Table of Contents
- Fhen M.
- Thomas McDade
- Paul Moorehead
- Ken Farrell
- Richard Stimac
- Ellee Adams
- Dan Murphy
- Tobi Alfier
- Nick Corcoran
- Allan Lake
- Katherine Alexandra Harvey
- Allan Johnston
- Leah Sandals
- J.D Isip
- Daniel Lanigan O’Hara
- AE Reiff
- Christopher Woods
- Tara Laing
- Francoise Van Zyl
- Connie Boland
- Christopher Woods
- Sunaina G. Rao
- Interviews
- Reviews
- Contributors
- Front Matter
Bamboo House
Fhen M.
in a small house made of bamboo
darkness wrapped the walled room;
unpaid bill close to a melted candle wax
we rested on a rattan chair
ate dried fish, rice with black bugs
around a tiny wooden table
the golden light from lit candles
flickered to the faces of the family.
my father told us tales of Biringan
a city in time future or another universe
where buildings are tall and towering
monuments are massive,
ports are prodigious
streets, skyscrapers shine gold and silver.
for now, the gold stones in my town
hang in the night sky.
St. Louis High
Thomas M. McDade
Alexis de Tocqueville never visited
St Louis but Charles Dickens did.
Hang on to that, there’s a wedding
in progress outside the Old Courthouse
where slavery triumphed.
The groom is blindfolded.
Bridesmaids of yellow and gray
I’m not close enough
to determine eye colors.
Something strikes me about a house
on 56th Street but I can’t recall what.
Took a ride to the Gateway Arch top
with a pretty LSU student with blue peepers.
(Were the French & Brit authors' irises
anything but large and observant?)
A Vietnam Vet and his wife on the way
to Tennessee took the 630 ft. trip too.
All three judge me as invisible
There’s a store devoted to left-handed people
Both Alexis & Charles were left-wingers
but only Dickens wrote from that side.
I’m not a southpaw but my travel journal
is such a mess some might argue
I used that mitt or my eyes were as draped
as Justice or a man who will soon blurt “I Do.”
No need to confess that a bit of what
I’ve transcribed might smack
of fiction writ lightheaded
192.024 meters high
Requirement Galore
Paul Moorehead
To my eye, a loose button
is only a choking hazard.
But it aches when anyone
calls a dandelion a weed.
If I cried hexagons
I would stack my griefs
orderly as a beehive.
Oh, if I could weep
into a Klein bottle
I’d never have to know
which is the up. I could
take any geometry
of being, any tessellation,
any fractal zippering, any
Fibonacci counting and
counting of sunflower swirls
if,
and only if
The Rain, a Candle
Ken Farrell
before the end
she had thought
she wanted
apocalypse
for the world to be
vacant, wide open
the tools
uses for tools
forgotten
craftsmen
long dead, and now
all she has
so many parts
bones, shoes
from avulsed feet
rust and rubble
her hope
a perpetual winter
abundant she has time
books stacked into months
blank back pages
a sharpened bone
a broken blood-
refilled bottle
she wonders east ocean
not the right word
she wonders harder
ponders sky
the particulate above
her is not that
another word effaced
her tongue
yet another tool
with no purpose
no object
for its affection
so many rocks to build
with, with this wrenching
she once called desire
but rocks do not move
themselves, and faith
a notion she would build
a monument to
if only she knew how
and for what
Confluence
Richard Stimac
Honeysuckle and bittersweet
dominate the iced trail
to the confluence. The mud froze
into jagged scutes, as if dormant
Leviathans hibernated beneath
the footpath. In spring thaw, gaping jaws
of miry earth will swallow whole
tread, lace, and sock of wanderers
unwary nothing solid is trustworthy.
The state piled a cairn at the conflux.
A brass plaque reminisces
about Lewis and Clark. Unnamed:
mound builders, underground railroads,
massacres, bridges and barges,
floods, all the give and take of the river,
too facile, too predictable a metaphor.
Next to the pile of rocks are benches.
On the opposite bank, a concrete tower
grants a heaven-eye view of the currents,
one brown-gray, the other orange-yellow.
They wait to merge for miles,
like lovers, afraid to touch.
Last time I walked that trail
along the strand, the river retreated,
not from me, too insignificant,
but from itself. The drought sunk
to record lows. The sky withheld
scarce rain for a year. Groynes of granite
stretched across dry sand.
Both should be submerged.
The land is transgressing
into a river that has lost its fight.
Not even the Corps can save it.
I stood on a sandbar,
ss if I were Moses, and Yahweh,
in all His Heavenly Host,
parted the waters between Illinois
and Missouri so His enslaved children,
carrying what they possessed,
and the weight of history,
could flee from bondage.
He left His work unfinished.
And here, of these events,
I write my own scripture,
the black letters and white negative
space flow side by side, each denoting
the other. Civilization and barbarism
record reflected images, form one channel
with its swept sediment and eternal crawl
to the sea.
So what to make of this
river, shrunken from its power, its majesty,
its commerece, frontier, and mystery?
No one can walk from shore to shore.
The river still divides, as each word divides
the named and the unknown. I turn
away. The sun is set. Its refraction hangs
just above the crown of trees. Mistaken,
I seem to look unblinded into the sun.
Rangers will swing the metal gates closed
Soon. I retreat in my car down a paved country
road, to the Interstate, past the airport,
to home, where metaphors are abstract
and history confines itself to books.
Where I Am a Woman
Ellee Adams
Yes yes I know about a woman’s body
I understand their feet
are generally smaller than a man’s
and their lungs are smaller
and their hearts and even their livers are smaller
they can’t metabolize
waste as quickly as a man’s
and the hips are wider
making the waist dip more than a man’s
generally speaking
like a valley turned
sideways I know about the
breasts
in all their hanging varieties
and the milk that waits at the nipples
I know about the cheekbones
the mouth the smooth neck
and that place where life begins
where the cells split and split
and grow white as a ghost
orchid in a greenhouse
Yes I know
except for the breasts
I have none of this
But a woman is also
a woman inside
where the fires are barely contained
where the voice emerges hot
as newly blown glass
no not from the lungs
but from that deeper place
where her love is
and her anger and hurt and wisdom
no not from the brain
from that other place
that place that is hidden from us
as God is hidden
or what came before light
Knife Slashing
Dan Murphy
The forest’s ears perk
When the axe rings.
Reverberation. Foreign
To the hallow tap
Of a Red-headed woodpecker.
Deer pause like statues melted in stone.
Squirrels scurry. Echoes search
To escape between their prison of trunks.
The grand tree falls. Slashing
A path of leaves
Into a thousand green butterflies.
I can smell the resined swoosh
As wind fills the light space.
Empty now where the last cries
From a nest of young birds balance.
Opened up. Scared as if a knife gale
Full of December
Had slashed the forest’s face.
Greensleeves Pantoum
Tobi Alfier
She wears emotion like a scratch-off Lotto ticket,
deep down inside finds love, deeper still
is where the sadness lives. Quiet, hopeless,
just the way it is.
Deep down inside is where the love is found
on the surface she’s a lace curtain in wind
quiet, hopeful, hopeless, just the way it is
one moment you see her, the next you don’t
On the surface she’s like lace on the wind
a ghost of herself, face in a thousand mirrors
one moment you see her, the next you don’t
she’s the tide, the clouds, a white tiara of blossoms
Her ghostly self, reflected in antique mirrors
sometimes her usual prayers miss the point
she’s the tide, the clouds, a white tiara for Sundays
even sung to Greensleeves her prayers are all wrong
Sometimes her usual prayers are misheard
or not heard, the prayer beads misbehaving, mistaking
even sung to Greensleeves her prayers are all wrong
like questions whose answers will never be sought
Prayer beads mistaken
ancient church smells and poor behavior
all the wrong prayers sung to the wrong songs
no wonder she holds it all inside
Ancient church smells and wretched behavior
her emotion has to be scratched off to decipher
no wonder she holds it all on the inside
quiet, hopeless, where everything lives.
There is Something Somewhere on the Map
Nick Corcoran
A sick gangly widow perched sneering on the atlas map
rearing itself in my home under my nose for god knows
how long and learning about the world off the paper coast
of Santa Rosa California and brooding over my shoulder
like some putrid gargoyle burning on the roof of Notre Dame
waiting and waiting and watching and waiting for the chance
to pounce at me and leave a sharp chill down my spine and
a small pin in my back for at least a few weeks even though
I have murdered it by sucking its smeared frame into the vacuum
and taping over the mouth so it won’t ever heal and decide
to crawl out and under no circumstance should I let
the venomous prisoner escape to torment my peace
with incessant sneaking and writhing in my carpets and
under my bed sheets and if there has to be anything under
my bed sheets please god let it be anything else because
I don’t think I can live in the world with these things
in by bed or in my room or hiding in my clean
laundry
or between the pages of my notebook or dancing on the grates
of my oven and my god they are everywhere and I can’t see them
but I know damn well that they can see me eightfold so
I am building an airtight glass chamber so I can spend
the rest of my months in there always sleeping and never eating and blissful and content knowing for certain that I am the only thing alive in there—
nothing left looking at me
nothing left to look at.
Empty Cinema
Allan Lake
Almost.
I’m here in semi-darkness
at noon on a Monday morning
with fizzy drink and popcorn.
I call it lunch out; I call it a date
with myself or whoever shows.
And then cometh light and I know
the delight that the universe felt
on that very first day.
Even ads look spectacular
on such a big screen. Food is art,
real estate can be amusing and
there’s still a whole story to come.
Outside this warm womb, where
amoral Nature presides, icy
spring rain is falling on cars,
on streets, on sad people without
raincoats. And on a clothesline
far away, my sullen but clean
clothes can fend for themselves,
can soak it up for a couple hours
while I try to fill a not-so-great
emptiness.
Your Father’s Reputation Never Got You Anywhere
Katherine Alexandra Harvey
I shouted:
behead the poets
when they rhymed in tongues I could not
understand.
All I really wanted
was for my father to know his lessons
resonated.
His empathy for the trees that grew by the water
beaten and bent, bowing to the waves,
I felt it too –
his unspeakable disasters, boat loaded
and water tested for truth. In a casket, he moved
overseas
and I stole the typewriter from my childhood home
tossing it overboard
in immortalization of imagination,
drowning
ideas that never blackened –
too pure for flames
too light for wind
too heavy for dirt.
Watching the Funeral Flowers Die
Katherine Alexandra Harvey
I told them, over and over:
in lieu of flowers.
Still, in the aftermath, I entered
the familiar space of our bedroom, found it filled
with carnations, chrysanthemums, blue
orchids, white lilies and red,
red roses.
They arrived in vases, already cut, ribbons
wrapped around their tendrils,
as though beauty and its fragrance
might intoxicate me, might
make me forgetful.
Taking up this newly vacant
space, somehow lessening the blow.
What else could I do but
follow social conventions and
write thank-you notes?
The flowers are lovely, you’re a
darling for thinking of me. I’m doing
okay,
in spite of it all.
When what I meant, really,
was what a cruel joke it seemed,
to be gifted something so full of life,
to have to watch it die so slow.
Goodbye, Pensacola
Allan Johnston
Goodbye, Pensacola,
goodbye Tallahassee,
goodbye, cities
with indigene names,
Watcheemaycallem towns;
goodbye mythologies,
steaming places
and narratives
of the Southern Cross,
confederations,
guns, alligators,
the Georgian line
measured by its sinkholes,
places where Bradford’s journeys brought
roads and tales
of liberation,
America’s Spain;
goodbye, Seminoles,
or at least those
left in studied
sea shells mounds;
we will not see
how the sea enters them,
Pensacola Alexandrian
nacreous with lighthouses,
monuments and pulled-down statues
washed away while Pharaoh sleeps,
ships his wealth to Sparta;
goodbye, Mediterranean waters,
middle of the earth;
goodbye, all
that continues
pretending
while Pensacola
becomes a reef,
automobiles
and architecture
under water,
sawdust floors
of the fast-food
crab shacks
washed from under
the heals
of the hard crackers;
goodbye
all that rises
as something
I don’t give name to.
