Category - Literature

Joe Bishop Literature Poetry

Inherited Thumbnail

The major sin is the sin of being born. —Samuel Beckett Hominid-handled bovine bone hammered Kindred skull. No dragging knuckles stopped Him looting dark markets, the self helped To fat figs, muted chops of choice tapir. Early man made primal maul, hammered Raft and drifted. Shrooming troglodyte...

Liselle Yorke Literature Poetry

we-ness

it used to be the world, singularsitting on your shouldersnow it’s each of youwe’ve become so individualized the frayed end of a tasseli don’t know who or what is the single thread holding ustogether at the top but it’s precarious, no i want to weave around younot the finesse of a...

Creative Non-fiction Literature Meesh QX

Thank you k.d.

The first time I heard of k.d. lang, I was twenty years old, living at home for the summer, and buckled into the back seat of the family car as we motored up the highway on the first family road trip in years. We were heading northeast towards the interior of B.C. for my cousin’s wedding. My dad...

Literature Poetry Sienna Tristen

stellar nursery

you pull out your day book &inscribe a stellarium on my belly. posed with your phone like a byzantine sainti tilt the word of your miracles to better light. i’m drawing my gratitude list in stars, you saidlike you do. do you mind if i balance this here? i stretch exalted, the breathing altar on...

Literature Poetry Tosh Sherkat

man-bae-b: a non-musical

I. welcome to the good woman. welcome to my mother or my lover. welcome to knowing what will not save me. i want to be clean, washed of conditioning, and rub shampoo dry with the past as a patchwork towel i made from every mistake. i want to cry and not blame it on the aftershave. tomorrow i will...

Fiction Literature Meg Max

Garbage Day

I jump out from under the covers, stumbling down the hallway to Curtis’s nursery. The deep cream carpet muffles my steps, soft against my bare feet. The cool knob of the door startles me fully awake as I turn it. The hinges creak open. The room is dark. No nightlight. The screams that woke me up...

Emma Rhodes Literature Poetry

My Queer

My queer is naming…….my cabbage patch doll “Madison” after my very best friend. My queer is my neighbourhood. ……..The shootings. Our small blue house with the white……..balcony. The dog, bear, bit the nose……..off Madison. Bit the skin off me. My...

Literature Poetry Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin

Hospice Yard

Flitting tails of firebow minnows— lilac fibrils streaked on wheelchair cobble— whipped by the warm pull of august a jug of orchids passes between palms their cups marrowed to bone, indecent gulping against the fold of dusk as if they have yet to live a life of tenderness ……..of shaking...

Fiction Literature Siavash Saadlou

Mi Padre

There was a time when Jubin’s dad used to run a reputable coffee store at the heart of Tehran’s bazaar. His cheques never bounced. His customers always came back for more. His name Farhad—meaning helper—had become synonymous with decency among his colleagues. They had even nicknamed him amin-e...

Cayenne Bradley Literature Poetry

Crime Victim Assistance Gauntlet

Please indicate the type of crime that occurred (e.g., home invasion, assault).  What counts as a crime? What is the exact threshold? What specific dimensions of flesh delineate the parameters of abuse? He started at the feet and hands, and then the arms and legs; con-men know that the more times...

Annick MacAskill Literature Poetry

Classic Myths to Read Aloud

In summer the grass turned yellow & long, the light grew its leaves over my arm, we kept plants in the classroom, & once, a bunny rabbit. My mother said to bring it home, & there it stayed, till autumn fell upon our faces like the blood-salt of obligation. I & my sister wandered the...

Fiction Literature Shaelin Bishop

Zugzwang

The woman smoking meth across from the bodega looks like your sister, so you offer her a pack of cigarettes and forty-three dollars if she’ll pretend to be her for one night. You could afford to pay more, but this is all you have in cash and she takes it. Up close, she looks less like Reed: acne...

