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...
Sugar le Fae —for Keith Maillard Backing under the shower’s hot spittle, a metal knuckle knocks and settles on the bathtub floor. A loonie? Must’ve swam up my pajama pants and stuck to my butt. What booty to excavate from one’s own bathtub, stamped with a bust of the queen mum! What strange...
Mónica Gomery Baby, I went to seminary for theology. They taught me every Thou is a funnel for the big bright You. They taught me God’s erotics would come to me in dreams. Put your queer shoulder to the wheel they said and push your palm into the centre of the earth, love dissolves us into people...
Holly C. Lam She named the dog Whisky so they wouldn’t become alcoholics. She adopted him six months after she finally boxed the clothes and toys and jammed them into the crawlspace. She got the dog for Boyd, to give him a routine. But Boyd wouldn’t walk the dog, wouldn’t feed the dog, wouldn’t...
Mary Chen A soft tapping at my door is enough to wake me tonight, because it is raining and so I have been having bad dreams again. I think it is my night-owl landlord, finally come to inspect the leak in the living room, but when I unlatch the lock and ease it open, I come facetoface with my...
Evelyn Deshane “Are you a virgin?” Emily was flummoxed. Sure, she was in her doctor’s office, and Dr. Rebecca Rosenberg had asked invasive questions right off the bat in the past, but this was still a bit too much. Semantically, at least. Because Emily Flowers, twenty-four, a...
Prathna Lor There is a time for making and a time for snow. Thinking. No one is there to hear the thinking. Staring out across river, the brownness drinks. Feeling vertiginous, candy. Slender in calling. Down out at the bottom, reeling and laughing. The fishermen float over. Cast down a...
Anna Navarro Think of the word the one that smothers your tongue on blistering days in July, is cool and sweet about it, lazes on your slack pink muscle, knows it belongs there. Think of the word and bite down on it, crush the figure of it like finger bones, force a grimace onto it until...
Nolan Natasha the word carries more in its belly than I can make you understand. that’s why I want to talk about it. it’s not just that it means one thing written in heavy books from the university press and another in your mouth as an answer and another on the stall door and another hurled from...
Matthew Harris I’m meeting Francisco tonight, and that’s when I’ll finally have my moment. I finished at the coffee shop at five. Afterwards, I ran into Celeste at the LCBO. Celeste is tall and always busy—you’re lucky if she pays attention to you. “Hey Fag,” she said, rushing up to kiss my cheek...
Ami Sands Brodoff Fact or Myth In fertile cervical liquid, sperm can live up to five days Natalie and Rachel huddled together doing their happy dance, splashing strangers as they sang “Ring Around the Rosy,” as if they were kids, while I leaned against the edge of the rooftop heated...
Georgina Beaty [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]E[/mks_dropcap]veryone was in the middle of a game when Yvonne walked in, an hour late to her own baby shower. The living room was crowded with Lindy’s...
Lynne Sargent I grind your cum into the corner of the mattress before sealing my whole sodden thing with my underwear. Grind because my body remembers yours beneath it. It is still primed for pleasure. Cum because it is the orgasmic that is of importance. Not reproduction, not shame. Into...
Glen Huser [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]W[/mks_dropcap]hen the Laundromat that anchored the west corner of his high rise was transformed into a coffee shop, Adam celebrated by inviting his two...
N. Page Shear my hair to its roots, ‘til I’m bare. I’m ready to reset, to begin again as whoever I was three years before. Shampoo intruded on my eyes too often anyway, and pomade was stubborn, took hours to wash away. My clothes started to bully me. My kicks kicked back. The jewellery...
Minying Huang lăo lao sits in lotus position on the bed, the end of the world in her belly. she is curiously absent in the room, looks the eternal to my fidget. Yíng Yíng twiddles her thumbs to shake the absence off the covers but still she will not budge. listen, kid, to time as it...
Alex Leslie We All Need to Eat (Book*hug, 2018) is a collection of linked stories from award-winning author Alex Leslie that revolves around Soma, a young queer woman in Vancouver. Through thoughtful and probing narratives, each story chronicles a sea change in Soma’s life. Lyrical, gritty...
Maggie Burton Through hinged-open double hung windows, the house winked at us, saw us holding hands when no one was allowed to see. Keeping our secrets, they kept out nothing else. The wind knew no limits. Would’ve been easy, you supposed, to figure out insulation, to heat tall ceilings...
Isabella Wang It’s been weeks without a poem and you wonder how you are still getting invited to readings. Haven’t they figured you out by now? You bring the same year-old poems and read until words that hurt like the thorns of a blackberry bush lose meaning. Outside, sunflowers bobble...
Cat Friesen Found poem using an interview with Trump If you remember, you were going down, choking on control like never before; it was only going to get worse. You announced the building of walls, cutting all the things you’ve done into thousands of neat negotiations. You were strangled by...