Undertow Overture (After a recital at The Rooms, August 2022)
Leah Sandals
who do you belong to? asks a small yellow house
slick trio plucks tempo and i’m short-chorded kin
to tones that swell all clouds clear in a big o glissando over the narrows
to blue paper ancestor newsletter, grey baby in a long white drape
the low bow of a cello; to call and despond’s insect hand
butterfly fingers shadowing black baby grand where
republic of newfoundland flag used to fly on da ill
also: to haootia quadriformis, the world’s oldest muscular animal
to chamber music written in doodle notation
cosmic tiffs frozen in 500-million-year-old shale
to a house i can no longer see on the battery, forest green
30 plus degrees and no a/c, to hot pink sneakers treble
trills
daffodils still in bulb mode twixt his and hers gravestones
to a pitch slightly richer, to a more ridiculous picture
to polished black granite and a cartoon
cat all ear-wearers who came before me
and the audience-y sounds that
we make right here, shifting in our chairs
i belong to leila fletcher’s cutout paper palm, c, d, e, f, and geez
to piano mom’s lost mind unclipped musical in chime
skipped to coda, scored to scree, who i belong to flows al niente
by the end, we finally all clap at the right time
What Every Pianist Needs to Know about the Body
Leah Sandals
the thigh bones just get out of the way, zay zay
weight delivered to the bench to clench tail
cue sternoclavicular hue to swing in, swing up
sit bone or [cry till your tears are straight blue]
the radius is the bone that moves
right hand, palm up right hand, palm down
or milk the globe’s arpeggios and my lou?
fold dusk into dusk, zay zay
she feeds on me in ways she shouldn’t, really
abduction is moving apart and adduction is
grooving together so kiss the skin tags
her chest hefts i scratch hives
i got from her [or from thoughts of her]
why can’t we be four? why be we only three?
the second and third joints of the fingers
experiment with playing scales, see
and i can’t [flee my face] when i’m with you
on the walls behind her pink things get longer
beansie, stop pulling down my goddam skirt to
see which cleft you came from note the no no hon
she just loves to crawl between the legs
she first come emerged from
at nine, zay zay, you fall asleep and I’m left
at play with a bad daydream
wrist bones mapping cadence
from pedal stasis to duller glistens
The Futurist Contemplates Hope
J.D. Isip
Nothing adds up. See here, how it ended
last time and the time before that. Haven’t
you heard what the internet says insanity
is? Doing the same thing, over and over,
and expecting different results. That is not
actually insanity. That is existence. Trying
to find love. Trying to have a baby. Trying
to eat healthier, trying to do a little exercise.
Humanity rises and falls. Kings will fall,
wars will blight the canvas of the earth,
in all of it, as sure as the rotation of the sun,
a sparrow drops a seed, a green tendril bursts
amidst the apocalypse. Isn’t that true? Hope,
too, can be predicted by looking back, seeing
that true insanity is the inability to distinguish
fantasy from reality. Which shall we call hope?
A Floating Fire Against the Moon
Daniel Lanigan O'Hara
The door popped open. It fell to the surface slowly, and where you would expect the sound of crashing, there was nothing. Nothing but me and pasty white.
Accompanying me in the ship were a stack of crates containing pipes, tools, glass, metal beams, artificial plant substitutes. My mission here was to create an air pocket. There was enough in these crates to create a small shelter, just enough to test the craftwork of our engineers against the real thing. But more than anything, I was here; The Moon, the center of imagination for every dreamer who looks up at the night sky.
I remember looking up at the moon, back then. A full moon, looking down at us as we watched back. There was grass shivering in the quiet wind, with fireflies buzzing and a pond straight from a painting. She and I lay in the grass together. I was in love with her.
‘Do you know what people say about the full moon?’ she said.
I said I didn’t.
‘They say it changes how you act. Makes everything you feel more intense. You know what I mean?’
I could never get behind that hippy spirituality stuff. Someone told me about it before – the full moon and its influence. I went and read some research and science said there was no real connection at all. Science I tended to side with, but I kept those thoughts to myself.
Instead, I just told her that it never seemed to make a difference for me.
She turned towards me with a dumb grin, laughing as she spoke. ‘Really? Never ever? It affects me all the time.’
We lay there for a bit longer. The cold was creeping up on us, but neither mentioned it. I could see my breath in front of me as it went into shorter and shorter bursts. I turned to my side, deciding to make an innocuous comment in order to break the silence.
She had these earrings that always stood out, made of black crystal and shaped like anchors. They were off kilter, yet beautiful, and I always wondered what it meant. Why an anchor, of all things? So I asked.
‘They stick me to the ground… stop me from floating away.’
At this, I snickered, and she punched me in the side.
‘Don’t! I mean it! You wouldn’t want that to happen to me, would you?’
I reassured her that I wouldn’t, but I thought she was being sarcastic. I asked her for a more serious answer. She didn’t have one. So, my next question, then, was why. Why would she float away?
‘Why wouldn’t I? Just look. Wouldn’t you rather be up there?’
At that, I didn’t know what to say. Above us was a magical sight: Fireflies scattering, Leaves delicately swaying, clouds smearing across the starring sky. And the Full Moon, right above. But to float amongst it, I could never imagine. Earrings didn’t stick me to the ground, gravity did. That, I couldn’t do anything about.
Then she asked me, ‘When was the last time you felt so intense you could float away?’
I stepped on the Moon’s surface, lunar dust shooting into the air. My only company was the wavering static of commanding officers. Real company was something I would soon miss, desperately. To be alone in a quiet dark room weighs on you, but to be alone in an open field weighs even more. To be alone here was to not share the pull of the ground you walked on. I was a small spec visible to half the globe. It was a look I couldn’t return. To see the city lights spark up the world’s biggest cities as I did from the ISS, but that light doesn’t reach here. When I looked up, Earth was entirely in darkness.
Commanders started walking me through the boxes. I unravelled each piece, organizing them on the ground. It would be at least a 2-week project, putting this structure all together. If I didn’t need to rejuvenate myself in the shuttle, I could have finished in four days.
As the time went on, the wide-open space became claustrophobic. Silent and still, like I was traversing a frozen world. Being on the Moon felt like reality stripped to it’s barest of bones. There is white and there is black. Hours and days don’t exist, only minutes do.
‘When was the last time you felt so intense you could float away?’, the question came back into my mind. I didn’t know what to tell her at the time. Memories are a like coloured stones at the bottom of a pond. Childhood comes back with full force, still burning. But fleeting feelings, once the candle burns out, smoke, and you can’t tell how bright it blared or however much time it took, just that it had been, at some point or another. The facts lost on me, I scrambled for an answer, and settled, instead, on what my heart told me.
‘Now’. That’s what I said to her. The last time I remembered feeling so intense I could float away. It was there, lying in the grass, with her, watching the sky. Was that cheating the question? I suspected it was.
She smiled. My heart rate increased. We were laying on the grass, it is sticking into the bare skin of my arm, but for her it wrapped around her.
‘Because of the moon? Do you feel it?’ she asked me.
I told her that I didn’t know. A statement which affected her, because I always knew. I always said I did, at least, never admitting to being at a loss for words. Though I couldn’t never know it to be true, I could feel it. Within me was burning, long and bright. The Moon, I felt its connection in a way I could not explain. An adrenaline rush. It was as though it was lifting me from within, towards it, off the ground, up to the night sky and it’s glittering cascade.
After that, she kissed me. After that, she snuck me in through her bedroom window and we kissed more. After that, what followed was as passionate as young people could be. It happened a few more times, and then, weeks later, our tether had burned out. Months later, I thought back on it all with indifference. Years later, we’re both married to different people, and I’m hundreds of thousands of miles away from that place, and when I return to that moment, it burns. It burns so bright I forget where I am and I’m a teenager again. It burns so bright I feel the grass and smell the water. I hear the buzzing of the fireflies. I feel the warmth of her bare skin against the autumn cold. Cherry lipstick rubbing against my collarbone. The tender grip of fake nails. The dark tapestry that hung above her bed. The red lights. Incense and sweat.
Why it came back to me now, so fiercely strong, was a mystery. Maybe it was the moon, as here we were, reunited. The absence of sensation made into a blank canvas to pull apart and reconstruct the shedded skin of my heart. I had fallen in love all over again. With a memory. With a moment.
It burned out again, and I was back in the present. I heard my Commanding Officer requesting my attention, and so I answered. He gave me the task of filling the finished construction with air. There were only enough oxygen tanks for one try, and a trip home, so it was all down to this. If it failed, we’d be spending another few billion dollars to try again.
I turned back to the ship, but not before looking around. The lunar sand that once looked like cliffs and valleys sucked of all their life, now glistened like pixie dust. There was not only life to its beautiful image, but I felt it’s emotions. It’s anguish, its rejuvenation, its lust, all shattered and eroded into a never-ending desert of dreams. It was the fuel to the fire.
I looked up at Earth. Again, it was all shadow, but I felt what hid beneath. Hundreds of thousands of eyes looking back at me. Burning bright. Floating. Like fireflies.
Dave Cacher
AE Reiff
The arcane name of that hidden city was DewPit, which helps explain the mistranslation of Dave's name, not Cash from his father, but natively, Cacher, French, to hide, shortened to Cache. This got down to Cash, which translates well in the life of a cop, avoiding all the jokes and the catch chers, cherchez. The outer city like the outer Cash had largely salvaged its motor crisis when it had gone with the beet gas and not the carrot of surrounding towns. Where detectives drive eggs and cars are red peppers at the pumps consuming beet juice you might time warp, even if it's facetious. I don't even want to say what to do with Beetle juice! We shall call this superposition one day when the gates are flipped and we learn of it, even if the next moment we subliminally forget. We will all share bank accounts. Where other vegetables drive around on an average day? I suppose you mean the celery buses, the zucchini trucks. You'd have to ask Dave, but that's the point. Where are the max-efficient peanut cars? Aye, where was any of this in that first chemistry of literature, the white barred clouds that touch the stubble plains with aluminum dew?
Another Dewpit fancy was the Arco redecorated to look like a tomato. A green pepper and an onion were at the pumps wheh he pulled in to humor his egg. To show the vagaries of that place they give him a boiled egg to drive, a hybrid. Dave called it a boiled egg. Chickens roosted in the hydrogen sulfide Seattle where he had worked when they ate boiled eggs in their lunch, packed on stakeout. Can you see him peeling the hard shell, reaching for the fiber bar? But before you quarrel with the egg, whether car or chicken came first, consider a fiery cosmic egg in a universe whose marvelous substance is visible right up to the center. It wasn't only the egg or steering wheel in front of him. Both have been taken as a girl, which shows the fantasies we indulge. When this figure held the wheel to its chest, the steering wheel of beauty, radiance, love in human form, a St. Hildegard alive with luminous fire, and, to speak of its maternity, we're not talking just spheres, but spirals and breasts and a wheel extending like a cross from the mystic hip center. Such deliberations were a major cause of Dave leaving Seattle for DewPit.
Little men pushing ice cream carts rang their bells all along the McDowell watchtowers. Baby shoes hung from wires announcing the Villalobos welcome, village of wolves, home to trailer parks and psychic reads, auto shops, car washes, iglesias, appliances, mueblerias and wood fired eats. He was driving down with the windows open to take the air. There being no threats, not even calls since the night before, just this one burglary in all of Phoenix, it was the strangest event anybody could remember. They'd like to hear of in Baltimore. People marched along that morning, as if some great pressure had been relieved.
When Hightower Dave got the call it was nothing but a relief to get out of the egg. This must be done in stages as any bird knows, first stand on the feet, where to onlookers he would have seemed to keep going up and up, not quite seven feet from that moment when egg landed him in this place where both sides say the lights either go out like snuff or come on with a pop. Take your pick.
The matter was that a Ms. OOps had had a breakin the previous night, inexact because there was question about her coherence. The phone to which the patrol report came said a missing bead collection, fare scheduled in coming weeks if at all, except there was nothing else to do. He had already driven the length of McDowell, green lights the whole way, past start ups and thrifts, meat packers and secondhand furnitures, beauty parlors and Mexican diners. Along with preserving vegan car technology,DewPit was monkeying with G. Manly Hall’s 33 degrees on the Paris Meridian. Hall says elite civilobes have there “a secret sacred destiny.” But my friend, that is not the whole of DewPit. Exact McDowell runs right down the center. There are two sides to every secret, steroes, endoscopies, tacos, Ollie Vaughn's eithiop, carnicerias, zumbas. Then across, tortas, limos, plum repair, llanteras and bi-low dentist uniforms. This section in the universe is Pi x 33 for those who swear by what the sages wrote, the flyin Swift X. Why don't they land at Hermon and finish off? PiX! Ambiguity is magnified in nuts to crack.
It takes a while to suppose these tactics can compete, but there was another fairy tale told by one Aldrich Something or Other writing for the DP Publica. His Nixies of Brunhild had not yet come out. Humanoids trapped in Austin and Tucson and other capitols could escape to DewPit, the mystical Phoenix, unless contained by elements of towering Haboobs and microbursts on I 10 that kept even the locusts at bay. Imagine the caliche of ice plain in the heat. Aldrich worked three part time jobs, but kept the police scanner tuned. He heard the dispatch to Dave Cash and nearly beat him to Damer's hut.
The first report on Dame OOps house said that it was scorched in fire, that was hard crusted limestone on the blackened chimneys. Maybe it was guano. Zoning laxed in the day. The building had been condemned and boarded up. Enterprising citizens had barricaded the canal ditches to prevent burglars, so there was no longer any citizen patrol. Aldrich disclosed five gallon buckets of motor oil were under citrus. A sort of a diptych, Aldrich had taken to listening to Milton inside his four wheel turnip in moments of inspiration. He was composing a song called, The Crescents of Asphalt,
ribbons of light the transcendent zone
arched roof Pendant
by subtle Magic shown,
many a row Of Starry Lamps
and blazing Crescents fed
With Naphtha and Asphaltus
light the radar bed.
