Born in Toronto, J. Mae Barizo was shortlisted for Canada's 2008 Robert Kroetsch award for Innovative Poetry and Ahsahta Press's Sawtooth Poetry Prize. In 2007 she received an International Publication Award from Atlanta Review, and was an Editor's Prize finalist for Spoon River Poetry Review. As a prize winner in the William Stafford Award, she was published in Rosebud. Her work has also appeared in Baltimore Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, Sink Review, Atlanta Review, among others. She has work forthcoming in Prairie Schooner and Bellingham Review. She is the author of two chapbooks, "The Concert Review" and "The Marble Palace."

 

Salvage

The window, then.  September already and the window he hauls her
sore arm against, fitting it with a new dress.  There we go, he is saying,
and tungsten is an element, no. 74, steely-gray and robust.  The highest           
melting point of all the non-alloyed metals and in her eye some trace of
the colour.  Its pure form.  Tenderness, another form of despair.  

 

Vesperae

Blue as in corridor.  The motor of the day ground down beneath
the foot as in Beethoven, no earth sounds.  How tardy always, how
sought after, desire [like a ribbon] wedded to the heel, pulling fast
when lids fall.  Morning was but a code for leaving and taking, taking
and leaving.  Blue like blood or guard me from it, cloud-light.

 

Green Grass, Telephone

The time zone the dream was in, continual comings and goings, grass pressed down.  How many times without I walked that green path.  Lamp ash already, some days I knew and others I did not know and that outlasted any other music.  Light came too slow to write it:  street sounds, train sounds, the nowhereness of flight.  In another city a phone was ringing, night walking away from morning, such faultlessness.