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...
terra nullius: the inverted disposition of thingsin ordinary flux, logging roads and peri-urbanlawn ornaments replicated on the clouds’ nuclearpetals, I watch the patterns on her dress orbit myeyes, my face, my mouth, overlap with auxiliary species of our scape, a cosmic bodice, feminised and...
I. SUMMER My mother was a gardener. She saw something in nature—in dirt and bugs and effervescent flies—that I never have. Under light skies and bright weather, she’d kneel for hours in our mediocre garden, weeding and watering or whatever it is that gardeners do. I am now doing the same in my...
She lives in one place and one place only: the entrance to a bakery where she has conjured a swirling rainbow display of cupcakes she pictures herself at the counter her voice sweetens an octave for “two please” wheremid she conjures in the cashier’s fingers that plant the sticker on the box the...
Your chef will be the first to saynot a muster of hair should remainas he timbers a fire, wide hands barb your fattened flesh. Thigh all manner of birds; you’re as light as a featherthick as a board. Resentful caretakersbreak their deer, unlacelegs, loosen fleshcleanly from each side of bone...
“Fragmentary,” “broken” (Crazy from Swedish Krasa: to CRUSH), and a medley of narratives insisting on disconnect, either from the body, from the self, from language, or whatever apparatus needed to withhold the linear. I say it’s the opposite. If you’ve never been through it, you’re thinking of it...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
