BC Poetry 2018: "The Tide" by Jake Byrne (Rahila's Ghost Press)

from The Tide

You’ll go to a place that is crumbling in order to watch civilization fall.
- Lisa Robertson
This is personal as eschatological.

We lost Miami and Riga in the opening salvo.

We lost friends on both sides.


Mica dusted our mouths.

We don’t talk about what happened.

What will continue to happen.

The nights: rabid and snarling.

The days: purple and hydrophobic.


Jet smoke over coral horizon.

I found myself caught in a machinery I could not comprehend.

The scaffolding fruiting over the top of the city.

Sky crowbarred open.


If the reports are true then we’re all going to die.

I love you.

I’m sorry.


This is not confessional poetry.

Confessional poetry presupposes something like truth.

Nothing is permitted, but everything’s free.




Sparrows bathe in a tub full of rocks.

Who?

Jake Byrne is an alumnus of Concordia University, where he served as the Editor-in-Chief for Soliloquies Anthology from 2016 to 2017 and won the Irving Layton Prize in Poetry. In 2017, he was a participant in the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity’s Writing Studio program. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in PRISM international, Lambda Literary’s Poetry Spotlight, The Puritan, Plenitude, BAD NUDES, and Poetry is Dead. He lives and writes in Montreal, Quebec, on the traditional and unceded territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka people.


What?

A long poem! In a chapbook!


When?

Arrived November 2017.


Where?

Book Launches:

Done and gone!

Purchases: From the Rahila's Ghost Press website. $10.


How?

Crowbarring.

Rahila's Ghost Press * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.