Billeh Nickerson When my friend challenged me to write a poem about the Winnipeg police who accidentally turned on the speakers to their taxpayer-funded helicopter only to broadcast a lurid tale of blowjobbery and oral salaciousness to the communities below I was momentarily titillated as...
Meaghan Loraas [mks_dropcap style=”square” size=”35″ bg_color=”#505556″ txt_color=”#ffffff”]B[/mks_dropcap]rian is irritated that the television isn’t working. I tell him not to do it but he’s sixteen and he does what he wants. He grabs my broom. He...
H for Heteronormativity Charles Demers When I was about twenty years old, my brother around seventeen, our dad took us out for what was meant to be a nice family dinner at one of Vancouver’s tackiest sushi restaurants. Fairly close to a university, the place’s tagline was “Miso Horny” (Get it? Just...
after Frank O’Hara Adam Meisner I’m leaving New York, again. Under swept trusses & skirting Harlem at the early hours of Columbia’s Sunday young. The drive piddles over the Washington & under another flag– the progeny of powdered wigs held higher ten years after I watched a...
Marcus McCann Scrapper, if swollen open lids allow before the vanity—cramped, lit like discount grocery—I’ll tilt my skull back, squint, note this bacterial shiner, sacré coeur eye patch. A nightbird laid a heavy pink shit in my socket. A camera is a bad eye, my eye now a bad camera. You...
Nicola Harwood Note about names and pronouns: Names have been changed in this story to protect privacy. Around the age of seventeen, Antwan changed her name and asked to be referred to as female. She has asked that we use male pronouns when referring to the times before then when she still...
Jade McGregor When I say poetry saved my life I should mention other forces– by 1999 all the cars cruising the kiddie stroll had power lock doors, crystal meth turned the girls —Amber Dawn, titular piece, How Poetry Saved My Life My mother lived beside herself in fear I...
Arleen Paré if anyone asks tell them I’m sane as stainless steel I heat the pot before I make the tea when the Jehovah’s Witnesses knock I stand stock-still behind the drapes I harden myself against the swords of winter rain against December’s bucket of black night before they hatch I do not...
Jillian Christmas Dear God, Is it wrong that so long after our separation, I still see your face everywhere? The holy water between my legs when she touches me The wet in her eyes, head pressed back, her sinner mouth too full of heaven This bruised knee city Springing with all the wrong...
He's got one hand on the wheel and the other on her thigh, and Mae can't quite remember but she's pretty sure this is what love feels like.
Sierra Skye Gemma This piece first appeared in Plenitude magazine, Issue 2. Published here with permission from the author. The first time I see Stacey, I am standing in front of the courthouse on S.W. Morrison, in downtown Portland, Oregon. I’m with all the other punks in our usual spot. This is...
Pamela Mosher How to prepare for the bed and breakfast lavish with tajines and import rugs, absurd with Québecois music and Americans who couldn’t afford Paris? We couldn’t believe our room of roped curtain, in-suite fireplace, and crystal wine glasses (we filled with cheap depanneur red) We...
One ex-wife was looking sexy in a retro green bikini with a built-in, conish bra. She seemed taller than she had the summer before, her legs longer, her toenails redder.
Sugar le Fae —after Collin Kelley’s “Saving Anne Sexton” In the library in Florence, Mass, I found her shriveled up small, a sibyl living in the hollow of her own book: a flask, a handgun, neatly rolled cash. Everywhere you looked, her curls!— in the red cursive script across the cover, in...
Joelle Barron All summer I’m growing: sugar snaps, raspberries, fat tomatoes streaked red and green. Plants are easy to love. My dog stretched out on the spruce-shade lawn is easy to love. Flutter in my belly might be you, might be gas. Too early to tell, but every night I drip milk. I...
Rhiannon Catherwood When I was ten years old, I ran away by accident. Every day at recess, I sought out the same secluded alcove in the outer wall of the school. I would sit, take out a spiral notebook, and write, relying on a plastic digital watch to let me know when my thirty minutes were up. The...
Alex Leslie We’ve changed You said to me “your assorted minority identities” I misheard it, my sordid minority identities I routinely mishear labels as compliments this is a survival skill I don’t remember not noticing acquiring this skill You are so articulate have you considered being a...
Neve Be The best sex I’ve ever had was with a sixteen-year-old boy. The thing is, at the time, I was also sixteen. And no, I’m not saying that my literal high school experience was full of good body feels and good sex, because it wasn’t. This hot, affirming sexual experience took place in May of...