Drucilla Gary Literature Poetry

The Green Potion and God’s All-Seeing Eyes

Her eyes glow green under obsidian skies She gives the midnight cowboy a silver dollar and he hands her the elixir sealed with wax She tells me that life begins when you open your eyes in the morning She wants to show me the field where the wild horses run while their watcher sleeps Her eyes glow...

David Ly Literature Poetry

Ways to Deal with Worry

1.  Write what you worry about on sticky notes.     Throw them on the ground and draw a circle of water around them.     Sprinkle salt onto the circle to light it on fire. 2.  Start by texting, “I’m worried that…” in a message to yourself.     Think about how sweet pecan pie is, and allow...

Fiction Literature T. Liem

Over Two Decades of Dedicated Maintenance

This one Sunday night I stood in my bathroom with the door open while Cass talked me through her most recent horrible week. Cass was tall, blonde, thin. Light on light on light. Except, she kept her long hair dyed bright colours and wore baggy clothes with a lot of patterns. This all had the effect...

Katie Cameron Literature Poetry

Ode to my ears

Pain thuds the drum before I leave the ear appointment, but the clinic staff wave me out the door. The throbs become thumps of bass through floor boards and I call 811, wincing against my pillow. The thumps release into fizzing, then sputtering I laugh off over tea and a roommate’s raised brow...

Literature Poetry Sarah M. Wilson

Blackberry Picking

after Claudia Rankine / Today: You perch at your kitchen table, a swell of distraction surrounding your screen: discarded wristwatch, stained cotton wipes full of thick black nailpolish, your third pot of bitter tea. You click between determination and avoidance, between the crushing metronome of...

Fiction John Elizabeth Stintzi Literature

Moving Parts

My left pinky was first. During the icebreaker at my college dorm’s first floor meeting, when I was asked to give three interesting facts about myself, I lifted my pinky-less hand. The first fact was: “I grew up on a farm about four hours away.” The second fact was: “I lost my left pinky finger...

Ashley-Elizabeth Best Literature Poetry

the best thing about today

Today my mother sent me a framed picture of her heart,ladybug stickers in each corner. A chest preparing for new growth. I’m not sorry anymore that she doesn’t like her life. My poemsare dispirited by her, thick mentions of roadtrips, and landscapesand pissing into Lay’s Stax canisters while stuck...

Ari Lord Creative Non-fiction Literature

Concussion Camp

1. They Say Fish Don’t Feel Pain As a new intake, I’m ushered through a maze of clinical rooms, a noisy lunchroom and a bustling gym. Joanne, the program coordinator, shepherds me, waiting as I shuffle with my cane and pelvic brace. We end at a darkened room set apart from the rest of the clinic...

Hugh Blackthorne Literature Poetry

The Ungirling

There was no book on how to girl. I read all the books about animals at the library. When my mother gave me a book on puberty, I drew penises. I became track suits, jean jackets, short hair. My bones grew. In the city, I swirled caught without ponds, between asphalt and decay. My friends were boys...

Literature Monica Meneghetti Poetry

Muse

I know you will make your own way in the world.The way you favour linen and leather, and walk like a boy.Your teeth are like pomegranate seeds, sucked clean.Your motorcycle helmet unleashes copper strands.You do exist. The way you bathed me in mud, adding champagne and orchids.I flogged you with...

Anuja Varghese Fiction Literature

Cherry Blossom Fever

Marjan Every year, for two weeks in mid-May, the city is struck by cherry blossom fever. In April, the city waits on the edge of spring, which should be soft like rabbit ears or tulips. More often, spring in the city is sharp, the mornings still mean and frostbitten, the grey dusks prickling with...

Gordon Taylor Literature Poetry

Origin Stories

There are tiny, quick spiders that live in my curtains. Sometimes they die, shrivelling in silk folds. I killed one once in a moment of fear, interrupting a key sequence of events, like the man who rescued a baby songbird that fell from a nest onto Queen Street, hand fed her mealworms and suet for...