Neither Cash or Aldrich S/O were aware that fairy tale had landed in DewPit. For real, neither believed, but DewPit sits right atop the grid lines N. Latitude 33.30.3, same as Bermuda Triangle. Remotes view it with their chakras. Painted Desert beliefs align Third Mesa Hopis with Orion's belt. This is proven with the Gadsden Purchase and the lights of Arriva. If you meet a fairy tale out walking what do you say? If you have any sense you won't go south to McDowell tonight to find out, further than one street away. North you may enjoy pleasures of the holy conscious sort, but those southy indigenous chewbacca out of Grimm, as far as Aldrich was concerned ran the girdle of the world. He had quotes on Shakespeare tacked up to poles and sides of buildings along McDowell to prove a series of comics. His first dispatch, from a desk under the old castle on Van Buren, was the little Mars anomaly. What do you hear from earth, Aldrich, horizons persist with eaves, caves, giant holes and praying towns? Luminous beams inside the Clavius worried him, not to speak of the Plato that Canadians know, violet edges of sea, first landings in Mare Crisium, luminosities, completely bald unblinking. But Dave Cash wasn't sure of his position in fairy tale either, whether the tale preceded the actual or the actual the tale. Some bulbs can't decide on or off. All this is to say that the Dame Oops lived south where hot shots we now go.
GoldiPOp
AE Reiff
The neighborhoods south of McDowell were eating GoldiPOp.
This is no joke.
Would you eat a nice moo cow coming down the road? All the trimmings? It was logical. GoldiPOp was as big as a cow.
She worked nights and came home in the day. Her car vented smoke like a blue tornado. When she put the pedal down it erupted.
Crowds gathered on walks. Chickens stirred their stripes. Voices ran like sirens. Widows did business in directions. At dawn you looked out your window for the fire and the fire engines never came, but Susan drove in the midst. Arms waved. Voices greeted her coming. It was Tuesday, which is what routine will do. The neighbors were watching her. You’d have done different?
Fence rows of that house surrounded GoldiPOp. She could still live in a building like you and me. Certain modifications had been made, doors widened, foundations reinforced. Her chair was a two-story bed. One wall sagged in the corner of the floor.
the little red phone on the wall was ringing. That phone was ringing because the goats were gossiping. You ate the Gold and think this exaggeration?
Science has long proven that earth is a homogenous ecoplasm which affects everything.
So?
Allegory, dude.
Susan lived where no white person dared. She was shortened down to the nubbin, parceled out by the plain! They saw her largeness and loved her mountain. Word went home.
Come to get the Gold!
Kindreds gathered. She pulled up to the curb smoking in her car to appreciative murmurs.
Peepo storked and Lydia cried.
Men in potato sacks around 7-11’s tramped out of their boxes for the view.
Random Quotes After the Friendly Mailman was Apprehended
Christopher Woods
I always gave him a big plate of cookies at Christmas.
I’m pregnant with his baby.
All the world’s problems could be solved with medication.
Such a sweet face. Such a ghastly thing to do.
Always generous with his smiles.
My neighbor is pregnant with his baby.
I almost left my husband for him.
I almost left my wife for him.
Strong thighs.
You never know what someone is really thinking.
I think I’m pregnant.
There goes the neighborhood.
He was some ride.
I’m moving to the country.
Who knew?
Imagine if it were my child.
Imagine if it were me.
They’ll never get the smell out of that house.
God, I hate to think of a substitute. They always deliver the
wrong mail.
Resettlement
Tara Laing
Sara’s awake nights.
At the window sucking damp salt air.
What about our dead?
Seems sinful to leave them graves go wild.
Imagine, I used to find this place small. Longed for the mainland.
Foolishness.
When they came for Arlene Kennedy’s house she had a load of wash on. No warning at all.
Sara’s house is empty, ready to be hauled across the bay. It was that, or council housing in town.
Might as well buckle her into a straightjacket, for all the air and elbow-room she’d have.
Men muster, readying ropes in her garden.
Progress for youngsters, or my man’s livelihood. Can’t have both, no Sir.
$1000 my arse.
“Wait!’ Sara cries, running to close her kitchen window. A bandaid on a porthole.
“Houses weren’t made to float,” She nods and the men begin to pull.
Salima
Francois Van Zyl
Hastings Banda was nearing the end of his reign as president-for-life of Malawi by the time we moved there from South Africa. In the early 60’s, Banda played a key role in achieving independence in Malawi from the British. A quick Google search will tell you that his rule was a “highly repressive autocracy.” I was ten.
Dad got the job from some guy who made it big in the tobacco game. Mr. Big Tobacco, a man whose identity remains a mystery, had decided that he would spend his fortune investing in a free clinic in the capital city of Lilongwe. He called Dad up and asked him if he would come work as a doctor there and lend a hand in a place that was in a volatile state of political and social flux. I think Dad wanted to help, but I think he also just wanted to go back to the bush. He spent his childhood on a farm in Namibia and rode horseback with the Ovambo. Many years later he would be drafted to fight in the Angolan Civil War where he would once again meet with the Ovambo who settled in southern Angola. Dad doesn’t talk about the war very often—I get why. But he does talk about the bush when I see him. “It’s just flat” he says. Other times he talks about long clouds of vapor that hover at eye level, and wild horses that he and his brothers watched from the back of a decommissioned army jeep. I think he wanted that for me. I didn’t. I grew up behind a metal gate with tall brick walls that had spikes attached to their tops. Neighbors who couldn’t afford spikes smashed beer bottles and glued the broken glass to the top of their walls instead. There are spiders like wolves, and snakes that are best to decapitate with a shovel. Better to stay inside and read and draw. But I think Dad wanted to go back to the bush.
* * *
Mind you, now, “bush” is not the best description of Malawi flora. It’s wet and populated with rainforest plants, long-stemmed canopies of hanging leaves overlooking sugar canes that steam in persistent hot rain. Black Mambas glide through these cane fields while clouds of mosquitoes pass above them. There’s the instant crack of a sugar cane stalk before the full thunder of it snapping completely. Little strands of sheath that are cigarette-yellow and brown hold it together despite repeated attempts to rip it free. There’s chalky crumbs of Quinine tablets to stave off the malaria. You’re not supposed to chew ‘em, but I had a bad habit of doing just that. Guava trees are planted in the yards of the houses that the doctors live in. I never touched them, though. They were often filled with worms and better used for chucking against the walls that were lined with rusted metal spikes. Violence—always stalking, gazing, and peripheral
* * *
Salima is about an hour and a half away from the patrolled area where the doctors and their families lived. It had been about six months so far and Dad was rarely home. The clinic never stopped calling—just malaria and gunshots and malaria. Fetal alcohol syndrome was swelling in the townships and the pressure of Banda’s waning grip was hot in the air. So, Salima. For a break and a walk in the white-hot beach sand.
We pile into a white 4X4 Mazda. Gates open and a security guard in an aqua-green short- sleeved shirt salutes us. His beret is red and wooly with a gold badge on it. Usually, these gates open to begin the half hour ride to Bishop Mackenzie International School. But now they open to somewhere else. To Salima. To wild fang and flesh-eating tendrils. These rides on shattered roads that are being retaken by the rainforest conjure irrational fears of creatures that rule the jungle. Every trip down that dirt road reminded me of the two-hour ride from Kamuzu International Airport where president-for-life Banda’s face watched us all—colonizers and Chichewa coming and going in the rainy season. That first ride was where I saw a man walking the road, barefoot and completely naked save for a layer of bubble wrap that he wore as a skirt. He carried a wooden walking stick with a bulbous top. He didn’t even turn his head to look at us passing him by.
The road to Salima is too narrow for two cars. So, when the army Jeeps approach us, we pull over as much as we can to let them pass. I dare not rock the truck -- what if we topple over into the brush? Is this what Dad wants? To fall into the brush? I’ve seen a puff adder here before. It crossed the jagged pavement a few weeks ago, its body bulging near its head with a soon-to-be- digested rat or a toad or Chihuahua.
We press on past the army Jeeps, past more and more sugar cane while more and more mosquitoes choke the air. One year from now, I get malaria for the first time. It will change me for the rest of my life. But at this moment, we are crossing the jungle to Salima, past a circular yellow sign that warns us to watch for yellow baboons. I have seen them. Their teeth are stringy with spit and antelope blood, coconut hairs and crumbs of sand.
* * *
First comes the yelping hurry of birds overhead. I cannot see them, only their shadows on the remaining pieces of pavement that eventually give way to a dirt path. Further still and the ghostly static of far-away waves is nearer and nearer. We pull up and drive right onto the sand. I’ve only ever seen brown sand, but this sand is as white as sugar and there is no one here. I’ve been on an empty beach once before, in Saldanha Baai, near a shipwreck whose wooden boards I tore off and kept for many years.
Now, again, alone in Salima.
A few bungalows are pitched around the edge of the jungle. A man named Mextan approaches my father and they chat in Chichewa. “Say muli bwanji to the man, son” my father says, and I do. Mextan shows us to our bungalows. The roofs are thatched grass that make the tips of my fingers quiver in anticipatory dislike of their splintery texture. The walls are made of brick that are painted yellow. Inside there are few windows and various framed sketches of Lake Malawi and President Banda. Nets are hung over the beds to keep the mosquitoes out which eases my concerns about the matter. Mextan has his own bungalow nearby and I am instructed not to intrude on him.
It seems as though I made it! All bodies accounted for without the intrusion of yellow baboons or the army. Mextan is here too, he must know this place well. We are all safe here. Outside my parents and Mextan chat over a few beers. They wave me off to the beach when I ask them if I can dip my feet in the water. As I walk and feel the once-familiar tickle of sand under my bare feet, it gives way to the sloshing of saturated beachfront. I take a second to be empty. This is my first time—the first instance of being genuinely, organically, and unexpectedly empty. Life happens when you’re not watching—when you’re present in the moment without having to try and be present in the moment. But those types of silences are bad for your health in the long run. They want attention and unpacking even when decades have passed by. At this moment, here in Salima, I’m not sure how to label the distillation of being in-tune with the universe. Everything is in its right place and it’s uneasy. I don’t know why. It will be many years later before I come to know this moment as the first instance of despair in spite of it all. Nothingness despite love, floundering in inarticulable ways. It’s disassociation while retaining the environment. Ripples. The paradox of wanting nothing more than to leave, to retreat, to stop while simultaneously wanting to stay and sleep here, never to leave, abruptly here in Salima and quietly OK in Salima. The lake is in conversation with itself, throwing its waves around for these few in the bungalows. I dig my feet into the sand and pincer my toes, shifting these atoms of the lakeside back and forth. The sky has been dark for a few days now. Later on tonight, heavy, larger-than-normal drops of rain will fall into corrugated buckets that go KOP and PUCK as they boulder against the metal. Just over a year and a half from now a man will put a gun to Dad’s head. He’ll pull the trigger but the revolver he uses will jam and Dad will floor it through the metal gates that guard our house as the assailant runs back into the dark jungle. Soon after, Dad will move his wife and children to Newfoundland. I will see Salima in my dreams from time to time. I linger there in the sand with the jungle at my back and stare into the opal of Lake Malawi, waiting for rain to mark these waters before I have to go back into the bungalow. Mosquitoes are worse at night.
Memories are like Shrapnel
Connie Boland
My cousin’s hiccup sobs remind me of a child whose fingers have been smashed in a car door. I imagine her doubled over, gasping.
“It’s Nan,” Kelly says.
My knuckles are white against an orange phone case.
“She’s in the hospital.”
My legs tremble. I slide down the refrigerator, dragging magnetic alphabet letters to the floor.
“You better come. Now.”
A hundred excuses cross my mind: I need to call my mother, wash my hair, finish the laundry. I need to deal with the magnets, and there are cookie crumbs under the kitchen table. I am tired. I have a headache. I will be there, later.
I smell like sweat, but I reek of fear.
Day 1:
The emergency room is too rushed, too loud, too real. Nurses with flushed cheeks and splattered gowns that look like preschool painting smocks shake their heads at my questions. In the hallway, a limp hand dangles from a parked stretcher. The absence of age spots tells me it’s not my grandmother. I step in front of a moving bed, halting its forward momentum. “I’m looking for an elderly woman,” I say. The orderly navigates around me, like a seasoned fisherman docking at a government wharf. “Please.” I grab his sleeve, trying not to stare at the blanket-covered body. “My nan?”
The orderly shrugs. “It’s a kid, a teenager,” he says. My hand falls from his green scrub top. I watch him amble down the hall. “Friggin sin,” I mutter.
I find Kelly in the outpatient department. “They took Nan upstairs,” she says. We follow brown dots into the bowels of the building. The air is heavy, and moist. Patients with vacant expressions zigzag right to left, left to right, towing IV poles and oxygen tanks, like parents pulling kiddie carts. “Stairs or elevator,” I ask. Kelly glances at me sideways.
The doors swish shut, silencing the chaos. Kelly jabs the button for the fifth floor. She leans backward, into the wall. The elevator jerks. It shimmies, and it shakes, but there’s no music to mask our silence. I stare at a floor with red and pink and green stains.
“What happened?”
