Ancestral magicians perform not tricks, but truly magical acts, like taking a blue and white pearl the colour of the earth and placing it in her work-hard palms. This is my mother, entangled in sisters, brought to peace in age, throwing off years like a hot fur coat, years of bitterness turned some...
After Natalia Ginzburg’s “He and I” He likes working on the patio. I prefer cooking up a stew or pouring out cocktails. I do the grocery shopping, take the car to the mechanic, and ferry cardboard to the recycling centre. He keeps the house plants alive, launders the sheets and towels, and fills...
A Bop Reports note Crocodiles with leather purses. Mountain Goats in puff sleeve boho shirts. Animals foregoing shoes, and girls, now Toucans, selling their Kia Souls to fly wingtip-to-wingtip to work, while Rabbits sleep on their husbands’ heads, hearts beating slow despite the predators next door...
The cuckoo has laid its eggs in my (mother’s) brain. It found the cerebrum a spongy roost, an almost natural habitat and now, flying the coop, expects me to take care of the babies. I consult a field guide. Learn the cuckoo is a strange relative of the roadrunner, its song a series of hollow...
By the time we flew into L.A., I felt like sending my body through one of those X-ray machines in security to make sure my brain was still intact. If a picnic in Stanley Park was all the disruption Malcolm could handle to his daily routine, why did I think for one moment—one second—that he could...
Well another day spent boot-walking through my allotted patchwork of registered burns and cutblocks. Rototilling circles around piles of slash and struck-by-thunder trees. In the heat of the day, I sweat through dark coveralls. Here I am: picking up skulls of birds. Woodpecker feathers, horsehair...
Erik Naydiuk (he/him) is a gay writer living in Vancouver and pursuing his MFA at the University of British Columbia. His poetry can be found in Bitter Magazine, and he is a member of PRISM international’s editorial board. He spends his time reading, cooking, exploring the outdoors, and...
including the one who spelled it with y. All I talk about is wealth-hoarding w/ Chinese characteristics, not to be confused with love-deprivation. Some auntie somewhere is learning the importance of saying “I love you” to her children & grandchildren. It’s that important to some of us now. More...
Translated from Slovenian by Lukas Debeljak I had literally fallen off the couch. Lying prone, studying the leafy landscape of the closed orb, where I had planted my grasses and sedges, I saw something move amidst the stems. Something green. I flinch, turning in astonishment from my position...
We meet in the morning // and the first thing you say is // back in the 16th and 17th centuries // “morning” used to refer to the whole day. // We are unusual people // we find honour in language history // sanctity in semantics // and tend to exclaim about etymology // and today? // Today will be...
Two months in a psych ward, 2008 Do not crush. Do not split. Do not chew. Pills in tiny paper cups each meal. They know how well you sleep. They’re weighing you. We all know the surveillance state’s not new. And oh, when the psychosis hits, it’s real. Do not crush. Do not split. Do not chew. Don’t...
I want this Ramadan to last a little longer, so that I may continue to love the sun for a few more days. As I’m sitting inside the mosque, observing the world within a world, I glimpse a man walking in, wearing brown dress pants and a green shirt. He takes off his shoes with the demeanour of a man...
1. One rib still aches from Winnipeg: ….not injury, just weathered memory. 2. Hormones sealed in a Ziploc, ….pressed between Saskatoon receipts ….and a rosary ….I no longer negotiate with. 3. A chest discovering its own storms: ….hail where there was once quiet. 4. A...
Power to force, I have none. I cannot make things/ humans happen. In the hostel, a tall, narrow window by my pillow opens only at the top. It has no screen. I wake in early morning to the sound of distressed wings— two monarchs fluttering by my face, on the ledge, a metre below the opening. One...
Cruising public bathrooms used to be the only life-threatening activity that we had to worry about. You back your truck into a shaded parking space in the far corner of this well-known cruising spot in a moment of desperation and desire, hoping that someone will park close to you. However, after we...
Mommy J always drove home in the dark. Today my chest lifted & I pretended it didn’t so it might stay longer. It is rare I cry. I love myself but not entirely. Sometimes I’m so vain even I think it’s stupid, if vanity is the right word for what I do in secret. Like googling myself—it never gets...
“Talk to dad yet?” Derek asks. His Civic is making the exit out of town along the highway. It’s the middle of the day, which feels a little late to be heading out but I can’t be up before eleven. My body just won’t do it. I glance up from my phone, tuck it into my pocket. “Yeah, of course. I told...
dusty walk up prince street tails flick behind the backs of teddy soft cattle where the egrets feast on the insects crawling from the hoof smears in the earth that holds is held by roots overlapping caressing lovers’ hands whose initials claim the trees crickets chirp forest hums orange light peeps...
Apple blossoms falling like snow. I will not just go to work and die, I’ll have a beautiful life, I promise. I heard you were somewhere. It’s never as bad as it seems; Worse or better. Hotel bathrooms, a fire in the distance. Another generation delirious and disenchanted. The world has always been...
