They Will Take My Island

by James Lindsay

Weekdays since they switched the time change, so long

and beige-bright, so open

to wandering around, touching the electronics

to keep them awake.

They watch them blink on in bewilderment. Stacks

of unread books and a stove clock that strobes

the room when the curtains are closed.

And they are closed, and have been since it was

discovered that these windows work two ways.

In and out, like a light lock.

They get it now.

To get at it, first thing’s first: ban all basements

and basement living, where slashes of afternoon

compete with smoke and aerosol for outside

air and inside voices. Their calls like small

animals who get in between the walls for winter.

They will take my island. They will come at it

from the rediscovered crawlspaces that

they have just started to clean.

For years they were hidden in darkness

until they cut down the trees that hid the highway

and let the commuters constant radiance back in.

They Will Take My Island

by Nick Thran

I love a plow more than anything else on a farm.

       —Arshile Gorky

Say in the painting, soldiers storm the field,

cradling their mothers’ sex

under their arms like gourds.

Say Freud, trying to flee the scene,

trips over the still hot coals

in Picasso’s Guernica,

and reignites an age’s fires.

Then Gorky’s mother’s limbs

do start to look like his.

And then his mother’s name

does start to sound the same as his

when it’s called out over the trembling field

for however long one person’s death can last,

which, including blockades in the aftermath,

is far too long a time. Say all of that’s there

for a while in the painting, and then

it isn’t there. And being certain that

it was conceived on Crooked Run Farm

in Virginia, some thirty years on—

say that I love the name of the farm

more than anything else on the farm;

that I’d bring that up to make this mine.

They Will Take My Island

by Camille Martin

They will take my island

to ukulele seas where mist

coalesces into plump petals laced

with leftover dew. I imagine already

hearing their cantabile veering off

the chart into succulent winds. They make

me believe that, and that’s what I mean

by “they,” though we haven’t yet

been formally introduced. I try

to make contact by floating a corked bottle

of cockles and musty pages toward

a cartoon etched in my brain of a ragged

man marooned on a neighbouring

island poring over a treasure map.

They patiently acknowledge

my attempt. I’m hopelessly late

scanning the horizon, so here’s

where I have to dig. But what island?

In what sea? Which me pumps the treadle

that spins the gears that keep the stars

mentally wheeling across the big clock?

They’re already inside my head. And this

is what I know: I exaggerate

their finessed vision, their exploded view

of every grain of sand. Such compliant

metaphors, these grains on which I blindly

circle along the mundane fractals

of my shoreline toward shape-shifting

constellations. My island is trained

in the arts of prisoners dragging red herrings

to dead ends and splashing through the middle

of creeks to throw off the dogs that never

evolved here anyway. They know that.

I eavesdrop on their chatter fathoms

under distant fishing boats. By the light

of my remaining candles I carve

tools from native trees as wax puddles

on the volcanic rock that shaped

my island. They will take my island

to that melted wax.

They Will Take My Island

by Gabe Foreman

Every ink blot on his flashy flash cards

is a perfect copy of my therapist (my nemesis)

playing the buccaneer, hoisting a cutlass on shore,

wrapped in a shawl of livid bees.

Those who talk as if they cradle honey on their tongues

are best avoided. Most likely their eloquence is bent

on divorcing me from my amulet of coconut and sand

on the cashmere cloak of the sea.

Those who speak as if their tongues had been stung—

as if the island of their solace had been captured—

mumble: Do yourself a favour, stranger.

Tell those pirates, sayonara.

They take more liberties than prisoners.

They Will Take My Island

by rob mclennan

Most of the risks I take are voluntary

but I remember disasters I lived through

that still can't be understood.

—Ken Belford

They will take my island.

Damn the shore. See the boats.

Stars animate the morning with their bird-song

We are craving but stitches pull.

Small sloughs among horizon births.

Strange to a man, encounter

half-tobacco and comparative suburbs.

See the shore, damn the boats.

Hardscrabble lake. A terrible wonderment.

Witness the pleasures of darkness,

a sound of belief. Let measures come,

as they may. They will take my island. The war

hasn't even begun.

Dear Prime Minister: I fear

for my safety. Two inanimate, rearranged, lines.

The people acted cruel, and sweet.

See the boats. Damn the shore. Send in

armed forces, the coast guard. The Air Force

drawn belly-thin; glows red,

like a robin. Clear the paths, damn the boats.

I need you to listen. I want you to love me.