“She fell in the bathroom.” Kelly sounds like she’s underwater. My stomach sinks. We finish the ride in humid silence.
The Palliative Care Unit smells like wild roses. When we were kids, we plucked the smelliest flowers from Nan’s garden. “They’re beautiful,” she would say when we clamored into her kitchen, petals crushed between our dirty fingers. “Watch out for stinger needles.”
The unit is decorated with thank you plaques. Subdued lighting casts a peaceful glow over scuffed concrete. Nurses speak in gentle tones, gliding from room to room to room in sensible shoes that don’t squeak. Soft hands offer rough tissues. Nan and Poppy had twelve children. One son lived only three months. The remaining five boys and six girls eventually produced twenty-one grandchildren who made over a dozen great-grandchildren. Our Christmas potlucks were legendary. “You didn’t have to bring anything,” Nan would say. The kitchen floor would be sloppy with melted snow. The woodstove would be roaring. Rum would sparkle in tall glasses cinched with ice cubes. In the early years, a cloud of cigarette smoke hung from the ceiling like grey mistletoe.
“Throw your coat on the bed in the room,” Nan would say. “Come over and give me a hug.” She would sit in her rocking chair, like a queen on a throne. “I told you there’s nothing I need, but since you went through the trouble.” She would tuck her knitting out of sight and hold out her hands to receive our carefully planned presents. I suspected the gifts would be stored away, but Nan admired every cotton nightgown. She examined every housecoat. She praised all the school pictures. Nan tut-tutted at gift cards but she clapped her hands at crossword puzzle books and scratch tickets. In return, every man received homemade wool socks, a pair of mittens with a trigger finger, or both. The women got a bottle of body wash.
*****
In 1970, I was five years old. My parents were heading for divorce so Mom and I moved in with Nan, Poppy, and ten kids still living at home. We shared a bedroom at the end of a short hallway, next to the only bathroom. To a child with no siblings, it was wonderful. Every morning started with Nan shouting. “There’s more than you needs to use the toilet. And for the love of God, open the window!”
Her kitchen was dominated by a massive chrome table. We sat on mismatched chairs, youngsters on one side and older kids on the other. They would stare over our shoulders, into the living room, at the black and white television. “Ohhhh, the story’s getting some good now,” they would tease. “Too bad you can’t see it. That Rachel is the devil.” The TV had shiny gold dials, and two channels. Poppy would adjust brass rabbit ears, twisting the antenna until static gave way to an almost clear picture of the soap opera Another World. On Sunday evenings, we huddled on the couch to watch the Wonderful World of Disney while Nan sliced thick chunks of homemade bread for our bed lunch.
“Come here and eat,” she would say. The kitchen smelled like hot yeast and warm flour. The air tasted like Tetley tea, brown sugar, and Carnation milk. “Now, git to bed, and don’t forget your prayers.”
*****
On the Palliative Care Unit, I hesitate on the threshold to Room 101. Nan is connected to machines that beep and hiss. Numbers flick across an ebony screen, like traffic lights. My mother guards the door. Her hair is combed. Her burgundy cardigan smells like incense. She licks her thumb, rubs the tip over my dirty cheek. “Mommy spit,” she says. “Cures everything.” Mom grabs my hand and I remember learning how to cross a street. We walk side-by-side into the room.
I count twenty baby steps to the raised bed. I reach around an IV pole to touch Nan’s hand. Wrinkled skin and blue veins. Nan believed in the power of a bread poultice. “It’s only hot for a few minutes,” she would say, knotting a folded length of old flannel around a pus-filled toe. “Where did you manage to find a rusty nail? Lord, would you stop wiggling!”
If I had a crayon, I would connect the age spots, linking brown dots to make Nan whole again.
Her forehead is blue and black. Under wiry permed hair a bulge pulsates like a heartbeat. “It doesn’t hurt,” she says, but her face is pinched, and pale. I remember the time Nan was interviewed for a documentary. It was the anniversary of the resettlement program that drove her family from their remote island home. “The government said there were no teachers for our kids; no priests to say mass on Sunday,” Nan told the reporter from Land and Sea. “We had to go, and I don’t regret it.”
On Palliative Care, Nan’s sons thrust their chapped fists deep into workpants pockets. They talk too fast about the weather, the price of lobster, and the cost of diesel. Nan’s daughters flutter around her bed like hummingbirds.
“Does she want a cuppa tea?”
“Is she comfortable?”
“Where’s her teeth?”
Nan watches us with the same steel-grey eyes that haunted our teenage mistakes. “I can hear you,” she says. “The answers are no, no, and in my coat pocket. What I want is my rosary beads.”
Mom tugs a worn leather pouch from a familiar purse on the bedside table. When she tucks the glass beads between Nan’s trembling fingers, I am devastated by the women’s look of silent understanding. Nan closes her eyes. It was the last time I saw her smile.
Day 2:
The hospital room smells like tobacco. Sage. Cedar. Sweet grass. A medicine bag rests beside Nan’s folded hands, to protect and guide her journey. A petroglyph of our L’nu symbol is beaded on tanned moose hide. In Mi’kmaq it means the people. Machines cast an iridescent glow over everything. Nan’s skin stretches too tight over her cheekbones. A homemade quilt is pulled to her waist, its colourful pattern out of place in the monochrome room. Kelly is curled into a recliner, legs tucked under a thin hospital blanket, a novel spread open on her lap. “Books,” Nan would say when we pestered her about Mother’s Day gifts. “And I don’t mind a bit of the sex in them.”
A spider web grows inside the bulge, seeping into Nan’s bushy eyebrows. “It’s ok,” Kelly says. “Talk to her. I think she can still hear us.” My cousin shifts. The book thumps to the floor in an explosion of sound and words and pages. My head whips toward the bed, as if I expect Nan to startle awake.
The machines beep on.
“Were you here all night?”
“I came about an hour ago,” Kelly says, “But your mother just left. The daughters are taking turns, so Nan is never alone.” Her words are like shrapnel. They pierce my skin. Shatter my heart. When I was six, our Grade 1 class made Christmas ornaments. On green construction paper I drew a thirteen candy cane stockings. I curled my fingers around a red crayon and painstakingly printed thirteen names. My artwork was crinkled, and the letters bled by the time Nan tore into the brown paper on Christmas morning, but she pulled me into her ample lap and hugged me hard. “Sure, you’re just like one of my own,” she said.
On Palliative Care, I want to tell Kelly that I am one of Nan’s daughters, but the words die in my dry throat. The air is acrid. Instead, I turn away from the bed. I stumble out the door, and down the long hallway, searching for a secluded corner. Perched on a wooden bench, I sob until a box of tissues is placed gently on my lap. “It’s good to cry,” a nurse says, touching my arm. “She’s your family.”
The door is closed when I go back to Nan’s room. I raise my fist, thinking to knock, but a murmur of voices suggests I do otherwise. Kelly is in the kitchenette at the opposite end of the unit. In a long apron that covers her dress slacks and frilly blouse, she reminds me of Nan. “The nurses are doing morning cares,” she says. Kelly offers me a mug. Steam smells like full-fat cream. Coffee is the colour of spring mud. She takes two cookies from a can. Drags a wooden chair from under the scarred table. “I don’t know how to do this,” she says. “How are we supposed to watch our grandmother die?” The cookies are dry and grainy. They taste like ashes.
Day 3:
The kitchenette feels like home. The couch is frayed. The matching loveseat sinks in the middle and is wide enough for two people to huddle together. Paintings of flowers, birds, and mountains hang on walls the colour of sunflowers. Homemade casseroles overflow the counter, the stove, the refrigerator. We pack meals for the nurses. Doctors report that Nan’s heart and lungs are strong, but beneath the homemade quilt, our matriarch is wasting away. Sons with wet eyes wonder about a feeding tube. They remove their baseball caps to ask if their mother is hungry, thirsty, starving to death. Sympathetic nurses patiently explain in non-medical terms. The sons nod. On a bench outside Nan’s room, they talk about the wind, ice in the bay, and digging a grave.
The kitchenette is a refuge. We share stories and our laughter flows, like music, into every nook and cranny. A borrowed pencil is comfortable in my hand. I listen to every word, writing quickly. Some of these stories I’ve never heard before.
“I hated school,” my uncle says. “I used to run down the hill to the beach. She’d follow me, with a stick.”
My mother laughed. “She said childbirth was like walking through the valley of death.”
The kitchenette buzzes with caffeinated smiles and sugar highs.
“She hid me from the cops, once.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
We own the Palliative Care unit. We apologize for being loud.
“She had her favourites.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Who always got their own pie?”
“I did.”
“Exactly!”
We play games. Scat, and Whist, and Crib. “Gertie loved her cards,” Nan’s sister says, cracking her knuckles against the table. “Put an ace on that, I dare you.”
I was 10 years old and holding a skein of wool. Sitting with my legs crossed. Arms extended toward my grandmother. My hands are as wide as her lap. Nan is winding, winding, winding. Her chair rocks back and forth, back, and forth. Poppy sits with an old school desk pulled tight against his knees, knitting a net. “I did this for your great-grandmother,” Nan said. “Tell me when your arms get tired.” The wool was itchy. My butt was numb. My arms ached. I didn’t complain.
Day 4:
The kitchenette feels different this morning. The air smells like stale bread and burnt coffee. It smells heavy. We talk about taking turns sitting with Nan. Kelly borrows my pencil. She chews on the eraser. She tears a page from my gift shop notebook. We drift around the unit making notes about work schedules. Daycare. Obligations.
I study plaques donated by grateful families. Nurses dab Nan’s dry lips with damp sponges. Her breathing is laboured. Her body is tiny under the heavy quilt, diminished by nature. Her forehead is smooth.
3:00 p.m.
“Are you leaving?”
I tell the nurse I will be back in an hour.
“I think you should stay. It won’t be long now.”
4:00 p.m.
Ragged breathing.
4:30 p.m.
The room smells like Nan’s flower garden.
5:00 p.m.
“She’d hate us gawking at her,” my mother says. “She was a private woman. Not even Daddy saw her in her underwear.”
5:30 p.m.
I lean down to kiss my Nan. Her cheek is cold. “Thank you for taking care of me,” I whisper. I take 20 baby steps away from the bed. Standing on the threshold, I watch my family.
6:00 p.m.
6:30 p.m.
7:00 p.m.
On the last day of her life, Nan’s family stood, holding hands, in a semi-circle around her bed, until rapid breaths were followed by no breathing at all.
7:30 p.m.
“She was ahead of her time.” Kelly is stacking egg sandwiches in takeout containers. “You should write her story.” The coffee pot is scrubbed clean. I rub a finger over the Queen of Hearts before tucking it into the middle of the deck. At age twenty, I shacked up with my boyfriend. When I tell Nan, she disappears into her bedroom, emerging five minutes later to press a five-dollar bill into my hand. “A woman must always have her own money,” she said.
At Nan’s funeral, our family squeezes together in church pews, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, backs straight. We wear black, like members of an exclusive club. During the eulogy I think about how different Nan was after Poppy died. How one stumble in the bathroom ended a life that spanned almost nine decades. How we are all connected, bound together by the one woman who loved us all.
*****
Five days after the funeral, Nan’s girls meet at a retirement home to pack up her room. In her closet, and under the bed, we find stacks of wrapped Christmas gifts, neatly labeled for re-gifting.
Sarala at the Movies
Sunaina G. Rao
Her large bedazzled phone was propped up on a pile of coupons and mail she had stacked in the midst of her cluttered dining room table. Chewing carefully on a handful of fennel seeds, she realized she’d seen all the Hindi movies that were in theaters now and settled on an English romantic comedy. The description said it was based on Shakespere. She rolled her eyes at the American obsession with this playwright – Shakespeare was no Kalidas. Not that she’d ever sat down and read either Shakespere or Kalidas, but she’d seen enough movies based on both authors’ plays to know which ones she preferred.
That reminded her to give her son a call. He always had his nose in books. It was exactly that sort of American fiction that got him in trouble. He had graduated from university years ago and now he was working for some useless company no one had ever heard of, making peanuts for a salary. And how was she supposed to explain what Communications was to her mother-in-law? Communications-shmammunications. The boy couldn’t pick up a phone call much less communicate with anyone. Her neighbor’s son became a lawyer and now she had to look at the shiny Lexus he had gifted his mother every time she got in her ancient minivan. Last year her son had gifted her a reusable heating pad. As if she was some invalid. Sure, it was a blessing in the summers when her feet hurt from being in sandals all day, but it was no Lexus.
Checking the clock she realized it was time to go. The bowl on the table was filled with goody bags from the parties and poojas she had attended. She threw a bag with two laddoos and a bag of spicy mixture into the bottom of her purse. Backing out of the driveway she dialed her son and put the phone on speaker. It rang a few times and went to voicemail, no surprises. “Hi jaanoo, it’s mummy. Call me back” she said into her phone. Sometimes she wondered what she had done to that boy to make him act like this. Was it so hard to take 10 minutes to call your mom each day?
