“The one you would choose: Were you led then by him?” “What longing, O Yaar, is controlled in real time?” —Agha Shahid Ali (Ghazal) i dreamt of tulips today they opened their mouths in a yawn the kind that engulfs the sun in its vacuous mouth like a little hurricane; the sort of yawn that could...
But how could it not, when you used the precise alphanumeric sequence needed to land your words in my inbox? Not what you meant? Let’s begin again. Sarcasm arrives too easily when I’m nervous. Yes, I am well. As in I am doing well. As in I remember to steady myself with deep breathing when...
Content warning: this story depicts domestic violence and has discussions of sexualized violence. The Johnny Cash records. Well, we left behind all the records, along with that battered record player in the teal case. All of us, when we were little, liked to play with the metal clasp on that case...
before lockdown i dreamt that a serpent tried to kill me. so i tattooed it to my forearm in the place of my neck, a vision of black scales & black eyes blazed alight beneath the red of an imaginary sun. when an alien summer leaves you hypomanic it makes perfect sense to carve nightmare...
I am you in your jewel-domed reading room, I am you in your kayak skimming. —Phyllis Webb The sky was inverted. I called you in the bare yellow night. I am you against the river of clouds, I am you in an energy current shaking down the kitchen walls, you in the contrapuntal stream of two trees...
“Two Warehouse Workers, Not Smoking” was inspired by the short story “Two Nurses, Smoking,” (The New Yorker, 2020) by David Means, and the investigative journalism of The New York Times. The sign was written in half a dozen languages in order for its meaning to not be mistaken: A Smoke-Free...
In Loving Memory of Simon (1992-2022) * in the city that screams beauty occurred to me between the city and the city there’s a body of water and a ferry * we have found in ourselves a great proximity to danger we are born of fire and blissful taste of forget I forget how many Is I have written into...
There are rats in the house. They gnaw basket-straws, the cardboard edges of things. Their shit, softening in repeated washings, hidden in the fingers of a glove. Grey stains along the baseboard. They track each other, smelling. Eyes dried berries, swiveling. The intelligence of their tails...
She spent the afternoon the same way she had every day that week, digging around the lake after swimming lessons with the dog-eared blue book tucked under her arm. In her bag, a rosemary sprig, a stubby white candle. All week, Fran had been considering the jaw of the squirrel, and now she walked...
i fear the deluge of careerists tapping concrete in oxfords & ballet flats chic folx in Barbour & Burberry coats released from desks to trains or after hours off king west dead ass with pretty young things, all beauties and good vibes only—so kalos kagathos—made flaccid by business manz...
Read to me in tongues aflame in blame, I asked the past. My prayers burnt to accusations, I cannot get past the past. Killing, not violence if you believe a killer rearranges a body’s time. Rubble of muscle, not soul. All have killed before—so vast the past. I bathed my shadow in a rainstorm...
The frosting on today’s cupcakes is bluish-grey, the colour of blah—the colour of this moment. But the smells of cinnamon buns, movie popcorn, and French fry oil fill the air and remind me of the verb wafts, so I turn away from the dessert shop and try to forget it’s there. I make my way to a...
A flying woman, balances between the cruel heat-drafts of mid July She hovers, between tin-can house-music and picnic-fattened ants whose licorice-backs gleam in the merciless summer heat Her support? The co-conspirator to this rebellion against gravity? Perhaps she’s a childhood friend, a lover...
It’s just fabric, but the shape is everything. Like a boat made of steel, it’s all about how you mould yourself into the world. Like how the body is mostly water but still walks, doesn’t pool and run into the sand, or turn to droplets suspended in the air. Like how even a disjointed sentence makes...
I’ve been walking in the woods for some time when I see it: a bright synthetic pulse of colour, about a stone’s throw from the trail, peeking out from the dead leaves. Upon further inspection it’s a cross, tole painted in uneven coats of periwinkle blue. In a careful and tidy hand, someone has...
I beg for it short like a boy, Boy-short, please. I come out with a pageboy: gymnast, figure skater. Still a girl. I swallow red. I hate myself. I didn’t know how to quit cutting my teeth/brain on my culture, sweet carts & cameras, cutting through me like a parking lot, making everybody look...
for Kasem Last night I saw clouds turn into paper Stars waning in your eyes’ unuttered anger. How do we speak of love, my brother When tongues are as stagnant as tears?Remember the lonely tree of our childhoodThe inodorous sand, the clouds that turned into cinder? I try to forget my first memories...
When my older sister Mathilde was twelve, my mother told her she had to wait a year before getting a pet—to make sure she was responsible enough, or maybe just hoping she’d change her mind after a year. My sister, being an animal-loving preteen fuelled by stubbornness, waited the year and...
cooling my burned thumb at the kitchen tap I’d grasped the roasting stick too high up cold water rushing over the raw spot farther down the stream rinsing yellow plum the neighbour brought over tasting the sour water eye always wander out I kept this in a box, snug I pull the lid off and it rises...
When I say strangle I don’t mean the hands that crush the throat, but the body that won’t resist, confident in its ability to hold its breath, or not. There are nights when I wake up choking because my body wills itself to stop breathing. Tolerates few terrors of murderers or other lovers— silent...
