Paul Pearson
Paul Pearson is the co-founding editor and chapbook designer for the Olive Reading Series. His poems have appeared in Descant and Event, and the anthology Writing the Land: Alberta Through Its Poets from House of Blue Skies. Raised in a mining town in the mountainous back-country of southeastern British Columbia, Paul has since relocated to Edmonton where he lives and writes with his wife and two children. Lunatic Engine is his debut collection.

Bodies That Stay Atop Water
or don't
move without it or
move
without remembering or
remember
when movement didn't rely on
memory
moves
water and bodies
to write books about water and memory
moves
this body from city and science
and our bodies to the bush and its bodies
and its past and its
god
it is
so many bodies so much memory
moving like water or so much
water moving over bodies
of memory bodies moving within bodies
that stay within memory or
move atop
it or
fuck it
baby
let's just start this let's just
get married against our mothers' wishes and have
miscarriages and have kids and be good mothers and
fathers and get jobs and buy houses and buy cats and
bury cats and bury mothers and ignore signs and deny
sorrows and
see who
floats and who
doesn't