“Happiness is coming for me unexpectedly from the sky somewhere over Thunder Bay, 1125 miles from where I’m heading, 10AM on the wing.”
A new poem in Queen’s Quarterly: “Happiness.”
Last summer I was invited by The Brave Festival of Risk and Failure at Harbourfront to write poems for people on the spot. About 40 folks came over several days and I asked what they needed a poem for and then I wrote it. And then they took it and walked away.
At the start of my shift on the second day, a man was waiting there, eager. No excited. So into it, it made me nervous.
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Courtesy of PLANT Architects, my poem "The City" is now painted 20 metres long on King Street, Toronto as part of the King Street Pilot project. Here's what Azure Magazine had to say:
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A line from my poem “Kensington Market” accompanied the recent exhibition at the Toronto Reference Library, “Toronto Revealed,” paintings, drawings and linocuts from the 30’s to now. The poem is from my book Personal Effects (Pedlar Press, 2000.) It is one of the poems featured on the Toronto Poetry Map.
Read More“The trouble I’m in, we’re all in,” Ronna Bloom writes in The More, her sixth collection. The Toronto poet and psychotherapist is referring to the human condition — the hunger for connection and the angst of mortality — but she also shows an appetite for life, as the book’s title implies.
Barb Carey, The Toronto Star
Read MoreThis Breakfast
In honour of Gerry I invent a new breakfast.
A fried egg, bacon and warm spinach salad.
It took me several tries to get that order right.
Did you say a warm spinach salad? Feh.
With a fried egg? A warm spinach, egg,
and bacon salad. A warm spinach, fried
egg, and bacon salad. An mmmm fried
egg and bacon salad. An mmm fried egg
and bacon and warm spinach salad.
What I wanted was greasy, salty, green, limp,
and fresh, with vinegar, and two kinds of toast,
one grainy, one smooth like challah but more brioche,
with peach and orange marmalade I made.
Three mugs of tea. No four. Dark
chocolate biscuits for dessert. Dessert
for breakfast. Pablo Neruda said, I confess
that I have lived. So would Gerry.
It was a lazy Susan kind of mind, wanting to
put together whatever wanted to go in the bowl
and my mouth, with a bit of vinegar, as I said.
It was exactly what I wanted, which delighted
me as I'd stopped trying to make it work.
Just eat, Gerry said.
After the funeral, I felt like someone took
a gun and blasted it through the part of my brain
that makes sense. It was left raw, like egg.
Ok, egg. Bacon. Ok. Greens. Ok. Jam! Yes.
And imaginings of Lorraine cooking with me,
and Gerry sitting, and I have no idea if he likes
any of this, but to stay true to the process and its shtick
in the service of a mission that holds in its mouth
the names, and imagined wants of others, as much
as one's own taste buds, is, I think,
just what the man ordered.
Ronna Bloom, The More, (Pedlar Press, 2017)
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