“I’ve heard,” says Kristen, shifting gears as she pulls out of the ER parking lot, “I’ve heard that quadriplegics, they can get off to someone stimulating their ear. Is that what this was?” “I’m not quadriplegic,” I say, wishing I’d had the foresight to puncture my left eardrum instead of my right...
From India’s dirt forests, into the elephant chest of the West we brought a child. Years erupt on skin. You are larger than Canada!—you are not a child. We all see things we do not want to see. In a white world, my father left my mother—she knew she would be a prisoner as soon as she got a child...
Plenitude Magazine’s Genre Bender category is a new call for submissions of hybrid writing. Our aim is to publish work that bends boundaries, to offer a space for literature that doesn’t fit standard conventions of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction. Does your work blur the lines between...
Reviewed by Shannon Page Christina Cooke, Broughtupsy (House of Anansi Press, 2024), 240 pp., $22.99. Born in Jamaica, Christina Cooke is now a Canadian citizen living in New York City. Broughtupsy, her debut novel, is both a gritty, queer coming-of-age tale and a nuanced dissection of grief...
Plenitude Magazine is once again increasing payment to its writers! Paying LGBTQ2S+ writers an industry-standard honorarium for their poetry and prose continues to be very important to us. Thanks to a generous grant boost from the Canada Council for the Arts, Plenitude will increase payment to...
Reviewed by Andrew Woodrow-Butcher Greg Kearney, An Evening with Birdy O’Day (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2024), 336 pp., $24.95. At 69 years old, Roland is long past the peak of his hairdressing career. And after 25 years together, he and his handsome, chronically ill boyfriend Tony have settled into a...
You are ninety-eight and blind and nearly deaf and can hardly walk and live mostly in another world now, a world in which dolls can talk and each person appears twice, and in this other world, I like girls, or so you tell my mum matter-of-factly one afternoon as she sits with you in the care home...
Deirdre opens the door, a vision of opulence with onyx hair and topaz eyes. One look at her and Cassie forgets about Ben and the kids. She finds herself in the narrow entryway of Deirdre’s apartment. Cooking smells of oil and garlic permeate the air, settling in her throat. “It’s been too long!”...
Liquid dark slides down our throats, sloshing against curved glass. I place my goblet back on the dash. The evening air shifts, a mineral of many disguises. Body twines within itself. Groaning from the cold, the liver and the heart sit — at the centre of our existence. † A deep and pulsating gloomp...