Hannah Yore Literature Poetry

Mother

I watch your mother stroll through her garden. She moves like you and I imagine us here together—years from now—harvesting sweet melons and mobola plums for our daughters.  We follow her cautiously, just close enough to brush arms every third step. Wading in and out of the tide between us. There is...

Fiction James Cawkwell Literature

What Came First

It started when the bylaws changed, allowing anyone in the suburbs to own and raise chickens. My mom was unemployed at the time, which was common enough in our neighbourhood. She also had two thirds of an agriculture degree, which wasn’t. She worked when she felt like it and didn’t when she...

Literature Poetry Vivian Li

Untitled

CW: Mentions of suicide Look inside your skin. Reverse it, snake hide. Bubble wrap. A gift. Sifting darkness. Proposals. Threats. You cannot control. Look within your meat. The flesh, the blood. Hemoglobin you wish could clot. Sudden hypothermia. Induced CO. You learned to label monoxide in Chem...

Anders Villani Literature Poetry

Quicklime

And so this flaw within the silk of memory began to run— —John A. Scott, “Run in the Stocking” Rain boils. A liar wakes eating the down on her wrists. Failure, again, to alarm the eyes fast enough to shock unstalked world. At breakfast, she and her parents will share a bowl of loquats from the tree...

Fiction Laura Clarke Literature

Vestigial Traits

I can’t even begin to tell you how boring I am now. Boring in a good way, the kind you like, the kind that doesn’t exhaust you. It’s true every night I snort coke off a buzzard’s gold-encrusted talon at the Archbishop of York’s enthronement feast. It’s true my chocolate-covered knuckles are always...

Leah Bobet Literature Poetry

Trojan Road

instead, the next time her mouth opens the snake-tongued road unrolls through it, past the groves inland, to Mount Ida.that morning, her brother cut songbirds plume to chin to cast their smooth crop stones, trace them like masts underwater. In turn they recounted their dreams: in hers a white...

bonny c.d. Literature Poetry

Interpretive jig

in my marbled monokini I vein a new tract into yr comely cornea with my strong postured pubic stubble And it issues forth laws on street parking and winter bans, and its many             exurban mothers band together to ban my locked-hip public self, my unnatural             monumental stiff dance...

Danielle Keiko Eyer Fiction Literature

The Halfway House

The social worker parks us in the driveway. In my lap there’s a duffel bag and backpack, which I stuffed, hurried, when we stopped at my apartment on our way from the hospital. The social worker—Andrea—idled outside while I ran in. I barely remember what I grabbed before stumbling blindly back into...

Helen Han Wei Luo Literature Poetry

Plums

from lena to maribelle this is just to say that I have eaten the plums, en route from Georgia, pits and carmine juice spat on roadside dirt to pucker the ground, so sweet, so cold. Carrion for suckling mayflowers. You may have been saving them for breakfast, some decades past, the thrill of this...

Emily Riddle Literature Poetry

Storm Formation

is it sacrilegious to say i was horny for a thunderstorm?all day we sat on the beach of wâpamon sakahikan bodies burning on the beach foolish not to slather each other in sunscreen or admit our feelings for one another in june the sky is in transition above nehiyaw askîy it’s difficult to predict...

Liselle Yorke Literature Poetry

in need of

Liselle Yorke i put an entire nation into a cardboard boxhandled them with care down the basement stairsopened the last door for themthe last act of common decency i put them on the cold floor of the crawl spacetucked between winter gear and holiday lightsalongside seasons that have passedi leave...

Literature Poetry Rob Colgate

Want Poem

Rob Colgate Finn drowned me         he wanted to there’s nowhere            to read this and my rubber               filled with lungs pushed the stretch        of my back thin water                        no I’m sorry white water                     yes it was less costly to sink            the...

Fiction Kate Cayley Literature

Bloody Mary

Kate Cayley There was a small bathroom off of the gym changeroom. Grace knew it was almost never used. It was behind a beige door between two rows of lockers, and it only had three cubicles. The bathroom was L-shaped, the cubicles facing the sinks and mirrors, and then a corner that ended in a...