Her body was part-whale, part-mouse—behold the lie! It lives in your belly. Like an unborn baby you mould the lie. Slice my ears with the jagged stars. What did you ever do with the gift of music? I buried the violin and told the lie. This lamp in the ocean. A wolf with feathers for fangs. The...
The ringmaster thinks about the words work and pride and feels nothing. Glowing tubes writhe and pulse through colours as they pass over the audience, who scream or laugh or noiselessly gape up into their futures. One tube pauses above the ringmaster, changing to match the black and purple of his...
I don’t really have a preference. Which name you use. The coffee beans. Fonts or flowers or flavors. Except when it comes to bubbles. Keep my water flat, I don’t need it to be interesting. I’d prefer not to say—that’s a preference. I’d prefer to stay—that’s a...
The Hunter’s Moon reaches bloody illumination tonight obliviously obscuring what would be my first glimpse of the Draconids. I’ve yet to witness a meteor shower which is to say my blood still burns from when I saw a star fall by chance years ago and didn’t make a wish— how dare the moon rise...
Naegleria Fowleri infects people when water containing the amoeba enters the body through the nose. This typically happens when people go swimming, diving, or when they put their heads under fresh water, like in lakes and rivers. The amoeba then travels up the nose to the brain, where it destroys...
i think of myself in images: oranges split down the middle, pavement damp with rain. spring fields are the same as being under water and fill the hollow in my gut where a rib used to be. sometimes, i am a row of naked bodies on different planes, reaching out to touch fingertips that...
Reviewed by Madelaine Caritas Longman T. Liem, Slows: Twice (Coach House Books, 2023), 96pp., $23.95. “[I]f you think an apocalypse // will eliminate the wealth gap, let us hold together the / premonition it will not,” reads a phrase from the poem “In Response to Feeling Alone; Or, Before and...
Interview by Cara Nelissen In connection with the annual Victoria Festival of Authors taking place October 11 to 15, 2023, Plenitude book reviews editor Cara Nelissen interviews Michelle Poirier Brown: a Cree Métis poet, performer and photographer living on unceded syilx territory in Vernon, BC...
Plenitude is excited to announce that Meghan Kemp-Gee’s poem, “A Newly Discovered Species of Lizard with Distinctive Triangular Scales,” has been selected for inclusion in Best Canadian Poetry 2024. Congratulations, Meghan! We are thrilled that our queer poets continue to be recognized for their...
