I like poetry.

This girl’s gonna ditch her rustic frolic, this girl so wants back to bright light big box open late lurchy bus people shout car siren city siren three a.m. car car six screen butter popcorn new release people people busker nightschool swim class take-out pizza art show book club bike lane Chinatown wants to sit down Friday night half-caf latte frothy lip foam run mouth poet in every chair at the open mike read to me read to me read to me café.

— Rhonda Ganz

I was ten years old the year Chernobyl burned, the very same year that Expo ’86 came to Vancouver and the city changed forever. For I will always think of China, the China pavilion to be exact, each time these years later I pass the China Gate at Dr. Sun Yat-Sen’s Classical Chinese Gardens. We were moving then, all of us, from one place to another. Now, I’m haunted by the SkyTrain doors’ perfect open fifth, then that smooth electronic contralto programmed to reassure one rides the Expo Line to Waterfront Station. That line stretches out behind us: concrete contrails left over from ’86. Eighty-six, the year Chernobyl burned hot as the centre of the earth, the sun, and men hurried in.

— Elizabeth Bachinsky

I want to ask poetry where it was for all those years. Where was it when I chain-smoked my way through Vancouver bingo parlours and where was it when I traded my Penguin classics for True Crime stories? I want to ask it about waitressing in Chinese restaurants and slinging beer in Indian bars and about hitch-hiking and smoking dope and seeing the prairies for the first time. I want to ask about underground rivers and the homelessness of rain and how it knows what it knows and why it knows so much more than I do. I want to ask poetry where it goes when it disappears and if it was there when I shot pool and crashed in cheap hotels in small towns across the country. I want to ask it why it drew me close and then let go and if it led me to the dying as a way to keep me alive.

— Eve Joseph

From "Poetry In Transit"

Photo by Trevor Meier