Surely her daughter would pick up. She dialed again as she rolled her car out of the neighborhood and onto the main street. This time too, the phone rang and went to voicemail. Poor girl, she was probably busy. “Hi jaanee, it’s mummy. Call me back.” she said again before taking in the echoing silence on the other end of the line. She turned on the radio and the sounds of pop filled the seats around her.
She was still ten minutes away from the theater so she decided to make another call to her friend, Chitra, who co-organized the Thursday sangeets. Chitra picked up after two rings.
“Hii Sarala, howareyou?” Chitra crooned through the phone. Chitra was always bubbly and excited to hear from everyone. She was the star of their meditation classes; always coming out of their deep pranayama sessions with a joy in her eyes that sometimes made Sarala want to wring her neck. For Sarala the meditation classes were meant to be serious and she took the time to remember prayers or think about her husband. She usually came out of it more relaxed but in a bad mood. She just couldn’t understand the air of levity that Chitra always seemed to occupy.
“Hi Chitra, I’m good - just talking to my kids. How are you?” said Sarala, taking on a cheery tone.
“Hanh hanh, fine ji” Chitra said.
“Hanh, great,” said Sarala. “Just wanted to see if you had asked Prabakar about bringing Yogesh-ji to next week’s sangeet. Don’t want to order the extra pakora platter if we won’t have the extra crowd”
This was how the sangeet worked: Chitra worked her charm and brought in the most desirable and auspicious guests; while Sarala handled the logistics of food and seating. It was, in Sarala’s mind, her attention to detail and ability to pull decor out of nowhere that made the sangeets so successful. The problem was, Chitra’s mind was always floating away somewhere and Sarala was always responsible for pulling her back to earth.
Yogesh was a young Carnatic singer who had temporarily moved to their neighborhood for a work assignment. He was the son of a Priest from a big temple in New Jersey. In addition, he was handsome and would be a first-class rishta for any of the girls in their community. Having him there would draw out guests both young and old; vying for a glimpse of this eligible bachelor. Maybe even for Sarala’s own daughter.
“Oh, yes! Of course. Let me do it now. You know, Sarala, I was just about to do it yesterday when—” Sarala’s mind wandered as Chitra went through her excuses. It really was always up to her.
“Ok, Ok. Chitra. That’s fine. Just do it today, alright?” Sarala said, disguising her annoyance with a sugary sweet tone.
“Of course, ji! You know it’s just so busy over he–” Chitra started again but Sarala cut her
off.
“Good good. Now I am going to see a movie. I will call again tomorrow, na?” “Ok, Ok, enjoy,” Chitra said.
“Ok, ok. Good night” Sarala said. “Ok, hanh, bye” said Chitra.
“Ok, ok bye” said Sarala.
The timing was perfect, she was just pulling into the movie theater parking lot. Checking to make sure her illicit snacks were buried underneath the big shawl in her purse, Sarala made her way to the box office. She had picked Tuesdays as her movie night because tickets were $5. But nowadays she doesn't even have to pay. Two years into this ritual one of the employees, seeing her come in every Tuesday, just gave her free tickets. She didn’t know his name and he didn’t know hers but there was a silent kinship between them. There was no one else there so she strode confidently up to the line with the dark haired boy behind the window. With his swooping hair and facial piercings, he was the kind of boy that she would have disapproved of if he was friends with her son. But as the boy who gave her free tickets to the movies, she thought he was a good boy.
“I want to see Dance of the Sea, please” she said to her ‘friend’. He glanced at her listlessly, printed a ticket and silently slid it over to her. She gave him a little smile and said “ok” before heading toward the theater doors.
The teenager stationed at the door glanced at her ticket and muttered “theater 3” before half-heartedly looking inside her bag (this worker too with piercings and colored hair that Sarala had to stop herself from commenting on). Pleased with her deception Sarala strode confidently into the theater. She stopped to use the bathroom and tugged her shawl across her shoulders. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror she pushed down at her hair. In recent years she had all but stopped caring for it, chopping it short and half heartedly running a comb through the mat every few days. It had the unfortunate habit of growing in an odd square shape instead of following the contours of her head. Every time she looked at it closely she noticed more greys. Before she could get caught up in the passage of time she turned sharply away from the mirror and walked out the door.
Sarala always had a row to herself toward the back of the theater. It made it easier for her to check her phone, maybe fit in a few games of Bejeweled™. She got comfy, pulling the spare shawl out of her bag and draping it over her legs. She arranged her bag so she would be able to easily reach in and grab a snack once the lights dimmed.
Of course no trip to the theater was complete without a selfie. Sarala’s Facebook posts were popular and she loved counting the “likes” and “hahas” as they rolled in. Also, she had a loyal following to update on the latest movies. She began every movie with a selfie and ended it with a hastily written comment with her review of the movie. “Lots of good dialogues but maybe not good for kids! ” was her review of Ted. Holding up a ladoo, Sarala quickly snapped a selfie before putting it back in the bag and opening her Facebook app. Posting immediately (the auto caption read: Sarala Gowda is watching Dance of the Sea at AMC Eastbourne) she began scrolling again.
There was Pavitri, her daughter’s dance teacher, posting from yet another exotic location. Sarala’s lips pursed with tension. Pavitri’s husband was a prominent orthodontist meaning her dance classes were a true passion project. She charged the lowest rates in town because she didn’t need the money in the slightest. Sarala’s husband had been good friends with Pavitri’s husband. At parties they would hole up together in the study to discuss history or politics. Once Sarala’s husband had left her, Pavitri and her glamorous life was out of her reach. She liked the photo of Pavitri’s poolside snack and wrote “Enjoy!”
That’s when she saw them, sitting just a couple rows ahead of her. A young couple, snuggled close, whispering and giggling. The disgust rose in Sarala’s gut. Even when her husband was with her she would never behave like this. One of them took their hand and started giving the other a head scratch, their curly hair flounced, silhouetted by the screen ahead of them. These kids….this was why she always insisted that her kids were home by 8pm. Who knows what kinds of things they would have learned if they came to this theater.
The trailers were coming to an end and Sarala pulled her first ladoo out of her bag, breaking off a little piece to eat it. The couple in front of her had settled down for the moment, at least. Her mouth twisted a little in disapproval.
Sarala’s own marriage had practically been a love marriage. But she still went through all the proper channels. Her husband had been a regular customer at her father’s restaurant. He would come every Friday, looking meager after a long day of medical school. And she would smile shyly at him while pouring him water or setting his dessert in front of him. Her father always sat with him at the end of his meal for a cup of chai and a rousing conversation. She never knew whether it was her father or her husband who broached the subject first but 6 months after first handing him a menu they were married. And 3 months later he got the news that he would be able to travel to the US to complete his studies.
Sarala had never had any big desire to go anywhere. She just wanted to sit in a beautiful home with her kids and be a big, happy family like the ones she saw on TV. Instead he brought her to Boston in the middle of winter. The stress had caused her hair to fall out and it had never grown back the same. They had two kids and moved many times before buying a respectable four bedroom home she still lived in. She never complained as long as he came and spent time
with her. As long as her kids did what she asked. As long as the bills were paid. As long as everyone was there for dinner. As long as she had someone to go grocery shopping with. As long as someone would rub her feet once a week. As long as….
Shortly after she turned 40 and her kids had gone to college, her husband had decided he was done. He said he wanted a clean house. He said he didn’t want to be bothered. He said he wanted freedom. Freedom-shmeedom. After a few months of traveling around he had gone back to India at the ripe age of 44 to live with his mother and sister. He didn’t want freedom, he wanted to be taken care of like a child. But Sarala had been the youngest in her family. She had wanted to be taken care of too. He never seemed capable of that.
She had been listless for months - just laying on the couch and watching Jeopardy reruns. But her daughter was still finishing medical school and her kids weren’t married yet. No one would want to marry into a family like hers. So she lied to everyone and said her husband had gone back to take care of his mother. And they had been living this lie for almost 10 years now. She spoke to her mother-in-law once a week but hadn’t heard her own husband’s voice in years. It was not how she thought her love marriage would end up.
Speaking of marriage…..Sarala went to check her phone again (what if her daughter had called?!) but there was just another email from Target and a notification from Bejeweled™. She switched from her ladoo to the spicy mixture and when she turned back to the screen she was met with horror. On screen everything was going as expected (our leading lady was being taken to dinner by our leading man), but the silhouette of the couple in front of her had morphed into one writhing mass as they pressed their lips into each other. Sarala’s disapproval reached maximum levels. Who could do something like this? Didn't they know there were other people here? Where were their parents? If one of her kids did something like this she would never let them out of the house again. She would send them to India to live with their father and learn some manners. Nevermind that they were adults - anyone can learn to behave properly. Should she shout? Should she tell them to stop? And was that the sound of a zipper? She tried rustling her bag of snacks. She shuffled around and coughed. Still, they remained lip locked in front of her. Even the couple on screen had less chemistry. Just when she was working up the nerve to stand up and move seats, the couple disengaged and left the theater.
In all her days of watching movies she had never seen something so brazen. Did this happen often? She hoped it didn’t. On screen the couple was making-up after a prolonged fight and dramatic music was playing. By the time Sarala’s shock wore off the credits began to roll.
Gathering her things she went back into the movie lobby where she spotted her son’s high school friend, Joseph, standing by the concessions. She waved to him and he waved back. Normally Sarala was suspicious of all her kids’ American friends but Joseph was the exception. He was high achieving, even became Valedictorian at their high school. An honor that would have gone to her son if he could have stopped reading books and applied himself. Either way, Joseph was always a good boy.
Just as she was turning away to dispose of her trash she saw another boy come up to Joseph, smiling, His curly hair bounced as he walked. Sarala’s eyes widened as she thought back to the curly hair silhouetted in the dark movie theater. From the back she had assumed the long curly hair belonged to a girl.
She scurried out of the theater and into her car. A ringing filled the space and she saw it was her son calling. Heart thudding, she picked up the phone.
“Hi janoo, I called you so many times and you didn’t pick up!” She exclaimed, almost by rote.
“Hi mom” , came his monotone reply, “I was just a little sick. How are you?”
“Sick? Oh - you want to come home beta?” She asked.
“No, mom. I'm fine. Already feeling better” He said, maybe a little too forcefully. He would never let her take care of him.
“Ok, ok janoo. Please drink some milk with haldi. And eat some sambar. Did you go to sleep after you washed your hair? You always do that!” She exclaimed.
“No mom, I didn’t” he yelled into the phone, “I’m fine, OK? Can we move on?” “Ooookkkk.” She droned, letting him know she thought he was being ridiculous.
“Anyway, I saw Joseph at the movie theater”
Now her son seemed shocked. “J-joseph? In Easbourne?”
“Yah. Of course, where else would I see him? Oh, did you know…I think….I think he is a gay. He was with another boy. Can you believe it? Did you know this?”
Silence yawned from the other end of the line.
“Hello, beta? Are you there?” Asked Sarala, thinking the call might have dropped. “Uh…yeah, mom. I’m here. Um….I need go. I’ll talk to you later, ok?”
“Later? You just called me! Come, now. Tell me, did you eat today?”
“Mom. I know. I have to go.” His voice sounded strange. Sarala made a note to send him some ginger tea.
“Ok, beta. Call me soon. Your sister also didn’t call me. I’m going to Chitra aunty’s house tomorrow, OK?”
“Ok mom. Bye”
He hung up before she had a chance to respond.
It was always like this. They would call for a few minutes and then hurry off. As if she hadn’t spent hours listening to them talk as children. As if she hadn’t sacrificed for them. No matter. She would mail him some ginger and turmeric for his cold.
Thinking of the paratas she had in her fridge, Sarala turned out of the parking lot and turned on the radio, giving her daughter one more call on the way home.
rob mclennan: An Interview
Interviewed by Victoria Cole
rob mclennan is a prolific Canadian writer of poetry, prose, essays, and book reviews. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His recent titles include the poetry collection the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the
face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022), and the short fiction collection On Beauty (University of Alberta Press, 2024). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey. He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers.
While I can copy and paste a biography from the internet about rob it will not convey the kindness of this poet. I went into my interview with rob filled with intimidation, as I am a person who knows little to nothing about poetry. Until the Horseshoe Literary Festival I had never even heard this poets name and all of a sudden I was going to be interviewing him. When I began my research to understand rob I became even more intimidated as he has won numerous awards and is held in extremely high regard for his writing. I began to read rob’s blog to gain a better understanding of the person I would be asking questions to. rob accepted my apologizes of being late getting questions to him, of not really knowing what I was doing or asking, and generally being a flustered grad student. Most importantly though, rob made me feel comfortable. He assured me that has dropped the ball on interviews too. rob unknowingly gave me confidence to ask even if it didn’t feel like the best question. If you want to know the basics about rob, his writing abilities and the multiple other awards associated with him you can read his blog, Wikipedia, or the multiple professional interviews he has done. If you want to know the answers he gave to some fairly ridiculous questions you can read this interview. If you want to actually see how kind he was to me throughout this whole process, you’re going to have to file a request with ATIP because it is in my work email that has a lot of confidential information. You’ll just have to take my word for it that the man without the capital letters is extremely kind and I appreciate him for answering my questions and keeping me calm during the whole process.