Colours are no boundary. Blue trades blue

and merges, black. Sky to line to line to water.

Damn the boats. My clothes are torn. Seagulls

pick at the distances.

Napoleon knew to keep to his castles,

an object in reverse. Everything you say

is possible. The clipper ships. Damn the boats.

Damn the boats. Tell me again, you saw.

The downside slogan, in these most

mundane of moments, matters. They

will take my island. I can see every single thing

in the whole of creation, standing. Here.

They Will Take My Island

by Rosanne Carrara

for landlocked, a limitless expansion –

this brace of camouflage rigged up

as my own sterling contribution

to the national effort – the leaf-blood,

fabric revisos of a camp along the front –

I’ll take especial credit for the deities

hovering along the upper corners

of each screen – the squat, god’s-honest

likeness of a Moai, moss-headed, concrete.

He gets his rise grinning over the tall

fires, the scorched whole loaves of birds’

nests, all the abandoned knitting. And,

relishing the nearest internal struggle –

the long-expected row between a rampant

lion and a trinity of left hooks, supported,

well enough, respectively, by the only

obedient muscle in a person’s body, the tip

of an icicle, or a sleuth of leaden pyramids

couched between wrist and elbow – this idol,

he’ll say the lion’s casual, knows enough

to know they would have killed him

by now if they weren’t just practicing.

Then, the left-hand trace of that other god.

He’s mean, no, economical, about his face,

cocking and re-cocking his bird mask

to get it low enough to set some formal

distance between himself and any of our

earthy disappointments, as if the postponement

of hope, epitomized by a sudden flare-up

in one of the abandoned tents, was not

the source of jubilation he had longed for

all along. Still, still, he finds the human

predicament alluring. The long waltz-shadow

of the critic, sailing in a helmet and feathers,

swilling from a horn, swearing to his partner,

make the best of my farewells – although, to think

of it, his shadow never makes a faithful exit.

Or the critic, himself, squatting, clement

in the center of things, bent over his weather

map or the flag of no country he’s ever known –

Armenia, maybe – spinning a piece of chalk

so swiftly in his hand it blurs into a shield.

This god’s at least a little bit concerned. ’Suppose

he thinks this might just be the chalk I gave

to him, the critic, in my moment of triumph,

when I told him to produce some kind of master-

piece himself, urging him to work fast, too,

if he would be so kind – I’d need it back sooner

or later, so as to mount the box I took to standing

on and scratch a similarly strained goodbye

my loveds on its wooden sides, before I kicked

the box from under all of us, that is, and died. 

They Will Take My Island

by Mathew Henderson

You find an island in the way the wrench grips you back,

the heft in your hand like a man reaching up and out

from the current and finding only you, who are caught

in a current of your own. There are thirty of you here,

more away, all pretending you’ve found something solid

in the sexless hips beneath your boots, something

you might leap from. In the morning, sixty slow feet

fall into coveralls with the patience of men who’ve guessed,

already, the rain and dirt and burn of all the coming years.

Your lungs catch the barb of something unbreathable

in the air and every man on lease stops to watch his hands,

to test the ground with his feet: leaning back and forth,

the brim of his hardhat cutting a crescent from the world.

They say some of you will die this winter. They are always

saying things like that. Those who sleep through the night,

who have been the meagre villains of every story you’ve

ever been told. They who are always coming, they who rise up

like waves behind us. They who take our islands, in the end.

They Will Take My Island

by Adam Sol


            You taught me language, and my profit on’t
            Is I know how to curse.


They will take my island
            if I don’t scorch it to the bones, though
                        to speak truly,

I did not know it was an island
            until they said so.
                        I thought it was the world.

The river-fish would drift
            into my clasp and I would gnaw
                        on their flesh while the gills still

gasped.  It had edges and pleasures
            and dangers.
                        What more is a world?

Then they arrived with their instruments.
            They taught me so much
                        about my home it became

strange as my body became strange
            when it bloomed.
                        They renamed

the birds after their own birds.
            They taught me to sing for them,
                        and to delight in singing for them.

I watched their plots evolve
            as a monkey watches
                        a jaguar wrestle a snake.

Then one day they gathered on the sand,
            and my princess held the hand
                        of a young god,

and I cursed myself for a fool,
            and the drunk bowed his head
                        and a pig was cooked,

and even I was given
            a piece of hoof to suck on.
                        And they sang a song

and climbed onto some felled trees
            and sailed away to heaven,
                        leaving me

to the wordless noises.  I returned
            to my caves and corners
                        but couldn’t remember
                      
what to hide from.  The jaguars
            had been slaughtered.
                        The fish tasted raw.
                      
