Steacy Easton A few years ago, I went to Boston in November, to give a talk at Harvard about healing and religion, in the context of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that raised me. The Latter-day Saints grew up in the 19th century in frontier areas, and I was mostly talking about...
Interview by Rob Bittner Here is the first of four interviews and story excerpts as part of our Youth Spotlight project. For details on this series, see our original post. “The Ostrich Wife” by Annie Bhuiyan is a semi-autobiographical examination of what it means to feel uncomfortable as a...
Abryna Bulford Nigankwam held my hand When spring blues hit me. Sometimes things don’t disappear, But change into something better. And here I am, whole, as I always was. What gift was I to give you, I ask myself, besides healing? I could not do it all, but only enough. And that is enough, is it...
Ani Kayode Somtochukwu Gloria used to say love was the greatest redeemer. She said this with her eyes closed and fingers fondly caressing a picture of my father, her sweaty hands smudging it to her chest. When I was younger, his pictures used to hang on every wall. He looked almost regal in them;...
Joelle Barron “These Texas gals are passionate about God’s beautiful design for womanhood…” – Girldefined.com Blonde godheads, god girls, proselytizing YouTube doll babies. Their blog favicon a white-panty period stain. Sweet girls, what do they desire? Girldefined, ecstatic girl-tongue. Girl is...
Kyeren Regehr granting of a penny wish druthers something beloved Am truly all those hackneyed phrases shopworn and cloying unbelieving Am madly tripping light-headed fantastically smouldering the grass with each step...
Julia Peterson Your safety is your personal responsibility. Always follow the road marked on your map, and do not stray too close to the sidewalk. Do not take shortcuts. The unkempt backyards and vacant lots may be enticing, but the hungry ground beneath the weeds has been abandoned for too long...
Isabel Yang On our first date, I throw crumbs to water- fowl. She says bread makes birds sick, It’s like junk food for them. Don’t let them eat the crust. On our second date, he pushed fingers in, and I opened up, thinking it was the same anodyne reflection on...
Jade Wallace after Jean Day Ours is a generation of wistful and somewhat attractive humans, wanderers in a bad and beautiful slough. We say that all we want are convincingly unisex jackets but what we mean is that we are tired of bitter butterfinger metaphysics, bored of biding our time in the...
Grace Kwan I was five years old when I dreamed of snow for the first time, tucked into my bed in our hilltop apartment in Cloud View Tower, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In my dream, my mom, dad, and I had just emerged from an air-conditioned building into the street’s simmering heat. I was accustomed to...
Karine Hack Mashup of Ocean Vuong’s “homewrecker” & Michael Ondaatje’s “The Cinnamon Peeler” when we swam once, white dresses spilling from our feet / in water, late August our mothers / left with no trace your father’s tantrum turned, turning our hands dark red as if wounded: a wildfire we...
David Ly Too many men are too afraid to be tender, too raw. My love makes me fearless with fangs and a flickering tongue plucked from a king cobra. I match the wildness someone else wished into you until you were abandoned. Nothing between us is forbidden, too much, too scary. Your harpy talons...
Annick MacAskill The universe gets a little heavy-handed when you’re around—the Bow still green all these kilometers down river; two geese and their tuft of fledgling: proof that the universe was once the size of a gumball. Time is a rubber band, we joke. Nothing like looking over and seeing you...
Peter KS Yu The powdery veins of white pigment float within the deep gray field of our concrete bathroom floor, wisps of cloud in a dark sky. My husband Neil and I put so much intention into making that floor just right. We first conjured a shared vision—a floor with depth, transparency...
Kaitlin Ruether One. Bright and fluid music softened Harriet as she emerged, three weeks ago, from Bloor-Yonge station into the pupil-sting of day. She ascended the subway steps and turned the corner to encounter three violinists, a cellist, and a percussionist whose snap-tap-tap snare rhythm...
For mobile devices, this poem is best read in landscape orientation mode. James Collier anonymous bumps in the darkwe body and couple and bodywestrict structures just too tired forwe send lovlies thatwe wont see spoken heardwe dig our hands into groinwe find ...
Zoë Johnson I dunno When I talk about my gender, I always end up leaning s i d e w a y s My vertebrae begin to bend into the shape of the word sorta See, I’ve been trying to solve the equation Of internal chickness and dude-ittude for years But when I try plotting the data points the...
A. Light Zachary A movie called Alien vs. Predator in which we go back in time to fight everyone who hurt us when we were young. A movie called Cowboys vs. Aliens about watching our backs at the club. A movie called Village of the Damned about our neighbourhood. A version of Invasion of the Body...
D. Simon Turner The scariest part was that they liked you, making jokes about the dick you don’t have. And there were some days you’d rather not sit with them at 9am “lunch,” congregating with the regularity of high-school cafeterias. Like the day when, each time you stood, you glanced at your...
Ron Schafrick If it was supposedly commonplace in the mythic suburban dream of the sixties and seventies for fathers to teach their sons how to throw a ball or how to make a fist to defend themselves, my father not only didn’t know it but he also would have regarded such things as useless and petty...