Cole: Why did you choose to not capitalize your name?
Well, that was early twentysomething me wishing to source an individual self separate from my family, in that normal way of growing up, I suppose. I also considered the lower-casing to make it less about me and more about the work itself, although too many others spent, I found, more time on how I was “getting my name wrong” and “I couldn’t do that” instead of just looking at what it was I was attempting to do with my writing. Now I think it looks sleek.
Cole: What do you think your children’s version of, “sentences my father used”, would sound like?
Hah! I misread this at first as a question about my father, which would have been clipped, short. Lots of “hm,” “no” and/or calling my name. For our young ladies—seven and ten—I think theirs concerning me would be a variation on my mother’s, with “why is this on the floor?’ and “could you ladies come here please?” added in. I suspect my elder daughter, now in her thirties, would have an entirely different consideration, although I wouldn’t easily be able to piece together what that might be. The poem for my mother is my grown-up recollection, from my own teenhood forward, which make me wonder what my own version would have been when I was seven, or ten, and how different or similar it might have been to how the poem ended up.
Cole: How much of your workday is devoted to maintaining your digital presence and do you ever feel it takes away from your time to write and create as much as you would like? Is creating a digital presence something you enjoy working on or a part of the job that's necessary, but you wish you could give up?
Occasionally. I usually have to spend the bulk of the last week of every month working overtly on periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, and at least twenty minutes every morning during posting days to broadcast the links on social media. Over the past year or so there are a few other online projects I’ve had to drop for the sake of pure overload, some of which I keep hoping to return to, but there simply isn’t enough time in the day. Certainly, there are stretches I’d rather be doing my own work than working on some of these other things, whether posting or reviews, but in the end it is all fuel for the work itself, really. In the end, I do all of the above because I enjoy doing it and think it needs to be done.
Cole: What do you think of the new wave of Instagram poets? Do you think these people are important to bridging the gap we see between younger generations and their interest in reading and writing poetry or do you feel like they are doing a disservice?
I’m not on Instagram, so I can only speak generally. Some of those writers are able to bridge a gap that more traditionally-published writers wouldn’t be able to accomplish, reaching audiences very few of us would otherwise have access to, so that becomes really interesting. I think for young folk with big feelings they can’t put into words, artists such as Taylor Swift or any of those “Instagram poets” provide an essential service, showing that it is possible to shape those feelings and that material into meaningful language.
That being said, I’m from a tradition and consideration that sees literary writing as a perfect blend of form and content, and certain of these “Instagram poets” seem to minimize any considerations around form, so I’m bored by the lack of “writing” in something deemed “poetry.” If we’re boiling down to basics, a whole fraction of literature can be boiled down to “I am sad” or “I am happy” or “I like that person in a romantic way,” all of which loses the nuance of what writing can accomplish. Why would anyone watch Clueless if they’ve read the original Emma? Without the writing, the art, the story itself is the same. Given how good the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, does this mean that culture should abandon The Odyssey? The “how” one gets there is, in my mind, an essential element of whether or not one gets there at all, even before how the “getting there” shapes the reader. However compelling the content might be, with some of those “Instagram poets,” without due consideration on form, it doesn’t really feel like “writing.”
Cole: What do you want Canadians to know about the book market? As someone who has been a bookseller for Indigo for years I have only been exposed to mainstream writers while a large number of Canadian writers are not given any representation in bookstores. Can you see any solution for this?
This is why one should be buying books from local, independent booksellers, as they’re on the ground when it comes to literature, with a wealth of knowledge and shelves well-stocked with Canadian titles from all over the place. Indigo (and other big box bookstores) focus on selling books that are already selling. Those “mainstream writers” you mention, say. What’s worse, some of those big chains deliberately worked to drive out the little stores, and then turned around to focus on selling candles, pillows and notebooks. I mean, if you weren’t going to even bother selling books properly, you should have just left those little guys alone.
For Indigo, it seems as though bookselling is a means to an end, whereas local, independent booksellers are specifically there to provide access between the Canadian literary market and the reading public. And did you know that local stores can even order titles in for you as well as the box stores? Some even allow online ordering! Support local! Stop buying from big box stores who care nothing about you! There must be someone better selling candles also!
Cole: I am working on the Horseshoe Literacy Journal with Adam currently, and I am just wondering what are you looking for when searching through submissions to put on periodicities or Touch the Donkey? How do you choose who to interview on touch the donkey? I feel as though you have a lot of choices for these two sites but how are you making them?
Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] is a print quarterly that deliberately leans into the experimental and avant-garde, so I’m seeking work that is a bit more adventurous, daring and out there. The interviews emerge from the list of contributors for each issue, and interviews are centred around each author’s particular contribution to that issue. Beyond even the fact that the authors within each issue tend to roughly half between Canadian and American-based writers (with the occasional other geography thrown into the mix), I also work to not include two authors from the same city in any given issue. If nothing else, I’d like to know I’m at least introducing authors to each other from within the bounds of each issue.
periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics has a bit of a broader stylistic scope. I do attempt to include poets that one doesn’t always see in journals, for example, and I attempt not to repeat anyone too close together. I’d love to get more translations. The purpose of the journal is to really attempt to find the best that is out there and spread the word as far and wide as possible, although that can be said of Touch the Donkey as well, and I suppose any literary journal. Maybe? I’m trying to shine light on so many corners of what is happening with both of these journals, and not simply hold to any particular, singular geography or aesthetic. We all become better readers, and better writers, also, through access to a range of different possibilities.
Poetry for both journals, by the by, is predominantly solicited, but I’m open to a query every so often. Or even a recommendation! I shouldn’t get to a point where I think I know everything and everyone. That seems a dangerous and rather limiting presumption.
Lindsay Bird: An Interview
Interviewed by Brittany Noseworthy
Lindsay Bird is a poet and journalist. Her first collection of poetry, Boom Time, was published by Gaspereau Press in 2019. Her poems have appeared in numerous Canadian literary journals, such as The Fiddlehead, Event, The Newfoundland Quarterly and CV2, and anthologized in 40 Below Vol.2: Alberta’s Winter Anthology. She is a 2019 recipient of a Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters award, and a past winner of Geist’s Postcard Fiction Contest. Lindsay lives in snowy Corner Brook, NL. (lindsay bird.ca)
Noseworthy: As a producer and host of CBC Radio 1's Atlantic Voice, you've given a platform to storytellers of the East Coast since 2021. Can you tell us a little about Atlantic Voice? How did it get started and why do you think these stories deserve to be told?
Atlantic Voice has been around before me, in one form or another, a long time – years ago, it was called Maritime Magazine. Names aside, it’s always been a space on CBC radio for long-form narrative audio storytelling to reflect the people, ideas and places of the east coast of Canada.
That’s a fancy way of saying we make (almost) half-hour radio documentaries, I guess. It’s actually the only local radio doc program on CBC. The show really does give a voice to Atlantic Canadians, and not just for a minute or two – what’s critical in my eyes is that the show spends time with people or ideas (or both) and cracks them open over the course of 26 minutes.
That intimacy, in my mind, is what a lot of people are looking for these days. Documentaries in general have become more prominent in the media landscape – that’s been pretty well documented – but most of the time people think of video docs. Radio docs have always been a bit more niche, and our audience a coincidental one: people who simply had the radio on when we were airing and were interested enough to keep it on. But with the rise of streaming and narrative podcasting -- think S-Town or Serial, where you a journalist takes you audibly into a life and uses storytelling techniques to pace it, not the podcasts where a bunch of people just talk to/at each other -- new audiences have opened up.
The relevancy here is that means Atlantic Voice now reaches beyond Atlantic Canada. So, I think the question is less, why do these stories deserve to be told – and becomes, why not? Through documentaries we’re able to enter each other’s lives and see what gives meaning to each other. Whether it’s a story as universal as a woman learning to play music after a stroke, or as specific as the sub-sect of humanity obsessed with giant squid – documentaries enrich our understanding of each other and, in a time of deep societal divisions, in my mind, fosters a badly needed empathy– not just Atlantic Canadians, but humans.
Noseworthy: Following up to the previous question, what is something you hope listeners take away from the program?
I think the above paragraph babble gets at that somewhat. But to add – I also hope people just enjoy getting taken into a world and learning a little something. Like in that giant squid story, that aired on the show in early November: did you know the first picture of an intact giant squid ever taken was in St. John’s, and a group of guys marched the carcass through the downtown to get it to a photo studio? Fun facts for your next dinner party.
Your work of poetry, Boom Time, was published through the small company, Gaspereau Press. From my research, they seem to pay close attention to every detail of the book making process (paper choice, typeset, cover illustration, etc.) Was this your experience while working with the publishing company? How does this attention to detail lend itself to the finished product, especially when compared to books from a large publishing house.
I can’t compare my experience with Gaspereau to a major publisher, because I don’t have any experience with major publishers. That said, in terms of aesthetics – something Gaspereau excels at – I was pleasantly surprised to be consulted and kept in the loop by Andrew & Gary on all the physical matter that surrounded my words. It’s not my forte. We discussed colours for the cover – for a while there was talk of using a neon or bright orange in there somewhere to offset the greys and browns, to reflect the PPE that dots the industrial setting of the book in the Northern Alberta oil sands. Eventually that morphed into maroon somehow, and it looks good to me. With the book set almost entirely in the oil sands, Andrew had also wanted to use illustrations for the cover, and I sent off a bunch of my bad and blurry-ish digital photographs from my time there, which a wizard of an illustrator from Ottawa – Adam Smith – turned into the cover and inside art. That process – of taking an original mundane photograph and layering it with artistry – really resonated with me, since the process of writing the book followed the same pattern: taking real events, places, or people and embellishing or morphing their edges into poetry.
Noseworthy: Staying on the topic of Boom Time, are there any poems that didn't make it into the final draft, but you wish had? Additionally, are there any poems that you struggled to get "just right" during the writing process?
This book went through a stupid amount of drafts, over the course of a similarly silly number of years. I don’t have a quick process, somehow, even though few of the poems run more than a page. So, yes, there are a lot of bad poems or things that didn’t quite fit that still exist somewhere on my hard drive – including the poem that started the manuscript in the first place. I had this idea of writing about the layer of dirt that settles on your skin at the sites: the image of workers coming into the lunchroom and taking off their safety goggles to reveal their pristine eyelids when they closed their eyes for a minute of rest. I’d seen this somewhere over the years and wanted to write about it, and it was a poem that stayed in the manuscript for a long time until I realized it was incredibly heavy-handed. That’s always been a struggle for me – being deft or light, perhaps – and injecting a variety of tone into the manuscript was something that took a long time, particularly with often dreary subject matter.
Noseworthy: I hear that you are a recreational beekeeper in your off-time. What initially drew you to the practice of apiculture and has it taught you anything that you bring to your career as a poet and journalist?
Beekeeping was borne out of pandemic desperation. We all did weird things in lockdown, and for a long while I fantasized about leaving my current circumstances behind and becoming a professional beekeeper. I had never cracked open a hive at this point, and I actually thought I was deathly allergic to them (a long story that a trip to a St. John’s allergist proved false). Anyway. Beyond the entrepreneurial dream, I was fascinated by how many beekeepers said beekeeping is a very meditative process: you have to move slowly and be in the moment when working a hive, otherwise you’ll get stung a bunch and end up with angry, unhappy bees. Any sense of stillness or calm is pretty elusive to me – I’m composed of equal parts caffeine and anxiety – and that appeal drove me toward it. It’s also partly what keeps me in it. You’re always in a state of learning and observing with the bees, this complex society of interdependent insects deemed a superorganism – the individual cannot exist on its own. There’s a lot of fascination and humility going on as a beekeeper, and those seem like good traits to pursue.
I also really like that I’ve learned how to harvest my own source of sugar, in case the world completely goes to shit, and we’re stuck on this island, utterly isolated. It doesn’t seem like a far-fetched scenario some days.
Andi Bulman: An Interview
Interviewed by Brandon Hillier
Brandon: As a writer, you are perhaps best known for your work as a journalist and sketch writer, and as the author of a popular cookbook. What drew you to the vastly different world of authoring a children’s book?
Andie: I saw in the news that Manuel’s River offered workshops to help kids with climate anxiety; that freaked me out. I worry that my nieces will have to exist with this kind of gripping, scary sense of the world ending.
I spent part of 2020 and 2021 hosting a CBC news segment called Habitats, where I interviewed scientists tackling and studying climate change in our province. I realized that hosting this segment and learning from scientists had alleviated some of my fears. I wanted to share that with kids and offer them ways to take action, but I also didn’t want to hit them with more scary messaging. So, I tried to think about how much joy I take in nature and I tried to think about how I could bring that sense of joy and wonder into a kid’s television show. That show didn’t get a second season, but the idea lives on in [IsThisAnOlogy?].
Brandon: How did your writing partnership with Ruth Lawrence come to be? And what is that relationship like as co-authors?
Andie: Oh, Ruth is my favorite.