I sat on a stone
            and tried to imagine
                        what to think of myself.

                        They will return.
            How can they not return
if they spoke of this place so enchantingly?

                        And how can I not try
            to prevent them, now that
I know it is mine?  How can I not resist them

                        with my very teeth,
            or with the perfection
of a purging fire?  Every sunset
                      
                        I ascend the heights
            of my puny kingdom,
and scan the sea for sails.

They Will Take My Island

by Jason Camlot

They will take my island

to the tip of Florida,

fix it between two flamingos,

and make a Ferris wheel.

They will take my island

to Mount Sinai. Then they will

carry my island back down again.

Then they will smash it to pieces.

They will take my island

to the top of Etna the volcano,

set it over the hole like Achilles’ shield,

and make Freudian repression.

They will take my island

to the coast of the Gaza strip,

near the Bay of Pigs,

in Wii Sports Resort.

They will take my island

to Trader Vic’s in Almaty,

Kazakhstan, and paint it blue

like the tops of mosques.

They will take my island,

they will take my island,

they will take my island,

the revolution will not be tweeted.

They will take my island,

please, baddum-bum,

and serve it as Vaudeville Pie

in Henny Youngman’s kitchen.

They will take my island from my head

and put it in my hands. They will knock it

from my hands and it will roll like an apple

in the schoolyard at recess.

They will take my island

to the Atlantic Ocean

and prepare it for Salt

Water Taffy production.

They will take my island

to Vermont for the weekend,

and when they return it untouched

they’ll call it aloof, cold, autistic.

They will take my island

to the tailor and attempt to measure

its waist and inseam. They will

make my island pants with cuffs.

They will take my island

to the top of the mountain

so that he can see what other

islands look like from above.

They will take my island

to the giant bus depot

and slip it into the giant

coin-op waiting-room television.

They will take my island

to the moon so it can

be the first island

to walk on the moon.

They will take my island

to its first concert at the Montreal

Forum and it will smoke hash

but not feel anything.

They will take my island

to Fantasy Island and it will

learn the folly of its fantasy

to be Fantasy Island.

They will take my island

where it cannot be found

and it shall be missed for a while

and then forgotten.

They will take my island.

Those ones are most inclined to snatch me reef.

Them guys shall enact the seizure of mine isle.

The authorities are going to effect the acquisition of my archipelago.

“They Will Take My Island,”

a Canadian song about love, death,

abandonment, emasculation,

pets, romantic poetry, and Italian food:

               They will take my island.

               They will shoot my dog.

               They will drop my snippies

               somewhere in Ottawa.

               They will take my island,

               from this sorry song,

               hide it in a teardrop

               from the socket of Don Juan.

               They will take my island,

               they will toss it high,

               they will slide it in the oven,

               make a pizza pie.

They will take my island

away from the children.

The children will cry,

“They have taken our island!”

They will take my island,

I will cling to it fast.

I will cling fast to my island.

They will take my island with me.

They will take my island

without good reason.

I will destroy them

with good reason.

They will take my island.

But who are they?

Rabbi Gamaliel says,

“They” in the line

“They will take my island”

refers to they who have not been refined

by an ethics of property, and, consequently,

take unlawfully. Rabbi José says,

“They will take my island”

refers to they who have not

and therefore must take to survive.

This is the true ethics of property.

They will take my island.

The “will” suggests inevitability,

A pre-determined event, unpreventable,

as in, The will of God.

They will take my island,

get it shined up for their price runs,

make a live cause of Mike Tyson

versus Foreman, never mind what.

They will take my island,

touch the sides up without license,

get their fight on, get their knives out,

strike a riot, slyly triumph.

They will take my island,

find a pilot with a lightbulb,

a nice fellow, join his flight club,

crash their plane into a Giant.

They will take my island

but they mightn’t,

had we tightened up the ropes

between the eyelets.

They will take my island

dress it up as NY’s finest,

slide it out of violent ovens so the

Brooklynites can buy it.

They will take my island

and it will become an absence

that has been recorded

in binary code.

They will take my island

and it shall be remembered so long

as there is poetry in the bacterial

cells of SpongeBob SquarePants.

They will take my island

and there is nothing this poem

can do about it, except delay,

or repeat one preordained atrocity.

