As part of the Victoria Arts Council’s Poetry in Public project, Tharuna Abbu’s poem, “Emergency Measures,” has been published into five different languages! This poem first appeared in Plenitude in July 2020 as part of our Queer Isolation in a Pandemic series. Here is the full excerpt from UNTIL...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
