Why we continued to celebrate the new year every 365 days when it took this planet almost double that to revolve around the sun, I never understood. I’d have preferred the planet’s natural rhythms, forcing us to mark time in a slower way. Maybe then I wouldn’t find myself at the end of each...
Orientation desk music have YOU read Proust? God. the invisible sex of it. Claire. the eagle-eyed spectator. My substance: Honey. tea tea then nothing. London roads narrow my sense of dying. you love this shit. Joe, like wheat. a shared renaissance! Fall. Née autumn. words. soft. pedal. on dental...
I tug you taut slide you slick you squeak up and down between my incisors and their neighbours tight fit forever loosened by pre-Invisalign shaving-down you choke my fingers your small green plastic case is too tiny for AirPods I swing your lid open unfurl you unwind you unspool you and at arm’s...
The day was appropriately gloomy for a funeral. Raven perched on her ladder and sheared dead ivy from her windowsill, occasionally glancing at the procession of mourners mirrored in the glass. It wasn’t an unusual sight for a cemetery, of course, but she liked to watch over these things. There was...
The basement suite is leaking in my brain, connectors wet, though advertised brain-tight. My mentor, ice in her cup a rattling rain, from cancer-dark names me formidably brainy. I rustle into the paper bag of childhood, and touch the slick sweet jelly of sour brains. You take my photo on the...
Mackenzie Wiebe is a writer interested in texture, sensation, and ornament. They have an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and currently organize the Emerging Writers Reading Series. They have a chapbook with Armistice Press called Wandering Teeth.
I once thought of marriage as an exoplanet in the habitable zone of another star; I knew it was capable of sustaining life, I just didn’t want to live there. I’d taken astronomy lessons from my mom’s copy of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. How tidy the binary seemed back then, before...
Dear [enter the name you see on your lips, of the poster on your wall, the face on the VHS cover, the girl you swore was just a friend as your mother spins your baseball cap forward and smooths your hair], When you [you, you, and you, too] all dipped your toes in the sparkling pool of traditional...
I have seen Twin Peaks exactly once in my life, in an apparition of a sunroom. ◊ It was like watching dust settle, how bored I was, piecing together why I was here and what I wanted and what this would mean to me in the end. ◊ The hot itch of orange tweed against the backs of my legs, an irritating...
I am become my grandfather’s ghost: Crumbs over the kitchen sink into eternity The children of hunger, The Daughters Insomniac, Nobody ever loved you like a good pot of stew. My grandfather wore a messenger Hat, a black leather jacket. He is alive now, like a ghost; I, his cool fibers...
The common loon has four calls—the tremolo, the yodel, the wail, and the hoot. Each call communicates an emotion, a desire, or a warning. When I return to Wisconsin, the place where I grew up and the place where my grandpa’s family has lived and died for generations, I listen to the loons calling...
Angelic Goldsky (also known as angelic vers) is a queer/trans poet working at the crossroads of diasporic lineage repair, queer world-building, angel-wrestling and complex trauma timeline healing through musicality, rhythm, clown-foolery and playful devotion. Their poem Trans Scripts of Crisis is...
Lucas Crawford is Canada Research Chair of Transgender Creativity and Mental Health at the University of Alberta (Augustana). This rural Nova Scotian has authored five books, including the Kroetsch Prize-winning Muster Points (U of Calgary, 2023). Lucas runs “Rewriting Ourselves,” a...
the walls are moving. tumbling walls falling. i undo the home. i break the skeleton, the back- bone. foundation alone could move mountains. i shake it up. take it apart. kiss a side, turn it inside out. plop it face down on the ground. lie on it. give it warmth. i loosen the screws of every single...
In the copy room, the machines drowned Anna out. The whirs of the photocopiers bounced between the concrete walls, their humming somehow as harsh as the fluorescent lights, halting any conversation that might begin even if just between one part of the mind and another. Professor Anderson walked in...
S.A. Leger is a writer and ornithologist from Newfoundland, Canada. Her poems have recently appeared in or are forthcoming from The Hopkins Review, SWWIM, The Los Angeles Review, Conduit, and The Malahat Review. She spends her days exploring the 47th parallel with her wife and dachshund.
i was a [servant-god] made for [you-me]— just more [water-fire] to pour down a throat, just another bushburn [sinking-rising] [down-up] the building’s spine,……back to mirror, a [child-adult] sleeping until 12 [pm-am]……woke till the lightest dark……until until until i could the...
Kevin decided to run for office. He said: Well, I guess it’s time for me to dust off my copy of Atlas Shrugged. You know, said Beta, who once had been his girlfriend but now was not, there are other books about politics that you could read. But Kevin did not want to read other books about politics...
Everything hurts. I engage muscles that have been single for so long they have cobwebs. For days, my hip twinges, my neck side-eyes me. I roll my shoulders in an attempt to calm them of their hysterics. I must say that not all fat bodies are out of shape, but this one is. And we’ve only learned 30...
Mistletoe ornaments a branch. the forever green of it, eaten out of season. here, birds wipe their beaks against pink sky, & the language adheres to trees. the sprigs flourish in their raging shoots. at a whim, I tapeline myself to a baobab trunk— reaching for the roundness of grapes to busy my...
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...
