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...
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...
