t find anything. With strings, the bottom of. This map of forgetful. Sky, illusion. Soft voice in the dairy. Indifferent takes, a sudden drop. Ever since the subject. All our being, compromised. Insurgence. Big bone, squalor. Beyond the present. Raised sense from seed. Untarnished.
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Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025) and the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.