These two poems are from Jamie MacKinnon’s first book of poetry, Just like blood, recently published by SGB Perfect Current Publications.  The book is available at independent bookstores, as well as online at http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/.  The book is illustrated with six linocut prints by Genevieve MacKinnon, Jamie’s daughter.

Each and every peach of a day

The centrepiece of each
and every peach
of a day

the heart
of every iridescent
moment

the core of all
my sundry
promises

is

this stone of my remembered self

my sunny disposition
my perfect yearning
my smooth-skinned raucous gaiety

is now

the germ of each
and every
peach of a day

Nostophilia

The long black submarines that go by in the night-black river
This Saône River, five storeys below, remind me of the
Anxious years, when vivid hallucinations – delusions –
Would convulse me with fear

Perhaps it was a form of nostophilia
That longing to swim home, upstream
A biologic bidding, intershot with dream
That allowed timid hope from madness to emerge

On my bed now I lie awake, reassured
I can hear the fog-muted hum of the engines
And the wake hit the cut-stone banks
As the long black submarines go by on the river below