Double denim, doubled down and soaked through. 17 bus line, headlights cleaving Canadian five pm. You are scratchy and wet. Stage left, glinting gold, the girl is muttering to herself. Turning a crucifix between her fingers, burnishing bronze under the motion. She is one of those ages you might...
When proto-lemurs were caught up in the graceless process of evolving into bats— when small trees bent under their oversized talons, & heavy bones— when their wings spanned almost enough length to catch wind currents, but not quite— they did not know they were a transitional species. Only knew...
Yolande House is a bisexual writer whose work has been supported by the OAC and the Canada Council, and published in literary magazines like The Rumpus, Joyland, and The Fiddlehead. A graduate of Sage Hill, she is currently querying a memoir-in-pieces about being hard of hearing...
The Jungian analyzes my bladed braids and lipsticked lips. What are you trying to prove? He asks as I kill our molly fish and sleep at the morgue as punishment. Disembodied sheets of centrifugal steel, I skate onto your onanism. From the bathtub I watch as holy rollers go catatonic on the lawn...
I’ve known Costa for more than ten years now and I remember the moment we met, they opened the door at the youth detox the day after I was hired, their eyes wide, their hair tangled, it’s one of the two times I’ve looked at someone and known we are going to know each other for a long time and what...
—after Arun Kolatkar You may not realize this, but I’m that famous dog, who after reaching heaven, with Yudhistira on my side, I was thrown back on earth—to live among the gods idling the streets of Kathmandu, leering at every passerby and their bulging ………crotches & coin purses. I stayed in...
MICHAEL CHANG (they/them) is the author of Toy Soldiers (Action, Spectacle, 2024) & Things A Bright Boy Can Do (Coach House Books, 2025). They edit poetry at Fence.
I am not hungry, I say. I am not hungry. I have said it so many times that my mouth is compost and the words are larvae, getting stuck in a craw, spinning wheels in the snow, spewing on the lawn. It is winter, and the birds are hiding in the trees. I watch them through the places my breath has...
when we lay on the sand as a triangle trying to invoke some truthful looking, there’s much disturbance. might be the sky or the shadow of a leaf that distract us from actually staring at the upstairs’ void. we have the unrealized knowledge that Space is red. but whenever we look up we see a...
When you grow up in Cornwall, Ontario Ottawa is The Big City just an hour away making Alanis a huge deal. Our homegirl who made it big in ‘95 ………………………………………the year I moved to Vancouver for grad school. Having survived my home town secondary by being a class clown, a charmer maybe ………….I was the...
A tale of two weekends: a) Twists and turns like shimmer ….of gentle ocean, thirst ….in dreams and waking hours. ….Still, like blue ….at the pit of the morning sky ….—where do I turn? Forgive me. ….We had a good day. b) I can’t pretend I’m not wounded …...
Ten years ago, the mantle of Sun Coral’s Innkeeper fell to me, and in the four centuries that it has stood in Coveter’s Cove, I became the youngest member of the Lirio family to ever manage it. My mom never failed to remind me and my brother Ethan of this. I probably accepted the job when I was...
i. Bottom Quark Top, bottom, up down, charm me into strange submission, Quark, just this one time we can poof away time like snaps leave no trace of feelings I once had. You top, I’ll bottom and one day you’ll decay become me. Then you can lean into my synaptic cleft, but don’t get too positive or...
ACT 1: Will the Real Billy Bard Please Stand Up? A lady told me the other day that Shakespeare was really a man by the name of Edward de Vere—an earl, or a count, or a royal gondolier from Oxford or Downtown Abbey or something— and expected me to fall over aft-ways at the prospect of such...
“I’ve always been a great puzzle to myself.” —Jo Carol Pierce I resent anything that isn’t a simple machine, like a push mower or a pair of scissors. I could explode a bicycle into all its component parts in half an hour, lay them on the ground from end to end. I like things with schematics...
they call the phenomenon “the brain zaps.” …………I call it the air before a thunderstorm. ……………………metal on your tongue. scent more ………………………………ozone than petrichor. harsher. …………………………………………you’re all sweat and dizzy ………………………………from the buzz, the crackle of it ……………………reverberating in your head:...
the chevron has rubbed off my anchor ring tattoo chain and rod swim rootless in finger flesh book re-ink appointment on the to-do list—ten years and counting you and I sleep in separate rooms one of us may as well get a good sleep new parents—temporary measure—eight years and counting coral reef...
Lena Mutafov (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist focusing on poetry, fiction, photography, comedy, and music. They believe humor and vulnerability can go hand in hand. Her poetry has been published in Sea and Cedar and Eavesdrop Magazine, and she has featured as a spoken word poet for...
from Bad Houses (Arsenal Pulp Press, September 2024) When I couldn’t go on social media without getting sad or angry, I hired an intern. A quiet kid from one of my first-year composition classes. After the second week of class, as I was erasing notes from the whiteboard about how to paraphrase...
The turtle sheds his shell and smashes it upon the rocks. While I, a hobbled ape, cough up my skeleton like jumbled driftwood. …..Quivering like jellyfish, …..we seem surprised that we …..cannot walk away. So we painfully gather our fragments and try to reassemble ourselves upon the sand. …..The...