Justin Karcher Sam, we have to clear our mental garbage. It will take work to mend these holes. If we don’t, We’ll end up marooned on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch spanning waters from the West Coast Of North America to Japan. Garbage is magnetic. It flocks to other garbage, like blood...
Rachel Charlene Lewis [mks_dropcap style=”square” size=”35″ bg_color=”#505556″ txt_color=”#ffffff”]I[/mks_dropcap] keep losing my colouring; I am a blob of human. I should probably see a therapist, but for now I’ll stick to drinking a lot of...
Dina Del Bucchia and Daniel Zomparelli 1. I don’t really remember much these days, when the bones arrived I talked about paper or the way glass isn’t something I want to be around. Did you remember the way love works, I told you once in a small elevator that the world closes in...
Taylor Basso [mks_dropcap style=”square” size=”35″ bg_color=”#505556″ txt_color=”#ffffff”]T[/mks_dropcap]he cab was long gone but they were still standing in the same spot where they got out. Mario had handed the driver a twenty, didn’t even...
Shannon Webb-Campbell in the truck, on the way up, we talk around the meaning of marriage, we find an uncharted knowing driving down dirt roads, passing sheep, old barns, soon-to-be-made memories, alpacas by the time we make it to the highway, we conclude, love is truce, a pact to honour and...
Lynx Sainte-Marie I stand by the window. The night endures, and shadows are suffered by streetlamps. They mourn for the darkened lull of True Winter: that stillness where light is starved, begging for penance. For a while I had sat by my desk, looking busy. My eyes moved silently along the...
Aaron Chan I don’t know why I’m here. Before I left home, I told myself it was because I didn’t want to listen to my mom’s grating voice anymore while she yelled on the phone. On the SkyTrain, I convinced myself that my soul aches, that after years of searching and countless failed attempts at...
Amber Dawn I watched your breast which was fuller than the night on my porch when I first undid your buttons. The sheet beneath you was green It was almost our anniversary –“Epiphyte 2: Moss,” Jane Eaton Hamilton I watch your breast which is fuller than when we met I thought...
Davey Davis [mks_dropcap style=”square” size=”35″ bg_color=”#505556″ txt_color=”#ffffff”]T[/mks_dropcap]he Falcon is caged into its lot by prickly pears and a queue of stunted palms. Beyond it sprawl the fallow rice fields, and beyond those the...
Claire Matthews I Like ferns in the desert, you said we were impossible. I drew you a giraffe, a frond in its mouth, taped it to the fridge, said, Use your imagination. Around your neck hung the patron saint you wore when you saw your mother. In the living room, the only photo of her turned...
Jim Nason Here, above/ cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight. —Elizabeth Bishop [mks_dropcap style=”square” size=”35″ bg_color=”#505556″ txt_color=”#ffffff”]K[/mks_dropcap]ent had snuck the tent and two sleeping bags...
Ruth Daniell Everything came back to me, in snippets, later, after the smell of his cologne on a stranger wafted through the doors of a bus and the details swept into me like dirt maltreated by a broom— his hands on me, his eyes seeing my fear and ignoring it, his voice telling me to stay...
Calvin Gimpelevich [mks_dropcap style=”square” size=”35″ bg_color=”#505556″ txt_color=”#ffffff”]I[/mks_dropcap] met Gina sobbing on the bike racks behind my work. She paused to hiccup and check her cell-phone display before heaving into another...
Nico Amador Seasons have changed, even if doubts haven’t. Up north we’re together in the final blue curl of daylight, watching each iteration of trees out the window, their latest bit, that wild dead orange. It’s cold and I feel calmer in my clothes. I’m answering the call of old books...
Monica Meneghetti Vancouver wears its October sky like a toque. I long to pull off that sodden wool to reveal the cascading golden curls I know are itching underneath. Back home in Banff, the first skiffs of snow are melting under blue sky while yellow leaves still cling to aspen and poplar. Here...
Michael V. Smith I’m in the chapel on the Titanic but it’s modern and kind of tacky. The ceilings are twenty feet high. There are huge dark panels on the walls where stained glass windows should be. When you walk past them, you can see in, see three-dimensional representations of...
by Arleen Paré ask yourself how you bear this state everyday this chromosomal state of x and x like the day you step from the number 17 cross the street up the concrete steps faster along the everyday academic corridor into the university classroom late and a boy with a semi...
