In anticipations of PRISM’s DREAMS themed issue 57.1, here is some dreamy poetry from MA|DE, a collaborative writing partnership comprised of interdisciplinary artist Mark Laliberte, author of asemanticasymmetry (Anstruther 2017) and writer Jade Wallace, author of Rituals of Parsing (Anstruther 2018). MA|DE’s poem, “A Bad Dream Bent Ends Wet” appears in the print issue, and below are two more of their collaborative poems, “Make Me Down” and “Bone Meal” accompanied by artwork by the talented Aura. The DREAMS themed issue will be fresh from the printers soon, so if you don’t have a subscription to the magazine yet and need one, now is the time!

“Kahuk” by Aura

MAKE ME DOWN

Life has a pattern by design;
cruelty hiding in every stitch of it.
I am a devoted unweaver.

Dendrites fire briefly, indistinctly,
synapses must be taught to knit
electricity to pleasure.

Gently to the cradle, please don’t
mention graves; we are only waiting,
blanketed. Who taught you to dream?

There are no dreams without devoir.
Wanted is not the same as cared for,
and both are less reliable than need.

A floor is a bed that never breaks,
its pattern an evasive architecture.
Life: if it is built well, it does not bend.

BONE MEAL

To subsist on air and light alone,
that’s her new skinny girl goal.
Simpler than photosynthesis,

leaner than a sapling. If her
disappearing act happened on
stage, it would be called magic.

Her short shelf life, another spiralled
stare case, they’ll click like to her
gradual fading away.

Encase the dream in bone
and paralyze the egg, weight
on the end of a string to
catch fish. Her spine

struggles to keep its curve,
fossilizing like the skeleton
of a compsognathus.

An archive in amber,
awful in its indefinite end,
grim in the certainty of dissolution.

The wall, her brittle hands.
Push her back into a tree,
a lack forced to infinity.

Aura is an Onyota’a:ka (Oneida) artist, currently based in Tkaronto. She graduated from the University of Lethbridge with a BFA (Studio Art) and is a DTATI Candidate. Aura uses mixed media, beadwork, murals, art as healing, and digital Illustration to discuss intergenerational healing, identity, empowerment, and mothering. She looks to community to collectively explore personal storytelling and truth-sharing.