In the early days of the pandemic, I took a TV writing class from her. At the end of the course, she explained that Bell Fibe had approached her to see if anyone in Newfoundland had TV pitches ready to go. Bell Fibe had been sinking tons of money into covering sports, growlers’ games, that kind of thing. And they realized, during the pandemic, that they had to reallocate that money because sports weren’t happening.
I pitched two children’s television shows, and they got picked up. Bell Fibe gave us $30,000 for each show, which triggered NLFDC money from the province. It was all pretty thrilling!
We made our shows. Tales from the Floordrobe was a banger of a show I co-wrote and co-produced with my sketch comedy group and Ruth directed. I’m so happy with how it turned out.
I also asked her to direct and produce IsThisAnOlogy. IsThisAnOlogy didn’t turn out as a show. It’s medium embarrassing. I didn’t know anything about filming. I didn’t know anything about kid’s television. Now, it exists permanently on Bell Fibe. Live and learn. It’s hard to watch, but the blame is mine. Ruth and I loved the idea and pitched it to Breakwater as a kids’ book. We just thought that the idea deserved a second life.
Ruth and I work well together. I took the lead because I’d written books before, but the process was smooth. She’s so creative and so driven, and no joke, I think I would take a bullet for Ruth. She invites people into the arts in this incredible, generous way. I adore her. And I aspire to be like her.
Brandon: Part of being an author is getting the opportunity to get out and do readings of your work. As an accredited librarian with a keen interest in community building, how does it feel to share IsThisAnOlogy? with audiences in public venues like libraries and other community spaces?
Andie: It feels incredible.
Doing library events is my favorite part of this book promotion process. I love libraries. I see them as this tremendous radical equalizer. You know, it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor; information and access to information is entirely free at the library.
I’m worried about libraries; there’s a massive movement in America to defund public libraries because they have drag story-times and because librarians will go to the mat to defend your right to read – some folks think there should be restrictions on what kids read. Librarians rule. They help create this third space where you don’t have to spend money, and you can hear queer artists read to kids, and you can take out any book you want and jump on a computer, learn languages, or access free programming, and yet some people wish for this wonderful, radical thing to change? It’s trickling over to Canada, too. Our book, IsThisAnOlogy?,was just nominated for a Yellow Cedar Award, and one of the other books in our category is facing a challenge from parents in an Ontario library. It’s just outrageous that someone might want to see a book removed just because their own beliefs aren’t parroted back.
Anyway, I love libraries! And I’m happy to do events at them whenever they have me.
Brandon: As a children’s author, you appeal to an audience universally known for “saying the darndest things”. What’s the best – or strangest – review you’ve received from a young literature fan so far?
Andie: A kid told me they wished the cheese recipe had been a scratch-and-sniff, and I said, “Well, that’s genius.”
The ingenuity of kids always blows me away. Once, I was at a party, and everyone was talking about something dull like how to claim your home office on your taxes, and one of my friend’s kids was like, “I wish horses were as soft as they look,” and I was like, “God, yes, that is so much more interesting. We don’t talk about horse texture enough. They look so soft, but they are coarse. Amazing observation!”
I wish we could retrain ourselves to think like kids. I love their brains.
Brandon: What impact do you hope IsThisAnOlogy? will have on young readers? And their guardians, who will be reading along with them?
Andie: I hope this book introduces kids to possibilities.
We grew up (my siblings and I) in a semi-broke, low-income household. We had one working parent, many kids, and many expenses. The library really opened up the world. We couldn’t afford books, but we were voracious readers. We went every Thursday (after family grocery shopping), and I was allowed to take out seven books. I’d read those seven books and then get another seven the next week. My sisters did the same. Having access to books changed everything for us. It introduced us to possibilities. It made us think we could solve mysteries like the Boxcar Kids, start a babysitting club, or make our own movies. I want to write books that make kids feel capable.
I also hope that my book might help kids (and their guardians) understand that arts and sciences are not separate silos. Scientists are artists, and artists are scientists; the natural world is an artistic landscape. Also, I just wanted it to be fun too.
Brandon: Can young readers look forward to reading more of your work in the future? Do you have anything in the works at the moment?
Andie: I don’t really. I did obtain a grant to write a book about climate change and Newfoundland. It’s an adult non-fiction work about shifting seasons and landscapes. It’s a big journalistic undertaking, but I have this massive writer’s block and want to write more kids’ books. I want to write a zero-waste cookbook for kids. I want to show kids how to turn food scraps into art supplies.
I also really want to have a kid and take some time to live life. I’ve hustled hard for a few years now, and I have a lot of fantasies about having a baby and getting chickens and a pig. I want to have vegetables and animals and little toddlers walking around. I want those dreams, too.
Plus, I want to become a sports reporter for the girlies and the gays. That’s a big dream that’s gaining ground.
Jiin Kim: An Interview
Interviewed by Chinweolu Nzekwe
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
I was born in Seoul, Korea, immigrated to Toronto as a child. I earned a degree in Fine Art from the University of Toronto. 15 years ago, when our children were young, my husband and I moved our family to St. John’s.
How did you first become interested in writing, and how did you get started?
When my oldest son turned five, I started reading children’s chapter books and novels to my sons before bedtime every night. After reading more than a hundred children’s novels aloud over the period of eight years, I felt I could write a children’s book. It was organic. The best way to learn to write is to read.
Congratulations on publishing your first novel, Lore Isle. Can you provide a summary of the novel?
Peter is a modern-day Newfoundland boy who loves the extinct Newfoundland wolf. When his grandfather dies suddenly, and he and his mom are at risk of losing their home. A stranger named Mr. Doyle offers him riches if Peter follows him to a place called Lore Isle and help him find he is looking for. In the fantastical and dangerous land of mummers, wolves, fairies, and murderous pitcher plants, Peter discovers that Mr. Doyle’s intentions are not as straightforward as he first thought. In this coming-of-age adventure story, Peter realizes his values and learns to make brave decisions.
What was the muse for writing Lore Isle? Are there any specific books or life experiences that influenced it?
Six months after I moved to St. John’s, someone told me that there were no wolves in Newfoundland. I thought they were joking. Wolves were found all over the world. I thought there must be wolves in a province where there was so much wilderness and wildlife. After a search on the internet, I discovered that indeed there were no wolves in Newfoundland due in part to a government bounty that was place on them about a hundred years ago. Scientists have since discovered that Newfoundland wolf was a distinct subspecies, that is they were different from all the other wolves in the world. This irreversible loss inspired me to write an original fairy tale about a modern-day Newfoundland boy’s quest to bring back the extinct wolf.
Could you describe the writing process you went through in writing Lore Island? How do you go from concept to a finished work?
Once I had a concept, I wrote up a one-and-a-half-page outline. I took novel writing classes with Paul Butler (a well-known Newfoundland author who authors historical novels). I think there were five or six of us in the class. We read what we wrote in the weekly classes and received feedback. By the time the classes were done, I had enough chapters to apply for the WritersNL mentorship program. Lore Isle was chosen, and I was paired with Trudy J. Morgan-Cole. By the end of the mentorship, I had finished my first draft.
Then, Jessica Grant, Memorial University writer-in-residence, read a number of chapters and gave me thoughtful feedback.
After that, I worked on the manuscript for a couple of years on my own, putting it away for months at a time so I could read it with fresh eyes.
When I felt that I had completed the manuscript to my best ability, but not entirely confidant about sending it to publishers, I hired Ed Kavanagh (author of adult and children’s book, writing teacher and editor), to read my manuscript in its entirety and provide feedback. After I reworked the manuscript with Ed’s insightful suggestions, I really liked it and felt it was solid.
What would you say was the most difficult part in writing Lore Isle and how did you navigate it?
When I was re-reading and editing my manuscript, on one day I felt it was wonderful then the next day I felt it was not up to scratch. This constant insecurity and doubt were exhausting at times. I had to push through it by keep improving the manuscript until I consistently thought it was a good manuscript when I read it.
Do you have a set or specific writing habits or routine that helped you in writing your first novel?
When I wrote Lore Isle, I wrote when I had time and obviously, I got the book done, but ideally, writers should have a set schedule. Unfortunately, I still let my busy schedule get the best of me. I hope to be more consistent with sticking to a schedule. It is a work in progress.
At the 2023 Horseshoe Literary Festival, you facilitated one of the workshops with theme “Writing Your First Novel” and you talked about the writing group and writing class. What role did the writing communities play in your first novel, Lore Isle?
I have already detailed in that the established authors, Paul Butler, Trudy J Morgan-Cole, Jessica Grant, and Ed Kavanagh reviewed drafts of the manuscript as it developed. They were all kind and encouraging.
Besides finding support from writing classes and seeking out programs like WritersNL mentorship and MUN writer-in-residence, new writers can create a DIY support system by establishing a writing group. In a novel writing group, the members must be committed to supporting each other by taking great interest in each other’s manuscripts as they develop and provide useful feedback.
We understand that finding the right publisher can be a daunting task. Could you share your experiences and lessons you learned while publishing Lore Isle?
My first choice was to publish with a children’s book publisher with an editor who only works on children’s books, and I made my top five picks of children’s book publishers in Canada who accepted submissions. I decided that if I could not get a children’s book publisher, I would submit to publishers with an all-in-one editor who edits adult and children’s books. Luckily, Nimbus picked Lore Isle out of their slush pile, and I got to work with a children’s book editor.
In the book, there are 20 illustrations that I created. The book was accepted without the illustrations. After the first round of edit, I asked the Nimbus team if they would like to see my illustrations. I would have been fine if Nimbus did not want to include them, but the Nimbus team loved them. There was extra work in the layout because the 20 illustrations had to be placed in the correct places.
Together, the editor and I edited the book from beginning to end, three times over 2 1/2 years (everything takes a long time in publishing). The editor at Nimbus took good care of me and the manuscript. The editing process made Lore Isle a better book.
Do you have any current or upcoming writing project(s)? Can you share the details with us?
I am working on an adult book that has been on my mind for a while. I love children’s books and I am a children’s book author so this might be my only adult book. Both of my parents have passed away in the last couple of years, and I really know very little about them. My parents rarely talked about their past because having lived through the Japanese occupation and the Korean war, they did not want to talk about it. The central characters in my next book are a couple who immigrated to Canada in the 1970s like my parents. I am building an imagined narrative around this couple based on the very little I know about my parents.
What advice would you give upcoming or aspiring authors?
Pursuit of any arts enriches individual’s lives. If writing gives you life, then do not let yourself be discouraged. Do not be impatient for a final product. Write and rewrite until your manuscript is the best it can be.
Lastly, is there anything you would like to share with your readers and potential new fans?
Reading books as a child is special and magical. I remember more of the books I read as a child than as an adult. I hope the children who read Lore Isle enjoy the journey and remember it for a long time.
Maggie Burton: An Interview
Interviewed by Logan Ropson
Maggie Burton is a writer, musician and politician from St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. Her debut poetry collection, Chores, was the winner of the First Book Prize from the Griffin Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award in 2024.
Logan: What was your journey into creative writing? And why was poetry the creative writing style you decided to work with?
Maggie: I’ve been writing poetry my whole life, my first entry in my childhood journal was a poem about being scared of my friend’s dog at a sleepover. I decided to take it more seriously when I needed an outlet after my second child was born and I was struggling with maintaining a sense of personal identity. The sometimes-ambiguous nature of poetry allowed me to explore my feelings before I had the words to describe them. Now, almost a decade later, I still write poetry as a safe place to get to know my own mind, which is often an emotionally-fraught landscape that needs to be sorted out to keep me sane.
Logan: What is your writing process? What does it look like for you to complete a poem or a collection?
Maggie: I generally write first drafts in fits and bursts, often on my phone, in five minutes here and there whenever my kids leave me alone for long enough to get a sentence out. Once I’ve got a sketch, I’m a chronic re-writer. I have a difficult time deciding when a poem is “done”, and when to push send on a journal submission or whatnot. It takes me a long time to develop confidence in a piece of writing, and I firmly believe a piece must stand on its own to earn a place in a collection, so trusting each individual poem is crucial if I’m going to be happy with the final manuscript. I have hundreds of unpublished poems that someone will probably pry out of my cold hands after I die, because I will have deemed them not good enough to be seen.
Logan: Chores is the title poem of your new collection, and recaps the various steps after snaring a rabbit. Is rabbit stew and homebrew a meal you enjoy? And why was that chosen meal for the poem?
Maggie: When I was a kid, I grew up off the main road, the Conception Bay Highway, on a long and winding family-filled mountainous lane called Fox Hill, where there was abundant wildlife. I had conflicting feelings about eating wildlife that I saw in the woods, and flat out refused to eat rabbit because of how much I loved them. I was, in part, inspired to write about my guilty feelings about the consumption of animals by a photo of my poppy sitting on his front porch with a white rabbit on his lap, a cage propped open next to him. I remembered then that he gave me a pair of rabbits as a gift, which we kept in a pen outdoors, in typical homesteading fashion. The rabbits dug themselves out and went back to the wild. The next time I smelled the raunchy, gamey smell of rabbit stew cooking I worried that it was my rabbits being cooked on the stove. As an adult, while a family member was in palliative care, someone dropped off a wild rabbit ragu meal. The smell of it made me sick, while also reminding me of home. Long story short, while I support the responsible hunting of game such as rabbit, I still can’t stomach eating it myself. Homebrew, on the other hand, I have no problem with.
