Here’s the Eastern Orthodox Church, Community Centre
and Rec Hall. Your mom ate here
in the days before cable,
in nettles of rayon, at her cousins’ weddings.
Bandoleros of baklava,
land mines of burek,
they like their pastry glazed
their history heroic, Lake Orid and over-stuffed peperki
After the beast of chicken pox, immunizations, censure
and rectal thermometers,
all days are endurable
little muon, master muezzin of the bedding.
Bandoleros of baklava,
land mines of burek,
you’ll love the pastry, the cheese,
the mystery of Irish accents in Oliver Stone’s bio-pic
Ken Babstock’s most recent collection, Methodist Hatchet (Anansi, 2011), won the Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry and was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award. His previous collections of poetry include Mean (1999), Days into Flatspin (2001) and Airstream Land Yacht (2006). His poems have won Gold at the National Magazine Awards, been anthologized in Canada, the U.S. and Ireland, most recently in The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature in English, and translated into Dutch, German, Serbo-Croatian, Czech and French. All four titles were named Globe and Mail Top 100 Books of the Year. Ken Babstock was born in Newfoundland and now lives in Toronto.