I. Vilnius / destination a black grape hovers in the face of heavenly darkness before falling back down towards the streets of the capital straight into your wide open mouth like a warm trap. my eyes don’t follow the descent but I join the applause of our new-found friends nonetheless, my...
They’re trying their best. So am I. It’s not enough. “Okay, let’s just pause. Lake, I said pause! I need a second.” The wind is driving snow into everything. Down my boots, up the cuffs of my jacket, under my toque. It’s giving unhinged prairie winter realness, the full sweat-inside-your-parka...
I almost got the certificate before the paperwork passed away. You used to wear confidence in every button of your shirt before the suitcase rolled away with your buttons and the students filed into other rooms. We’ve fallen between the desk and the wall. They listened to you, I know that...
1. Imagine the poem: something about clothes and makeup, probably fingernails— the pains of paints: ochre, pink, yellow. Or of breasts and tits and dicks and cunts of bodies, (always) bodies. 2. 40% of trans people snort milk from their nose. 30% wake up crying in joy. 75% sweat at the sound of a...
“I’ve heard,” says Kristen, shifting gears as she pulls out of the ER parking lot, “I’ve heard that quadriplegics, they can get off to someone stimulating their ear. Is that what this was?” “I’m not quadriplegic,” I say, wishing I’d had the foresight to puncture my left eardrum instead of my right...
From India’s dirt forests, into the elephant chest of the West we brought a child. Years erupt on skin. You are larger than Canada!—you are not a child. We all see things we do not want to see. In a white world, my father left my mother—she knew she would be a prisoner as soon as she got a child...
You are ninety-eight and blind and nearly deaf and can hardly walk and live mostly in another world now, a world in which dolls can talk and each person appears twice, and in this other world, I like girls, or so you tell my mum matter-of-factly one afternoon as she sits with you in the care home...
Deirdre opens the door, a vision of opulence with onyx hair and topaz eyes. One look at her and Cassie forgets about Ben and the kids. She finds herself in the narrow entryway of Deirdre’s apartment. Cooking smells of oil and garlic permeate the air, settling in her throat. “It’s been too long!”...
Liquid dark slides down our throats, sloshing against curved glass. I place my goblet back on the dash. The evening air shifts, a mineral of many disguises. Body twines within itself. Groaning from the cold, the liver and the heart sit — at the centre of our existence. † A deep and pulsating gloomp...
And while I may look like a prophecy-monger, we shall confine our attention to the clump of houses in a seaport subdivision, home to Lancelotti the Italian abbot, a respectable and veracious man save for his tentacle suckers, big as saucer lids. Absolutely I am governed by sunbeams. When death...
I love you pandemic o sweet sweet pandemic. I love you new flu I love you flattening the curve I love you doors closed people inside families hidden from view. I love you whatever it is that brings Eva and me to each other’s mouths finally and our shaking panting wanting. Like dogs, I want to...
I look no further than the edge of my body my map to gather you oh brother my brother my brown skinned brethren my kin and distant loves my turbaned uncles my unclejis crowned like kings backs alder straight I gather you from the bastion of a ship a ship that sat ashore my uncles whose feet did not...
I don’t mind you’ve put on a little actually I’m attracted to boys do we deserve a snack tonight? what you eat really isn’t that healthy we should exercise more I can police your food if you’d like you shouldn’t wear a shirt that...
I would like to make it known that I never languished around like some sort of woe-begotten damsel, desperately waiting for Ben to show up. In all the time we’d known each other, my life had been full. Too damn full, even. And while there’s no shame in having a quiet Saturday evening at home, even...
Mother, then setting off— I see the world in which you inhabited sand breaching between land and seafoam you left clues, spinning sagas in my all too Canadian body of a place so delicious in warmth, the providence of natural resources prone to warships and the occasional genocide. Mother, on the...
after “Dick from a Girl with Autism” I love autistic gay trans queens Us sensual sensory gals Euphoric smut and top-shelf memes From squishy a-spec pals High-stim, low-stim Not him, zmm zmm Tattoos, role play Bound by the High Fae Head pats for days and no more shame I hear you call my name I wanna...
When she was eleven, Alex spent about a week out in the Missouri cornfields, crawling along the bottom of the stalks until she found a natural divot in the ground that was big enough for her lanky frame. There she burrowed down, surrounded by dirt and worms, and covered the top of the hole with the...
My father told me he came from an island. A boat in the middle of the night took him and his brothers to the city. They would grow into men, become part of another land to tell stories from, be named in— no longer speaking ways of the water. When my father became a settler on the prairies, I came...
I am writing you this letter from the bottom of the ocean where my eyelids are bottle caps and my stomach turns burnished copper. Maybe it is time for a new oral tradition. All day I flicker and sometimes I go out and leave in my wake the faintest trace of sweat and hibiscus. Maybe I am an embryo...
By the early 1950s, the town where I grew up was turning into a modern suburb of Montreal, just across the river. New streets were being carved into the surrounding farm fields of the St. Lawrence valley, but the house my parents had put a down payment on, not long before my older brother was born...