1. Our favorite part of the zoo was the aquarium. We were both scared of water. Never swam or got close to the beach. Being blue-skinned between the water tanks got us close as we ever got to being fish. Me and Jack. I remember, we found the ugliest fish we could that reminded us of each other. He...
and i’ve killed my tomatoes. their long arms crack, despite the butchness of my shoulders. they insist on death with unrelenting life. my girlfriend and i are gay on main street, in the vintage shop where i bought my first men’s shirt, the one i wore to my second pride, when i blacked out in a west...
shore nursing rubble water scraping brick teeth carmines, umbers urban abscess, coaxed into gaze by strings of 8 o’clock light an invitation to squint. ombak, waves me sand-laden, dragging teenage feet through coast, dark and happy grinning at the sight of Makku, my mother always perched on a...
Jo wakes up with a lump on her throat. Not in, but on. She sees it first in the bathroom mirror as her face fades into view through the steam from the shower. It’s about the size of a marble, gelatinous in consistency. When she touches it, she feels it move slightly beneath the skin. Lucille comes...
I am Charles Darwin. I eat owlflesh at Cambridge University. I have discovered something, an entirely new species with tropical fever in its reptile fingers. I am busy with taxonomying its most peculiar and three-sided armor, its six-toed fitness for these latitudes and its perfect speckled eggs...
I am told these are among the most dangerous tides in the world. I come from a country with dangerous tides, but only in theory: I am not familiar with that pull. I would not know what to avoid, so I pick my way across, nearest the shore, my soles sucked down, thinking of opaque glass and broken...
It is late April, too early yet for tourists. The cashier looks at me through a pair of smudged glasses that perch precariously at the tip of his nose. His curious eyes study my features, searching for clues: a hint of an Adam’s apple or eyebrows that are just a smidge too thin. He is considering...
just north of the texan blackland is a home with a stale teapot. an abandoned rain boot is the perfect centerpiece for the bottle cap table. and when it rains, it’s where to keep all the petals she’d stuffed in the tissue box. candy wrappers keep us warm. it helps, the crinkling they make...
someday there will be more doors someday we with ambiguous accidental bodies who carry the debt of shame in the thread of our bones will no longer need to be divine someday we will learn to see the shadows on our faces rivered impressions at the spill of our hips for what they are marks from...
It was the sound of humming that woke me, low and mournful. But when I came to full consciousness, I couldn’t hear anything. It was very late or possibly very early and the room was dark, darker than usual, a sort of pulsating soft black-grey. A fog must have rolled in off the river, dimming...
hide her inside a ruby. use every pronoun so they can’t pry program from machine. bury him in the left pocket of your bathrobe. lay yr tenderness out to dry on the rails. no one will suspect a thing & even you sometimes will forget it’s there. when you remember her again, they will come...
my parents die in. I do not pray to the sun before it buries s- in the pane of my apartment window then leaks and pools over the pavement sky. Rain traffics my apartment window and dries like vitreous cells, like siren prayers and the river of cars stops. Dies. Sin slows, stops, on the kneeler of...
M The first time you see L, she is climbing a dying pitch pine, brown needles falling into the shadows between her curls. You don’t catch sight of her immediately. Your calves ache from forcing your way through the encrusted landscape, and only a skinny rabbit hangs from your belt. Snow has crept...
after Fiona Pardington It is between pest and cholera, she says the world, this state of affairs, down her long, straight lashes she stares, describing the falling of her thoughts on the great indifference of many, thoughts that are weighty like sand in the bottom of an hourglass as we drift past...
Not that it’s enough, simply to adore a person But I adore her The way sansevieria reaches for the perfect ceiling The way hypoestes develops its pink spots like dark room photographs The way arthurium sucks on ice cubes The way golden pothos rests in a trail on the hardwood floor The way aloe...
Jaimi texted, “Dad died. Call home,” on the eve of World Pride in Toronto. I had just gotten a haircut. I was sweaty from my bike ride home, jumpy with anticipation for the weekend ahead. Our two cats curled through my legs, begging for kibble. As I read, she texted again—Art found him. We didn’t...
My sister and I stand barefoot on the radiator, our lacy night dress scratchy against our shins. Delicious jitters as we clutch the high window sill. Night touches our bodies freed from sheets tucked in too taut. A flash of light splits the dark, spiders down electric blue. Thunder shakes the room...
She _ites my lip just a nip a fizzing on my skin we wait at the _us station under zeeting streetlights they crackle like a chip _ag I envy the susurration from the am_er halo, want to tell her “see, that is what is generating the electricity not your z axis cheek_ones or the _atting of your...
In January I moved into a basement suite in Burnaby. The windows looked out into holes in the ground that were covered by planter boxes along the east wall and a newly built deck along the back. No one lived in the house above, but every weekend at 5 AM the gardener would start up a weed wacker...
i’m from here, drifted in from there, waterlogged, kelped, the sway of the sea still in my knees, where my motion sickness pulls from. like Bà Ngọai, i’m walking as i’m balancing a fishbowl upon my neck, my eyes convexed behind an unseeing lens as clouded as her mung bean yellow cataracts. i miss...