Kegan McFadden he got a nosebleed , and as a counter- measure sneezed onto the bouquet of white daisies he’d bought on his walk to the Italian restaurant , confusing the real point of the story— spring was in the air. Originally from Winnipeg, writer/curator/artist Kegan McFadden now...
Triny Finlay You should relax. Come back to my hive. I’ll make us some toast. Ignore the droning around you— those losers don’t know what they’re missing. Don’t worry, I’ve been there too. Once. I was seventeen—young and gorgeous—but no one believed I could be Queen. It sent me to a dark place. Lie...
Ben Rawluk [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]P[/mks_dropcap]lague Boy shows up to the walk-in clinic on Davie fifteen minutes before it opens and there’s already a line all the way to the entrance of...
Sugar le Fae I’m too many men’s maybe if their girlfriend leaves them. I look like a man. By every metric, I am. I never thought I wasn’t, but I’m not. Everybody knows, who talks to or watches me walk or gesture. Even in my boy clothes. So, I’m genderqueer. Because trans-feminine with no...
Jennie Chantal Duguay The crows have their routine, I have mine. For five hundred days they cross the path of my body. Horizontal in bed I watch dusk drape a thousand black wings in threads of gold or silver. How high or low they fly, how playful or solemn, the volume of their company all...
Kyla Jamieson In all my nightmares I’m a model again, on set trying not to eat or lose my mind. When my body was my product I always felt almost run out, like one day I’d wake up and none of me would be left. At eighteen my agent told me vodka shots and splenda and sent me to Sydney to turn...
Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch i. yt ppl think i’m yt like it’s a compliment brown ppl think i’m yt as though it’s a shame i didn’t turn out less gay tackled on both ends when the yt woman on the metro stares at me with plz die eyes before she gets off at laurier while brown ppl in the middle east...
Jory Mickelson Often, day goes sweetly as a bird returning to the branch it loves most to watch the waters of the lake on lazy afternoons. Say the tree is a shade oak. Say the bird’s not a bird at all, but a boy who’s learned to keep his wings. He spends his few hours crossing water from one...
Dominik Parisien I learned jealousy reading of a boy who kissed a wall. Oliver kissed here scribbled on the brick. I knew, then, love was breathing yourself into another; how boys feared getting caught losing themselves through their lips. And here was Oliver, who could have carried me with...
Sara Patterson You tell me to wash. We fuck the bathroom raw. Elizabeth Bathory, I bathe for you. If I deep clean my face with uterine lining will I be young enough? Blonde enough? I drink Diet Coke. Like horse piss, it removes blood stains. Mary Tudor, that rust haired cancer ridden monarch...
Erin Vance The blackened ear is the third fantastical bit the turpentine bark and the spritz, the oil drip ache to sit on the crumbling steps of the ruined pitch hidden slick, fallen sick, skin flakes black, like the ear scraped into the lichenous foot of the Styrofoam forest floor not the...
Erin Kirsh Everyone’s a philosopher and I miss comedians. Everyone’s got a theory and I got a headache. The selected world lives in a device that lives in my pocket with all the other change. It’s gathering lint. It’s tearing my jeans. It’s cutting my hand when I try to tuck one in for...
Ian Martin that i will die better than i exist that i cannot own desire as i exude it, let it go unabated into excess that my entrails interpreted will be used against me, someone else that i was defined against the sky tonight, nothing more Ian Martin is an inimitable buffoon and...
Robert Carr The power of a woman’s secret is sometimes found in light through a small glass of orange juice. Breakfast on the table long after she’s dead. Sitting at the Formica nook, papers strewn from 23andMe, I wipe strayed fruit pulp from my beard. On the pie chart of family history –...
Sadie McCarney and this airplane’s the size of an aphid who’ll prey on the fresh condos of suburban Boston; 13 and I’m wearing my too-big jeans, stinky and inked over in ballpoint pen; 13 and my suitcase is packed with Nair and tarot I pretend I can use; 13 and I predict her hair will...
Joe Bishop I haul on his rubber boots, pack tackle box aboard, part glinting pond on which my old man taught me how to skate. My grown hands recoil, recalling numb, small fingers tighten laces to his standard. This morning suns knuckles. I bait hook, cast lured line, scratch what will be beard...
Roxanna Bennett My father sticks in my throat a black clot I won’t swallow a stone swan sycamore My father is a story I am stuck in to rot a weather worn red boat on a rough river My father stones the moat w lapis lazuli drowns my medicine Buddha in red river My father is a...
Rachael Jordan 1. She bleeds scents and shows me with a knife. She scrapes the blade down the inside of her arm, a single red line sprouting from the touch. After a moment, burnt orange surrounds, creeps into the pores of my body. Lifting her shirt, she takes the knife and draws a triangle...
