features EVE ANTHONY HANNINEN

features EVE ANTHONY HANNINEN

My Hostess Gift

"Because it's just not polite to arrive empty-handed," my mother long ago reminded me on many an occasion, "a house guest always takes a gift for the hostess."

So I did. I remembered my manners on this special occasion.

After all, Eve Hanninen, editor of The Centrifugal Eye and now my colleague in this current TCE endeavor, had graciously welcomed me into her pages as guest editor for the Autumn 2007 edition. So, despite her initial protest, I have been able to return her hospitality by giving her back three of her own poems; my gift to her is bundled in the page below.

You see, from the get-go of this gig as guest editor, I had very much wanted her imprint on "Oh, Canada!" So I insisted (gently, but passionately) that she let me run some of her poetry.

Editors, I've learned, are reluctant to "take over space" in their publications. Understandably so. We want to have room for our contributors, and there's never enough room. So we demurely decline, as did Eve, to run "our own stuff."

Yet she amicably relented, understanding that I simply couldn't conceive of this edition of TCE without her voice, a voice to balance mine in the suite of poems she selected from my new book, Godwit: Poems of Canada; a voice, frankly, I envied, coming as it does from an American living in Canada— living my dream of a life above the 49th parallel.

What a pleasure it has been to stand beside Eve, editorially shoulder to shoulder—and most often eye to eye—together bringing you, our readers, our love songs for Canada.

Please join me in honoring Eve Hanninen by reading—and enjoying—three examples of her own fine handiwork. May you be delighted, oh readers.

Karla Linn Merrifield
Guest Editor, "Oh, Canada!"

"Reid's Jade Canoe"

E. A. Hanninen - 2007

Eve Anthony Hanninen resides in the valley of a stupendous ring of snow-capped mountains in Lower British Columbia, Canada. The beauty of the Pacific Northwest often imbues the themes of her art and writing. She is most interested in the effects of human experience, how environment impacts individuals, and in exploring these combined results in poetic form.

Eve's most recent works appear in Wicked Alice, Origami Condom, Shit Creek Review, The Barefoot Muse, The HyperTexts, Mannequin Envy, Southern Hum, and elsewhere, as well as in Trim: Mannequin Envy Anthology. She was guest speaker on The Writer's Craft for Seattle's It's About Time Writer's Reading Service in October 2006. She is also Editor-in-Chief of The Centrifugal Eye
Online Poetry Journal.

Contact Eve
The Centrifugal Eye

"King's Mixed Pickles"

A. G. Racey - 1925 - Canadian Policy Illustration

Illogical jokes in school
concerning ladders and lightbulbs
send me to Mother's room
where she sits penning a card to Zablonsky.
The joke's on them,
she says, puts down the pen,
hands me a book by Stanislaw Lem.
Now there's a Polack!
And not just Science Fiction,
but Science was invented by Poles
long fed-up with salt mines and gherkins;
take Curie, Biernaki, Copernicus—
I sit at her feet while she rattles off
how Adam Prazmowski founded
microbiology, based on nitrogen painting
butterfly cocoons in bacteria
and how Jan Szczepanik,
the "Polish Edison," brought us color films
and the illustration of sounds.
Poles and color.
I think of dour faces in muddy sepia-tones,
like in the photographs of my Mazurek relatives.
But postage stamps! Delicate
botanical washes in quartets and trios,
and especially wings of Lepidoptera
vibrant as origami sheaves,
tucked into envelopes of glassine.
But oh— those vintage posters! Graphic scenes
hoary with gouache
combat helmets and military tanks, screened
in lung-rot black and dried-blood red.
Gaping mouths and gathered brows.
Paint days when beets bled over the borders
from Russia, signified in stylized samovars:
steaming kreplach alongside barszcz
and sour dill pickle soup.
I forget about science and color
to study pierogies and golabkis,
try complicated recipes— savory dumplings seldom sold
in American grocery stores. Perhaps because American Poles
have hidden quietly in the cracks
of homogeneity, a habit of 1940's immersion
on the heels of wartime flight,
-skis and -skys often lopped from names.
Only after moving to Canada
do I find the bounty of Poland transplanted;
like pouring off liquid from the pickle jar
for flavoring, authenticity of thriving culture
appears in the form of a local-grocery freezer case:
thirty-six flavored varieties of pre-made pierogies
tempting from beneath illustrious flourescent lights.
And not a ladder in sight.

Frog crouches below Eagle's paddle; half afraid of saltwater,
he clutches the side of the Jade Canoe. Eagle would have flown
if not for Frog's phobias too long in air. Slice and dip,
paddle is Eagle's wing in water.

Hungry, Eagle bites at Father Bear's paw. Trembling Frog
finds some glee in this—how curving beak and curling claw
meet in a coiling circle. How else will Wolf's ravenous gnawing
of Eagle's true wing be ignored?

The Jade Canoe tips starboard as Wolf torques and slips
his own paddle into the rhythmic currents of lapping wake.
Jade Canoe is too full, decides Raven. Still, he steers
by perching over the shoulder of stoic Chief in Chilkat robe
and scaly hair of Dogfish Woman of the smoke-eyed dreams.

It is the way of every Sunday afternoon, of every noon
and night and Harbor Seal morning, crowded
and paddling the Lost Lagoon.

Beaver and Father Bear squat nearly knee to knee,
but do not meet in the crucial territory of the eye; this journey
on the green bay would turn red pond, if Beaver looks
and Bear eats. Besides, Human Mother of Bear sits between,
still suckles Cub, busy paddling, busy guiding the teat.

Scarcely awake to the present, Father Bear absently holds
the other unruly son, who would swat Frog and Mouse
Woman (still hiding beneath the tailfeathers of Raven),
into the glittering Sound.

Beaver sighs as Wolf wrenches again and digs his hind paw
into Beaver's shoulder. Above the jostling humps
in the Jade Canoe, the Chief raises Talking Stick high
until Orca-perched-in-perpetual-crest can speak easily
to the ocean-going winds.

Although Raven guides them proudly, and the Ancient
Reluctant Conscript goes along without complaint, it is Orca
who leads them all to the passage through the islands; it's here
that Jade Canoe glides with purpose, despite the rocking waves.

Talking Stick reminds them all with his stories of fire
and stars and fish, of moose and hawk and how
they each came to be— forever in this canoe, in this world.

An incongruous sea lion, your yellow diving-suit
bobs from the cold, steel bay— aqua
flotation parka radiating towards the shore.

A long syllable floats
from my lungs: Craaaaaaaaaaaaa-
zy old man. But you hail

from the Land of Winter Seas and White
Tundras. A place named Åå
for the beginning of language,

where the men sit around their dories,
mend nets, smell of rakfisk and pipe smoke,
all stories punctuated, SO-so-so.

The poncho pulls away from your long
head of grey, all features as colorless
as the iced eyes on whole, market trout,

and your obelisk of a body rises,
trudges from Pacific foam, far from your home
of bröd and tea, here to Nanaimo, to me.

Frozen: you, a bleached baton slipped
from neoprene suit and hefty tank, slender
ideal and mine, somehow. Not mine,

but a man who loved my mother
and brought your lisp into her house,
wove your staccato tales about our patient ears.

Became mine, in that hand-me-down fashion
we liberal Americans have for adopting
other cultures; today I play at being Canadian,

accent through osmosis— just so your knowledge
of my secrets, beyond what I told. Glazed, luminescent,
you sit beside me without shiver—still part sea, part tundra—
crumbling, melting into icy ashes.