Matthew Walsh Still feel the nerve in my neck snap back at me, injury from when I fell down the stairs of the Embassy, stairs now vibrant with exes orange and aquarium light. If I was floating in the galaxy with fresh new stars when they put me in the tube shoot me to the moon my brain will appear...
Erin Stainsby 1 The first time it happened, I was at my first real job, Curves Fitness, a women’s circuit gym. I was 16. She was 71. She looked relieved when I wasn’t angry, but she grew uncomfortable when I began talking about the unflattering cut of my jacket. She needed me to forget her...
Griffin Epstein my advice to future parents is be careful when you turn the bed notice who hears the argument...
Fraser Calderwood One time I broke Leo’s nose. He let the basketball bounce away and thwack the door of a parked truck and he pinned me on the driveway and sprayed blood on me from his nose. Specks of blood dried on the cement like my head was a stencil. I can say for certain we were twelve and it...
Alix Wood For months, we’ve planned to visit the New England Aquarium, where a new shark exhibit has opened. An open tank allows me to stick my hand in cold water and let it float, waiting for sharks the length of thigh bone to emerge from faux coral and swim. You watch me as a thin body crowds my...
Alice Gauntley Iris figured she was pretty calm about the concept of sex shops, and like most feelings uncommon to teenagers, this was a nerve-wracking position for a teenager to be in. The first thing you should know about Iris is that at the time this story takes place, her defining purpose in...
Dominik Parisien My body is a spaceship designed to optimize the proliferation and growth of its microbial cosmonauts. -Adam Dickinson The myth of body is this impermeable place this state of being never porous when the...
Tracy Wai de Boer if we’re counting i’d count for half they tell me what i am basically white basically meaning, not quite but almost close they tell me what i am does not exist because there’s no such thing as what i am they say, if they believed in gay or straight then i’d be just...
Sophie Crocker slim and strong as a samurai, you wash socks in our frequently broken kitchen sink. you say, as if citing the weather, murder rate escalating – must be the summer heat. i hold your hips between my hands. you feel so narrow and brief i ache when i touch you, ache when i don’t...
Tanya Marquardt A nude woman was sitting in my lap. I was looking at her through glassy booze filled eyes when her shaved head came into focus, my fingers curving around her hips to touch the downy hairs on her legs. Though my arm was around her, it felt more like she was all around me, soft flesh...
Aris Keshav Lines of sun-bright lesbians perched in café windows follow me with glint-glint eyes making smooth supervision of Saint-Viateur. I bask then traipse the corner, waverly with happiness. Here are black-pants men all elegance as they maneuver violin cases from a pick-up truck (everything...
Jeremiah Bartram The little room was full of shadows. Monsignor Pedro Lopez-Gallo, a tiny figure immaculate in black, directed me to an armless wooden chair before a spotless desk. I was a petitioner, seeking the annulment of my long-dead marriage and he was head of the Marriage Tribunal of the...
Annick MacAskill I like that pinot in your mouth. Are you sure you don’t want to play in the movies? I’d watch those movies. The geese love the nightlife here, shun the days. Over the same sink where we brush our teeth, rinse our coffee mugs, the wine glasses, I cut the tulip stems with your swiss...
Cara Nelissen on Fridays someone always wanted espresso right before closing I got so used to saying sorry I forgot what it felt like to mean it I always split our tips to the nickel I don’t believe in rounding down everything small becomes something if you hold it long enough we carried our vodka...
Andrew Binks Mom always said I was a trophy hunter, “like your Aunt Evelyn,” she’d add, under her breath. I’d bring home an abandoned wren’s nest, an antler or some old chipped piece of stone off the prairie, and she’d swivel away from The Price is Right, lean forward in her Lazy-Boy, raise her...
Daniel Karasik I think a lot of straight people don’t realize how closets work. They picture you malingering in a darkened chamber, clarities about yourself wrapped round your skin like leopard print, self-knowledge self-available, your only real deficiency the courage to— deep breath...
Nisa Malli Everyone tells me it’s not hard. The processes are material sciences done in the correct order of operations. Cooking is just heat, water, salt, sugar and the naming of things. Still there are days when I forget anything but the most shorthand of meals. Daunted by the impossible magic of...
Brett Josef Grubisic Using a plastic tool, Mother had demonstrated the art of peeling a navel orange four breakfasts in a row. I’d understood in about a second. Slice, slice, slice, slice. “There’s a technique to it too,” she told me. “From north pole to south in one precision movement. Then...
Alison Dowsett I. As Idea Years ago my friend sent me a draft of an essay she was writing for The Capilano Review titled, “What Literature Wants.” Several years before, we had been neighbours, which is when she introduced me to the work of Clarice Lispector and Hélène Cixous. She was a visual...
Jeremiah Bartram My version of the #MeToo story began years ago, at a book fair. I’d just published my first novel and I hadn’t yet figured out how bad it was so I was proud and happy. As I wandered around the exhibits I noticed a nearly bare table behind which sat two middle-aged women on...
