Proposes beauty as a more humane means of measuring pain than the healthcare industry’s compulsive subdivision of sentience into number and category. Written and read by Dominik Parisien, filmed and edited by Nicole Coenen, starring Sophia Palumbo and Shannon Arntfield, and directed and produced by Kevin Andrew Heslop, “Let us for a moment call this pain by other words” is part of the award-winning poetry anthology on film, mo(u)vements, available now exclusively from Astoria Pictures Inc. together with the companion seed-paper chapbook from Rose Garden Press.
To the Bridge
Depicts a simple, fleeting encounter on a “quiet park trail” between a young man “gaining on the Golden Gate Bridge / where so many beautiful boys fly” and a woman “trained / to give him anything he wants” which resounds with the complexities of our consumer-capitalist world.
Ripley's Aquarium
Renders the portrait of a neurodivergent father and son as they proceed with difficulty through an immersive aquarium while “other families ooh and ahh—what luck.”
He Who Senses the World's Shift
Suspends, “not quite nor ever / here,” in its electron cloud of traumatic dissociation as performed by dancer Ruth Douthwright.
Bone Music
Stages an anthem of resilience in homage to those who fashioned samizdat vinyls from x-ray films amid repression of the arts by the Soviet Union in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Things She Wants
Takes a behaviourist lens to the lived experience of intimate partner violence, exploding the institution of marriage and “these things she is supposed to want” in the process.
Without You
Playfully grieves romantic loss by eliding the letter “u” in this dehydrated confessional, concluding “I know I was sed / but I miss that sing.”
If I Wrote a Poem About My Father
Oscillates between the said and the unsaid in the relational dynamic between a father and a son, leaving out “the time he tied / my brother’s dog, Joey, to a post / and shot him with a .22 …”.
Torso 3
Is a love letter to Florence Wyle’s sculpture Torso (“Mother of the Race”), both to what is—“your breasts small and no-nonsense”—and to what the sculpture implies—“two perfect arms / though no arms exist.”
Magpie
Revels in its disinterest “in stoves, those great civilizers” by celebrating a suburb of women compulsively overcome with pica: “Ever since I tore my mouth lock off, I’ve been binging / like a magpie, on every glint and texture”.
Sea Song
Responds to the performance of an imagined underwater pipe organ while exploring themes of capture and resistance: “There is a sound / that catches. It is a net I am / a fish it is a line I am / a fish it is a spear I am / a fish.”
White
Depicts the way in which white colonialism “warped” and instrumentalized Jesus Christ “from prophet into insatiable poltergeist” to achieve its imperial ends.
Let us for a moment call this pain by other words
Proposes the human alternative of metaphor—“On a scale of anglerfish to northern lights, / how bright are the flashes in your head?”—to the numeralizing, categorical imperative of the healthcare [sic] industry.
Small deaths
Eulogizes a life lost to the fentanyl crisis in the city known as Vancouver, Canada: amid a meditation from the forest, it asks, “How many downpours / until we upend earth / for solutions?”