They Will Take My Island

by Jaime Forsythe

I squeezed everything I could from you,
sand escaping your collar, miniature horses
circling your sternum. You swung me
to sleep, then hollered all night
with the crows and the faucets.
I forgot my second-last home
under a blue net, was rescued
by nets and trapped by nets,
wrestled with rope, lifted silk
hauls of fish. I opened my arms.
I curled into nothing until I turned
into a shell. People forgive
themselves for more than this.
They will descend on roads
that hug the markets, charms
trembling from rearview mirrors.
They will crack the husks.
Like me, they will take what they can.


  

They Will Take My Island

by Evie Christie

Over there was a father, a father's things, here

thick folds of fresh cut hair, piss, the cool ceramic.

This a girl's thigh, that patchwork quilt, a bare breast.

There you'll find a keyhole, the violence

of oak, a bare eyeball (your own eye!). A mother's hard-

wired palm.

Where can you exist? Sure, there's the matter

of birthright: they planted your brother's brain in that plot,

lost your father around here somewhere--you might track

his glass eye with your molars

in an electrical storm.

Is there space for you? Finger the map, lose

yourself here: this is an eye, mid-blink, the first

pulse of blood in your hand cocked dick, and this, your boyhood

room. Get lost

with them: the breasts and eyes (made

up), the perfumed thighs.

What did they find in the walls

of that artery, the locket's autopsy,

the shotgun's lovestruck path?

In this ballpark, a wisdom tooth,

a brassy band, a vow and this

was your island. They will take my island, too.

They Will Take My Island

by Johanna Skibsrud

i. Chagos Archipelago

ii. Map: Christmas Island

iii. Floor plan: Imperial War Museum, London, UK.

They Will Take My Island

by Nancy Jo Cullen


Of course there was blood, that was a given
We told each other everything and
She ate my teeth
It was a metaphor so we laughed & etc. until
The children returned

We had to put on our clothes
The children wanted supper, or maybe they wanted wireless plans
After we left the grassland the children didn’t care
For naked desire abstractly expressed or
Mother’s milk

Take the text but not the poetry, not the struggle
To say something true in the wild blue yonder:
That we are servants to the crush of the vernacular
That the children are leaving
That this land is your land, Yours
And we are post-peripatetic, post-menopausal

Take your bit of rock
We will lace our fingers and float down the river
Plump and savage outside the realm of the sacred
A fox will track the progress of crones
Kissing in the water

They Will Take My Island

by Stephen Rowe

            and gift it away in a flutter of progress:

fold it in coloured paper like an origami crane,

a creature of bluest possibilities stood wading

where waves once stroked the shore;

            it will satisfy their ends as only

the passive can: a coastal zoo complete with

animals, quaint inhabitants, seaside villas

toured with a view of tomorrow in the offing;

            a bird aimless in the sea with a wake

broad as a five hundred year history,

each day thoughts of its hatching misting over

in the thickening fog of the North Atlantic.

            And the heart’s continental shelf

with its depths of longing; that legacy demands I

fold a thousand origami cranes of my own,

a siege of paper swarming crests of white, of blue.

They Will Take My Island

by David Seymour

I’ve grown obsessed with keeping things preserved,

folding bedsheets crisply as unread books, attending

churches built so sublimely Jesus would dismount

the cross and grab communion if he could. He believed

in eternity. If I shift my gaze with simplicity and without

aspiration to familiar souls and objects I can stare for

hours and none of them will change. That which moves

away from me isn’t necessarily afraid and that which

moves toward me is not always in love, I’ve learned

to say with a quieter honesty, surrounded as we are

by the cavalcade of powers and lights and agencies

some of which I’m for but also those of which

I am against, it being a happy coincidence I can be

both at once. Of happiness, I forget what I have done

and imagine other names for it. They have many

likenesses, are each alike, like most of what’s beyond

my grasp. They’re nameless as seconds. They’ve taken,

in their inane, fog-like disregard for details, the bulk

of what’s transpired. Once I could conjure, and no

They take it without prejudice. They’ve confiscated

my recklessness also, replaced it with refinement of taste.

They take their time. But they musn’t take

my island. Though I don’t live there anymore

it’s all I have left to remind myself. Of myself.

The weather today is exactly as I remember it

yesterday, and the week before. I’m convinced

that this is remarkable, that this light breeze is here

while the island remains, is theirs but wondrous,

because it is. It is a perfect day for a swim.