Here’s a look at their work
For the past few weeks, the Fulcrum has called on University of Ottawa students to submit literary pieces of fiction for our annual fiction issue. Here are the best poems we received.
Otonanza by Curzio
I undress in summer all over your autumn,
on your weathered branches,
on your ochre light,
on your lambent trunks,
on your vibrant leaf litter.
Evergreen climbing is your body, perched on my walls:
invasive,
obscene,
tremulous… and vagrant.
Your hands, your fingers, your mouth…
are wet fern pieces
on a gloomy forest, burning down against my skin.
Cups of fire and brimstone be to us
beneath the putrefaction of September.
Let my ten thousand leaves scatter over your pores
as the complex of my daring desire.
A cloak covers our nakedness,
garlanded,
cerulean,
mallow flowers.
And your groaned quince,
resin and incandescent amber,
is distilled between my lips…
like a lustful whisper.
A flicker of fall by Victoria Feng
A contagious
forest fire
flares
into flames of their kind.
It bites on branches.
Converting the colours
of leaves
from emerald to amber,
emerald to ruby,
and to another until the
crystals
lose their glimmer.
Still,
I ran still.
Uncannily similar to the bright sky
embracing
the motions in it.
Intentionally,
as if
a metal spring is made
to push back,
waiting for a cue,
for Mother Nature
to bloom again.
Mesmerizing echoes
from preys
rang my ears,
each layer
challenging my patience.
I watch
as animals rummage through soil,
hiding secrets
beneath the burning trees.
Little do they know,
the wind whispers to
the birds, taking
some away.
Yet these animals
pay no mind,
till what is left
is empty.
It is not until
when the fire halts,
when the forest has fallen,
that all start
appreciating the flicker of fall.
I see poets by Curzio
I see poets turning into lakefront willows
as they wave and lengthen
when the autumn residues arrive.
I see poets baring their branches
with the leaves kissing the putrid waters
in the search towards an oncoming storm
Other leaves nervously crawl,
rustling like the teeth
inside their bitter mouths
Other leaves flow away,
to coat the sadness cracking
of their corrosive verses
And time is running out,
in their naked eyes
the rain breaks through
and their traces are lost
among the leaf litter, among the disconsolation…
…and their sky is broken from within
Now I see ordinary men feeling lighter,
unburned by it all, sitting on the lakefront
Undisturbed by aught,
nothing to shelter them:
not even their leaves, not even oblivion,
not even autumn,
not even the shoots of their bare branches
Thus, it is
I can no longer see poets…
And I’ll Kiss You Again by Curzio
I have written so many love letters that even if this one tiptoes over
the threshold of the autumns, writing you love letters is like kissing
you again…
You march in my veins, for October to transits us together like recent harvests, even so, close, and yet so far away. I am crowded with kisses, whispers, clumsy words, and the sparks of the great defoliation strategy to which I will never take you.
But do you know what else?
That even if my fingers falter, even if the trunk of memory closes
for me with the inexorable key of dementia, even if my love letters
no longer reach you, not even from the threshold of autumns, I will
continue to see you precious!
Forgive me for the disorder of my paragraphs I loved you and I want to tell you, that to put the order in this accumulation of feelings coated with senescence, would be like trying to catch in the citrine wind, or simply the essence of a tree, to which to date, I only call by your name.
Tomorrow maybe, again with the excuse of autumn, to write you a love letter, will be like kissing you again…