Logan: The Bingo poems in Chores are fascinating and stand out for their ingenuity. Is it essential for poets to create work that isn’t static on the page?
Maggie: There are so many fun ways to get out of the static reality of words existing in 2D space on a white piece of paper. Whether it’s experimenting with the overall form such as in the Bingo poems, or fooling around with line shapes until it resonates with the writer in just the right way, poets who engage in the playful aspects of form have a unique opportunity to provide a moving experience for their readers. Seeing something differently is key for changing one’s mind, and what better way to see something as if it’s new than to create a new (metaphorical) body for it to inhabit?
Logan: Poet Mary Dalton stated that your work has a “sense of the primordial found in Grimm’s fairy tales, allied with the angst of a young woman.” To Mary’s point, the use of Newfoundland folklore is prevalent throughout the pages of Chores; how important is that story of the Newfoundland “Nan” to you, and why was it such a vocal point of the work?
Maggie: As a parent of young children, I read a lot of fairy tales to my kids, and because I had kids at 20, I don’t think I ever really left the make-believe world behind. I (mostly) survive the often tense, monotonous days of childcare and housework by partially inhabiting a fairy tale world, by writing stories in my head that I frantically write down when I have a moment. Alongside those fantasies, I spend a lot of time thinking about how in the world did all the women before me get through the tedium of keeping people, animals, and households alive. Nan, then, became a mythical creature at some point for me. It seemed only fitting that she became the protagonist of my poetry world. I grew up knowing four great-grandmothers and two grandmothers, and I am so inspired by their tenacity. If you were lucky enough to know my nans, you’d understand why I wrote a book about them.
Logan: As someone with a background in arts administration, what role can the arts play in impacting the sustainability of Newfoundland & Labrador? Moreover, do you think poetry is an excellent medium for thinking about sustainability?
Maggie: Being an artistic province is essential to a sense of identity for many individual Newfoundlanders and Labradorians, which in turn creates a healthier community with a collective sense of pride of place and people. Poetry allows for a depth of feeling around concepts like the climate crisis, that can be too big to hold in one’s own mind. A poem can hold space for uncertainty, anxiety, terror, and love, all at once, which is essential for processing or understanding complex realities.
Logan: How has your work in poetry helped with your work as a councilor at large for the city of St. Johns? Has the work you have done for the city also impacted your poetry?
Maggie: Being a poet has made me a more thoughtful person, which has in turn made me a better listener. I am genuinely curious about opposing viewpoints, and about the emotional reasoning and other maladaptive thought patterns that form the basis of public discourse. I used to have a difficult time with listening to conflict, but a regular practice of reading and writing poetry helps remind me that there’s almost always a kernel of truth that is possible to disentangle from a statement of pain or discomfort. In practice, I do try to keep church and state separate, as separate as is possible given that the personal is absolutely political and vice versa. I think that may be why I write about my childhood, and about my time as a young woman, because that time predates my political career. After I’m done on Council, I think I’ll write a book of essays or stories about that experience.
Book Reviews
Animals in Captivity by Kate Seagriff (Riddle Fence 2024)
Reviewed by Charlotte Lilley
The debut short story collection by writer and filmmaker Kate Seagriff, Animals in Captivity (edited by Eva Crocker and published by Riddle Fence Publishing) is a sharp-witted and frank look into human nature. The collection’s title (shared with one of its stories) sets the thematic tone for the rest of the book, as readers encounter a wide cast of characters set in an even wider array of personal circumstances, many of whom deal with entrapment (be it their own or others, literal or metaphorical).
Notably, Seagriff’s book represents part of a new venture for Riddle Fence. The journal is a longstanding fixture of the literary scene in Newfoundland (and Canada at large), and is now branching out into book publishing with their Debuts imprint. Announced in October 2023, the imprint is designed to support emerging artists, publishing strictly the first books of writers who have previously been published in Riddle Fence’s journal (Seagriff’s “The Poacher” appeared there in 2023), and operating as a non-profit, artist-run organization. Alongside Seagriff’s short stories, the imprint’s inaugural set of titles includes three poetry collections: Jennifer May Newhook’s Last Hours, Danielle Devereaux’s The Chrome Chair, and Tia McLennan’s Familiar Monsters of the Flood.
One of Seagriff’s greatest strengths within the collection is her ability to evoke entire worlds (both inner and outer) while remaining incredibly economical with her prose. Her stories’ settings vary widely across spaces and times, from train cars rolling through Western Canada, to Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe, to a series of more geographically and temporally ambiguous houses and farms, and across this range each place feels tangible and immediate (and often, distinctly Canadian). Likewise, the characters who inhabit these settings showcase Seagriff’s skill with voice, as she crafts individuals who are distinct and full of personality, even when they may only appear for a page or two.
The stories told here are often dark (though they are, at times, darkly humorous), but this darkness is not unrealistic. Themes like domestic violence, complex and deteriorating relationships of all kinds, and various manifestations of misogyny appear frequently, but are often framed in ways which make them feel believable and honest despite (or perhaps because of) their heaviness. Seagriff’s diction helps too – her use of colloquial and often conversational language provides a point of accessibility for readers while also presenting plot twists in casual and unexpected ways, rendering them all the more shocking.
It is worth noting that Animals in Captivity’s content seems to become heavier and more visceral as it goes along, a curatorial choice which perhaps lends itself well to evoking the sense of claustrophobia suggested by its title. While I flew through many of the earlier, fast-paced stories, I found myself slowing down towards the end and occasionally wishing for a bit of a thematic palate cleanser. Along these lines, I found some of the stories more challenging than others. While I particularly struggled with Seagriff’s portrayals of neurodivergent characters in “The Witch’s Tooth” and her blunt dealings with suicide in “Unidentified Male,” other readers’ mileage may vary. With the wide variety of themes and experiences explored in the book, there will undoubtedly be topics raised which are challenging for some readers, and some stories will inevitably resonate more than others.
With that said, the collection did present a few personal favourites. “The Many Coffees of Marissa” was awarded the Edinburgh Short Story Prize in 2023 and remains a standout here, exploring corporate sexism and misogyny and the masks used to navigate them. “Female Jockeys” also stood out, as Seagriff deftly evokes a sort of Canadiana-noir as a backdrop to explorations of queer relationships, a mother’s hopes for her daughter, and the ability to make the best of a bad situation. In the collection’s later stories, Seagriff also begins to play with the occasional supernatural element, invoking ghosts and magic in ways which leave the reader questioning the lines between reality and imagination. It’s a device I found intriguing, even if it does stand out a bit from the more intense realism of many of the collection’s other stories.
Overall, Animals in Captivity is a powerful debut collection which speaks to Seagriff’s skill and control as a writer and her ability to tell stories from a wide range of perspectives. The book’s blurb describes the stories as “guiding [readers] through desperate times and unusual circumstances towards hope in an imperfect world,” and while it’s sometimes difficult to sift through the heaviness to get to that hope, the effort is well worth it.
Contributor Biographies
Fhen M. The Waray poem “Uyasan” (“Toy” in English”) written by Fhen M. was published in a collection of literary works entitled Pinili: 15 Years of Lamiraw. His English verses "Lighthouse," “Seaport,” “Barbeque Stalls along Boulevard,” and “Tetrapod” appeared in Poetica anthology series published by Clarendon House. In 2024, Red Penguin Books’ About Time: A Coming-of-Age Poetry Anthology will publish his piece “Outside the Block Universe". Fhen M. was a writing fellow at the Lamiraw Creative Writing Workshop. He was one of the winners of the 1st Chito Roňo Literary Awards in the poetry category. Also, he was a daily winner of a radio poetry contest sponsored by a radio station based in Eastern Visayas.
Leah Sandals (she/they) is a Toronto-based writer of Irish Catholic and Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in Prism International, Room, Mom Egg Review, Filling Station, Freefall, Dusie and other outlets. Leah’s practice has been supported by grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council. She holds a degree from NSCAD University and has extended family in St. John’s. leahsandals.ca
Thomas M. McDade resides in Fredericksburg, VA, formerly CT & RI, He is a graduate of Fairfield University. McDade is twice a U.S. Navy Veteran serving ashore at the Fleet Anti-Air Warfare Training Center, Dam Neck Virginia Beach, VA and aboard the USS Mullinnix (DD-944) and USS Miller (DE / FF-1091). His poetry has most recently appeared in Half Hour to Kill, Emblazoned Soul and Flying Dodo Review.
Paul Moorehead is an emerging writer and physician. He lives in St. John’s with his partner, their two daughters, and a cat who tries to eat things that aren’t food. His poetry has appeared in Pinhole Poetry and Turnstyle: the SABR Journal of Baseball Arts.”
Ken Farrell's work is forthcoming/published in various anthologies and in journals such as Pilgrimage, Book of Matches, Watershed Review, Coffin Bell, and Panoply. Ken holds an MFA from Texas State University and an MA from Salisbury University, and he has earned as an adjunct, cage fighter, pizzaiolo, and warehouseman. Responding to his daughter’s challenge, Ken is currently writing his first novel, about a world where ghosts are jurors, the sky is off limits, and shards of souls are commodities.
Elle Adams has been writing poems since her college days back in the early 2000s. Her bachelors was in English and her Masters was in poetry. She went to Pacific university and studied with Joseph Millar, Kwame Dawes and Marvin Bell. Other poetic influences come from reading poets like W.S. Merwin, Gallway Kinnell, Dorianne Laux and many others.
Tobi Alfier is published nationally and internationally. Credits include War, Literature and the Arts, The American Journal of Poetry, KGB Bar Lit Mag, Washington Square Review, Cholla Needles, James Dickey Review, Gargoyle, Permafrost, Arkansas Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others. She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (www.bluehorsepress.com).
Nick Corcoran is a playwright, poet, musician, and theatre technician based in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador.
Allan Lake is a migrant poet from Allover, Canada who now lives in Allover, Australia. Coincidence. He has published poems in 20 different countries. His latest chapbook of poems, entitled ‘My Photos of Sicily’, was published by Ginninderra Press. It contains no photos, only poems.
Katherine Alexandra Harvey is the author of Quiet Time. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Queen’s Quarterly, The Malahat Review, Grain, Plenitude Magazine, Exile Quarterly, Quill and Quire, Existere Journal of Arts and Literature, 49th Shelf, Riddle Fence, and The Newfoundland Quarterly, among others. She has been nominated for the Governor General’s History Award, the Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Award, and WANL’s Fresh Fish Award.
Allan Johnston, originally from Southern California, earned his M.A. in Creative Writing and his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Davis. His poems have appeared in over sixty journals, including Poetry, Poetry East, Rattle, and Rhino. He is the author of three full-length poetry collections (Tasks of Survival, 1996; In a Window, 2018; Sable and Selected Poems, 2022) and three chapbooks (Northport, 2010; Departures, 2013; Contingencies, 2015).
J.D. Isip’s full-length poetry collections include Kissing the Wound (Moon Tide Press, 2023) and Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). His third collection, tentatively titled I Wasn’t Finished, will be released by Moon Tide Press in early 2025. J.D. lives in Texas with his dogs, Ivy and Bucky.
AE Reiff has authored Libby: A Vision of Beauty, of a Pennsylvania Dutch Radical, Memoir of Angels, the life of Ben-Gurion; Red Head, the poems of Taliesin, and A Bloody Theory of Divine Light.
Tara Laing is a Newfoundlander who lives and works as a therapist in Toronto. She spends as much time as possible on the west coast of Newfoundland, and enjoys writing for fun with her twin sister. She has received an honorable mention for her fiction in NYC Midnight’s annual contest. She has read her work at CBC’s Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids in Toronto, and with Local Writers at the Writers at Woody Point Festival in Newfoundland.
Francois Van Zyl is an MA student at Memorial University currently writing his thesis novel under the supervision of Lisa Moore. He is also a local producer and screenwriter for Bell Fibe TV, Ujarak Media and GrindMind Inc.
Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Texas. His monologue show, Twelve From Texas, was performed recently in NYC by Equity Library Theatre. His poetry collection, Maybe Birds Would Carry It Away, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. He has received residencies from The Ucross Foundation and the Edward Albee Foundation, and a grant from the Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation.
Front Matter
General Editor: Adam Beardsworth
Editors: Charlotte Lilley, Chinweolu Nzekwe, Logan Ropson
Copyright (C) 2024
ISSN 2817-8998
Submissions, Correspondence, and Queries:
Horseshoe Literary Magazine
c/o Adam Beardsworth
Grenfell Campus, Memorial University
20 University Drive
Corner Brook, NL A2H 5G4
Email: submissions@horseshoejournal.ca
Instagram: @horseshoeliterarymagazine
Facebook: horseshoe literary magazine
Website: http://www.horseshoejournal.ca
Horseshoe Literary Magazine 