two poems

by rob mclennan

from dream logic

009 : “Morning”

Sleep, into. The objects one might soothe. Emerge, if you can. If you will. Irregular, a single centre. Articulate the wind, spread out. Thirty degrees below where we were yesterday, jet lag. A kind of thought. What backwards, step. A routine of coffee, delivering children to school. And from this night, this day.

010 : “I can lift ten thousand pounds”

What these fragments conceal. Literality. Prior biographical context. Even the terror is. Deer, coyote, stray dogs. An example, of glorious wounds. Place is everything, sure. Cool and distant, an island. Look at me, look at me. Cut off from the world. A book near a pond. All articulation. The river’s prosody, corporeal. What dawn is repairable. Would you make meme. The very body of language. Slight of hand, slur of speech. It is true that you have. Will prolong. Plunges, headfirst. Future tense that evolves into elegy.

Photo of rob mclennan (taken by Marc Perez)

BIO: Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025) and the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.