Category - Literature

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...

Literature Poetry Samantha Sternberg

Labour

Samantha Sternberg Wafer paper and moonlightspread across the swept table.A fresh pen. Start at the waist. Hands on hips.The small-leaved lime treehad the greatest girth in Łódź, 2017. There must be enough to hold onto.Eat, eat. Few of her words I remember.Six years we shared. Zeyde stayed late to...

Aylin Malcolm Literature Poetry

Hometown Litany

Aylin Malcolm Sell gender to the highest bidder. Curate crisis. Have graceless breakdownover plans made. Undothe bed, shiver. A day weighed downwith hashtags: new year,                             new war. Splinters of time and death, merepartitioning the river. Noone wanted this. We wantedto push...

Creative Non-fiction Leanne Dunic Literature

Why Do You Kiss Everyone

Leanne Dunic A woman who was in my kindergarten class remembers me as the girl who had a crush on the Ghostbusters. I didn’t crush on all of the Ghostbusters, mainly the quirkier of the bunch: Egon Spengler and Peter Venkman. In Venkman, I found humour, self-confidence, street-smarts, and...

Literature Poetry William Vallières

The Sleepover

Courtney Love on all night in his low attic roomtesting with toes, jokes that weren’t jokesand soon, the lingering hand— how I loved his lingering hand!Fingers in the boxer band, our hardness!I shook in the sheetsout of joy for him that night. The next morning was Lady Di’s funeraland we were up...

Literature Luke Smith-Adams Poetry

Of Boxes

She asked me my feelings. Disclosure on demand. As though they could pile and inspect them. I couldn’t find any in my small square, the place where I store things. I must have put them in another box. I have since misplaced my scattered belongings. Luke Smith-Adams is a 32 year old living in...

Emilie Kneifel Fiction Literature

Portrait in Dental Cleanings

Emilie Kneifel the first years  they fumbled through the office door, always late, always elbowing each other as they rush-brushed their teeth before they plopped in the chair. a boy and his older sister, who was the moon to his moving car: always behind, same angle, same distance. emily would have...

Literature Poetry Roxanna Bennett

Wherever You Go, There You Are

Roxanna Bennett In Oxford on OxyContin, in Ajax on Ativan, in Paris on Percocets, in Cobourg on Clonazepam, in Switzerland on Seroquel, in Scarborough on Serentil, Berlin is a blur of Baclofen & Nabilone, Old Town is absinthe, Abilify & absence, Montreal is Mirtazapine, codeine &...

Jake Byrne Literature Poetry

Polyamorous Love Song

Jake Byrne My second boyfriend’s husband’s boyfriend pulls the page of cups I feel the only way I should: ecstatically We’ve put on the red light Concrete floor wet with verruca and lube A dampness on my perineum I composed this poem while David fucked me and apologized for not being fully present...

Chelsea Lee Wood Literature Poetry Queer Isolation in a Pandemic

More Than a Season

Chelsea Lee Wood As if they knew our fear the crows made strange calls, their crackling laughter. And eagles flying overhead flaunting a catch we can’t make. Today, a bird that shall not be named calls, their laughter cracks us open. And eagles joining up three, now four, soon none. Today, a bird...

Literature Michelle Poirier Brown Poetry

So Good

Michelle Poirier Brown Not just any so good. So good the way you say so good. The way you close your eyes and sink into your breath. The way you weep with me when I am happy. So good the way you greet your animals. So good the way you greet your tea. It’s infatuation. It always is. That adoration...

Elizabeth Mudenyo Literature Poetry

the way I keep coming back

Elizabeth Mudenyo the way I keep coming back I’m sure a part of me has stayed at age 12 I walked gaze lowered until my best friend told me not to and looking back I want to unfurl my fingers bent on impossibility my head filled with futures for somebody else and their body I did the work of...

Joshua Wales Literature Poetry Queer Isolation in a Pandemic

The Great Valley

Joshua Wales You plead to see my toaster every day and I make you count down before I flip the camera round to let you see: Three-Two-One Toaster! Raise the stakes is rule one of distance cinema. It’s just a dented chrome four-slicer but you find in its regularity a precious metal that only a two...

Creative Non-fiction Literature Sydni Zastre

Strange Weather

Sydni Zastre We land Saturday around two and it is warm, but the pilot warns us to expect heavy wind in Málaga, coming down from the mountains. The Norwegian boys next to me have been talking since we left Gatwick, while I slept fitfully and read Tipping the Velvet, and they keep talking as I stare...

Literature Poetry Vicky Chen

eulogy for a honda civic, 2017

Vicky Chen sharp knives in a kitchen cut from crisp asian pears and pickled radish stored in jars you promised could become more than glass prisons. turn back time, so you can ask me again: 你想吃什么? no shortage of berry, melon, spice from careful cupboards you have hidden loneliness in a place for...

K.S.Y. Varnam Literature Poetry Queer Isolation in a Pandemic

Holograms

K.S.Y. Varnam It’s like how I feel after too long in the country; there’s too much space between. I live in the city for the loud voices and the night chaos. I love trees and open fields and clean air, but I need the bustle of human lives around me too. I need graffiti in the back alleys behind...

David Ishaya Osu Literature Poetry

Ripening

David Ishaya Osu both tomorrow and the tomato will ripen into a song / no song is through with your body cry outside your robe will know why we laugh the boy and his ball lead inside, too i am too big for a ghost everyone faces the mirror and then says no, no, no   David Ishaya Osu is a poet...

Jim Nason Literature Poetry Queer Isolation in a Pandemic

Seven Thirty P.M.

Jim Nason And then! Oh, the noise! Oh, the noise! Noise! Noise! Noise! The Whos would start singing! They’d sing! And they’d sing! And they’d SING! —Doctor Seuss From balcony and rooftop, from sidewalks and cars— bicycle and dinner bells, pot against pan, spoon against glass, clapping and whistles...

Chris Slater Fiction Literature

Adirondack

Chris Slater You’ve been dead three weeks and it’s time to clean out your trailer. Sun glints gold off the dangling leaves. The sky faded denim. I could think of a hundred things I’d rather do today. A thousand. At least Brian’s working too. It’s silent up here in the boonies, no horns or sirens or...

Katherine Abbass Literature Poetry Queer Isolation in a Pandemic

Most Hoaxes

Katherine Abbass My roommate is a pilot; we watch the sky for signs of life. On warm days we sit out on the patio and stare at the stucco building beside us, our neighbour walking her iguana on the handrail, giving us a wave, a cigarette dangling from her winter lips, dry and scaly as her pet. My...