Monika Leepoetry
Monika Lee is a Canadian poet. She wrote gravity loves the body (South Western Ontario Poetry Press, 2008) and the poetry chapbook slender threads (EBIP and Canadian Poetry Association, 2004). She also published a book of literary criticism, Rousseau’s Impact on Shelley: Figuring the Written Self (1999). She is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Brescia University College at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. She teaches nineteenth-century British literature, creative writing, and a variety of other courses in English literature.

Monika completed a B.A. in French and English at the University of Toronto, and M.A. and Ph.D. in English at the University of Western Ontario. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University. She graduated from the Humber College School of Writing with distinction in 2007.

She has travelled extensively in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, and now lives just outside the village of Lobo with her husband Brian Diemert and their two daughters, Anna and Natasha.

Marrakech


the medina teems with antics.
souks and mules press against us,
tajines and sheep heads sizzle
in an unreal light.

jars of live scorpions are sold –
some come with their own exorcist.

fire eaters, dancers and magicians
throw us through the streets like flames.
i am lost in the hungering.

if we take some of your mint tea
sweetened to excess,
will you let us go,
release us to the palmerie?

or free us to the desert?
there scorpions are not jarred.
the wild cradled dunes
are magician and exorcist.

slender threads


a truant path, a slender thread
always leads to fate,
vision is an amber cord
tying a noose around the passage of time.

past never was. be here and now.
the future casts gigantic shadows on today.
a vast bird of prey,
it broods over its shadows--
over the eggs our thoughts would be.

a tightening grip on a slender thread,
a rebel grasp on a lengthening cord
slips forward and gives way.
tomorrow plants debris between
the interstices of time.

far-off centuries laugh in beholding this;
dense patches of fog obscure the sound,
but listen. . . and we may salvage time's pieces,
pile and mould them into a legacy,
an unblinking watch upon the days.

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