The turtle sheds his shell and smashes it upon the rocks. While I, a hobbled ape, cough up my skeleton like jumbled driftwood. …..Quivering like jellyfish, …..we seem surprised that we …..cannot walk away. So we painfully gather our fragments and try to reassemble ourselves upon the sand. …..The...
Reviewed by James K. Moran Hannah Templer, Cosmoknights (Book One) (Top Shelf Productions, 2019), 216 pp., $25.99, and Cosmoknights (Book Two) (Top Shelf Productions, 2023), 280 pp., $33.99. Readers will find Hannah Templer’s Cosmoknights a delightfully colourful queer space opera and heartfelt...
I. Vilnius / destination a black grape hovers in the face of heavenly darkness before falling back down towards the streets of the capital straight into your wide open mouth like a warm trap. my eyes don’t follow the descent but I join the applause of our new-found friends nonetheless, my...
They’re trying their best. So am I. It’s not enough. “Okay, let’s just pause. Lake, I said pause! I need a second.” The wind is driving snow into everything. Down my boots, up the cuffs of my jacket, under my toque. It’s giving unhinged prairie winter realness, the full sweat-inside-your-parka...
I almost got the certificate before the paperwork passed away. You used to wear confidence in every button of your shirt before the suitcase rolled away with your buttons and the students filed into other rooms. We’ve fallen between the desk and the wall. They listened to you, I know that...
Reviewed by Jeffrey Canton Guy Babineau, Channel Surfing (Cormorant Books, 2024), 272 pp., $24.95. With a gift for potent characterization, a penchant for quirky detail, and a deep sense of LGBTQ2S+ history, Channel Surfing in the Sea of Happiness, the debut short-fiction collection from Vancouver...
1. Imagine the poem: something about clothes and makeup, probably fingernails— the pains of paints: ochre, pink, yellow. Or of breasts and tits and dicks and cunts of bodies, (always) bodies. 2. 40% of trans people snort milk from their nose. 30% wake up crying in joy. 75% sweat at the sound of a...
“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...
