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...
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...
We are excited to announce that Cara Nelissen has joined the Plenitude team as our new Book Reviews Editor! Cara comes with a wealth of experience in the Canadian literary sphere, particularly as previous reviews editor for PRISM international. Cara will be taking over from Alison Dowsett, outgoing...
Reviewed by James K. Moran Adam McOmber, Jesus and John: A Novel (Lethe Press, 2020), 236 pp., $15 USD. Adam McOmber’s novel Jesus and John is a rare matryoshka doll of a horror novel. It is a queer love story inside a historical recreation of Jesus fraternizing with the Apostle John inside a...