Neurodivergent, queer, and living with chronic illness/disability, Ares J. Benoit (they/any) lives in Calgary / Mohkίnstsis / Kootsisáw with their family, but inside they still feel like a young forest demon discovering poetry for the first time. Micro memoir at Five Minutes Lit; poetry...
I’ve seen you around & that means everything bellies swollen with our histories and appetites. I am eating the world with you inside it. Nation Makes is a trans poet and neuroscientist living in Montréal / Tiohtià:ke. Their work examines how the brain and body conspire to create...
Frank is concerned that the drugs I have to take to induce lactation will make me want to kill myself again, but on the warm June afternoon when I fill the domperidone prescription at Pharmasave, I find it hard to imagine. I keep telling people I don’t eat at McDonald’s anymore but we thought this...
for Sarah We begin at the wicker lounge chair, B’s first big tooth cutting, but grin goofy she walks me to the kitchen & back, steps unsteady round & round her dimpled knuckles squeeze my finger while you drink the care I brought: a medium Chai latte. On Fridays, we start water for tea...
[FIRST SCENE – SUMMONING] The livestream focuses on four hot gays, the Hex Boys, standing on a cliff overlooking the roiling sea: 1. Ciaran St. Clair The charismatic one; cropped hair, dark skin, tapered jaw; leather jacket with pockets hiding his hands, each finger sporting one or two silver rings...
the sky was a surprise today each time I considered it (1) an army of puffballs marching across a river, (2) cotton ringlets sprung open in the currents of a lagoon, (3) the bruised eye socket of a storm swirling its empty threats the sun winking still behind the hill each of my best dogs let...
Keep above the waterline of breath. The level rises, recedes, the gravitational pull of it, a border contouring the bones of the face, soft chambers of the throat. Fluids have their own willfulness too holy to constrain. We say that there’s a gurgle in the chambers of the heart, or a murmur. The...
There was a time when the world, as I came to understand it, held its breath. I took those years and bloomed into you. Like a pale rider, a searching cold reached through the city and drew away any powers of spinning old into new. Every flake of snow seemed to whisper You will never be still. I was...
The house had been yellow once. Óscar could see the places where the paint had peeled back entirely from the wooden siding, leaving splintered patches of grey in its wake. Its scabby state was of a piece with its other features: the missing shingles, the lawn blistered with weeds, the black door...
“Here are the ashes. / The days are beautiful.” —Ann Lauterbach All being said, the fathers of my wild hypothesis live near that dandelion clock fountain. All clean now: even the station beggars have PayID and the strip clubs close before the sushi train. On the second floor of an Art Deco...
I press my face to the bank. ….the mud smears my cheek with vowels. the water does not say my name, ….but it chews the syllables. stones shift like vertebrae, ….a spine grinding under weight. the current drags nails, hair, feathers— ….nothing it takes comes back intact. a...
Jake moved his knight. “How long are you going to drag this out?” The angular black horse had a white scar in place of its left ear. This was the same set where one of the white pawns had vanished around the time Jake’s sister was born, and then been replaced with a wooden one on a slightly smaller...
in the summer i swallow the sun …………and i cry when my bare feet touch the dirt in the costco i watch …………someone’s parents begin to separately plan their divorce in my dreams interdimensional …………parking lots are all the rage...
Kath Healing (they/them) is a queer, trans, disabled, neurodivergent poet based on the unceded lands of the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking peoples (Victoria, BC). Their work explores archives of body, memory, and survival through hybrid forms. Winner of the 2025 Victoria Writers’ Society Poetry Contest...
Let us begin with an introduction to rock: a tap will tell you if it’s full or hollow. And enter: and let yourself lay open, stiller than a spinning top. Time attaches us to luminous things— …………….clamber, climbing, finding …………….you...
He thought forever would be like time going missing driving at night, but it turns out it’s more like a snow globe. It’s shaken and swirling, too much of a whiteout to follow the highway lines of time. He does know the start. It was static then, and maybe it will be again in the end. But since his...
Two As in a pair. As in a set. As in a couple. As in dalawa. As in double. As in two of cups. As in division into halves. As in when our two hands touch in the city bus in daylight it makes two hands turn into ten fingers and I think that means something. As in we can make more out of nothing. As...
for Cathy Ahlers Beloved void. First sound of first stars flung into darkness. You died, and there were eight loads of laundry. A brown mouse poked her head from beneath a white curtain. A con- tractor waved through the kitchen window, then pulled up the rotten deck. The world looked like nothing...
“Okay, like, hear me out. Going to the forest is like the ultimate form of getting in touch with your traditional manhood.” It starts like this, very gently, delicately placed. I am a seed that will soon take root in his mind. Dave is talking to him over a beer, like they do and have done since the...
Under the full blue moon of the sliding year, above a skin of snow, hirsute with trees, and beneath another bluff, the snatch-tangle of saplings in dense thickets over this rolling Wisconsin— Over such slumbering body of land, spunk of forests, bristlejaw of bluffs and hollers, in the shadow of a...
v.f. thompson is just compost in training. She can be found clowning around Thorold, Ontario. Her work can be found in The Hard Times, Last Girls Club, Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, the anthologies Monster Lairs, We Can Always Tell,The Crawling Moon, and many other nooks and crannies...
