Paul Vermeersch
Paul Vermeersch Poems
I came in a bottle, a prize like the worm
in the mezcal you swallowed
in lieu of an apology. Isn't it lovely
how I complement your fragile face?
...
for Baby Fae
Since our dawning in the Great Rift Valley
they have been our primordial homunculi,
dog-faced shadows at the edge of our world.
...
The hickory thigh varnished to a gloss
above the creaking metal knee
feels nothing, not the tarnished brass
thumbtack pushed into its grain,
...
Their discovery has been a kind of homecoming, too.
Part of you has been here before, germinal, hidden.
A painted hand resting on the stone. A molecule.
A memory of muscled, brawling giants buried
...
Marineland 1987
What I was before and then after
I was bitten by the glorious white-tailed buck
were as far removed as velvet and bone
...
You, jarred from sleep half an hour
before the alarm by an idling engine and
the hydraulic crush of busted kitchen chairs
from down the block. It doesn't help
...
I
In its own language its name means:
I walk slowly on hillsides
...
From that day forth his life was aftermath.
The streets were grubby, his fever hot,
the water in his glass was aftermath,
and he laid his blame evenly like snow.
...
Paul Vermeersch Biography
Paul Vermeersch was born in 1973 in Mississauga, Canada. He lives as a poet in Toronto. In 1998, he founded the I.V. Lounge Reading Series and later published an anthology, The I.V. Lounge Reader (2001). His poems often tackle themes concerning forces that isolate man from his environment and from his fellow man. Childhood memories and scenes from family life provide him with a canvas for much of his work. Vermeersch is currently teaching creative writing at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, and he is the Poetry Editor for Insomniac Press in Toronto.)
The Best Poem Of Paul Vermeersch
A Glass Eye Finds Its Purpose
I came in a bottle, a prize like the worm
in the mezcal you swallowed
in lieu of an apology. Isn't it lovely
how I complement your fragile face?
My gold-flecked chestnut iris is
a perfect match to your
gold-flecked chestnut iris, but
I fail to redden when your mood flags,
or when the nervous field-mouse beating
of your heart makes sleep impossible,
or when drinking deepens it
and you awake a little damaged.
I know I'm no great help. I fail to flinch
at the fist that brought me here, raised
in your blind periphery. I fail to see
how I can be of any use to you except
as a decoy. . . to draw away his jabs,
his right hooks and uppercuts, to blur
his wild uneven blows, to lure
your twin ballistic voices, the slurred
epithets you swap, like broken teeth
spat against a wall, to finally bring
the rising, untreatable fever of your love
into the umbra where everything's equal.
Paul Vermeersch Comments
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3/14/2026 9:57:58 AM # 1.0.0
