Everywhere you look
there is beauty.
The scruppled concrete
of a grey highway.
The wild purslane
with its bitter taste
of lemon and tenacity.
And here, a small gift:
a blue knot of string
shaped like a heart.
♦
Rosemary Griebel is a poet and the author of Yes (Frontenac). She is the Design Lead for Reader’s Services at Calgary Public Library, a position which allows her to focus on building a vibrant city of readers.
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“On this particular afternoon she ponders rock climbing,”
Our baby drinks and drinks from me.
I weep because she doesn’t know yet
that I’m an empty cup.
When I walk by the river the water
sinks to its knees, the air laps up the last of it and
Fish gasp in the riverbeds.
At home you pass me and I am dust,
falling lightly on everything around you.
You don’t even notice
that you kick a tumbleweed
as you head to bed. Our mattress is made
of the bones of the drowned, they crack,
empty of marrow, as you turn away from
me. Water, water everywhere
and not a goddamn drop to drink.
♦
Sarah Yi Mei Tsiang is the author of 8 books, including picture books, poetry, and fiction. Her award winning work has been internationally sold and translated. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Sheridan College.
**(“fuckin’ kiss me” photo, by Sarah Tsiang)
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“wild purslane with its bitter taste of lemon and tenacity”
“Forgotten, soiled but useable still. That is what I am to you if will take the time to see me.”
♦
Journalist, feminist, novelist, activist, teacher, Susan Swan’s impact on the Canadian literary and political scene has been far-reaching. Her critically acclaimed fiction has been published in sixteen countries. Swan’s last novel, The Western Light, (2012) shares a narrator with her international bestseller, The Wives of Bath. (The Western Light was a finalist for the best fiction and non-fiction award by the Ontario Library Association. It is currently being made into a feature by Lauren Grant at Clique Pictures. Hannah Cheeseman is writing the screenplay.)
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“When I walk by the river the water the sinks to its knees”
The lights blink out, one by one,
A synapse here, a word, a name,
Tobias.
Us.
Breakers blow, her screen goes blank.
Keys, long-lost, long-loved,
cascade
from fingers unresisting.
Jingling on a ring
around a rosey-toesie child.
Sparks alight.
Electric moth holes eat the sky,
Disconnect the dot-to-dot
of thought.
Corrupt the code.
Conduct, unbecoming.
We all fall down.
Control room out.
♦
Heather M. O’Connor would be lost without words. She writes nonfiction about greening our planet and fiction for challenged readers, as well as a mixed bag of other topics and genres. Betting Game, her teen soccer novel, was published last year by Orca. You can find her on Facebook, at heathermoconnor.com or at merlinwrites.com.
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“This is what I am…”
The last meal we ever ate together was ice cream. I remember because she had been chewing Clorets to hide the vodka and then we spooned the high-fat French Vanilla into our mouths. And when they finally left us alone for a minute, we kissed. I was 21 and she was 46 and we didn’t mind. It goes without saying the sex was often amazing. To this day I remember that she hated her middle name and I can still picture the permanent curl of her baby finger which her brother had slammed in a door at a cottage near Perth. I never met her brother or any other member of her family but I was there when they told her they’d have to amputate her leg. I was there when she looked out the hospital window and said, “Well, that’s the end of my Morris dancing, then.” And then she sobbed out a laugh that made the nurse turn away. “Poor you,” she said to me. “Here for the bitter old end.” She fished a key from her purse and sent me to her fourth-floor apartment on Avenue Road. Take whatever you like before the sharks smell the blood in the bathwater. I had wanted to save our ice cream feast for after the operation. An enticement to survival. French Vanilla where the lame gift of my young love did no apparent good. It felt like bad luck that she wanted it before going into surgery. And it was the first time I had ever seen a refusal to fight in a woman’s eyes. We ate from the same small paper bucket and then they wheeled her backwards away from me, back through the double doors. I sat for three hours in the waiting room with the plastic ice cream spoon parked between my teeth, hunting for traces with my tongue. Please change your mind. Waited and put off going out into the barking cold afternoon storm. No one would come get me to tell me she was gone. It was before they had to acknowledge that the last person who kissed your mouth might be family. It took me seven hours to get all the empty bottles out of her apartment but I wanted them to feel how wrong they had been to never once return her calls.
♦
Marnie Woodrow is the author of the novels Heyday and Spelling Mississippi. She is a full time freelance editor in Hamilton, ON.
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“Electric moth holes eat the sky,”
♦
Laura Smith’s distinct singing voice has been a mainstay of Canadian music for many decades now. Growing up in southern Ontario, she made the bold move to Cape Breton in the mid-80s where she found a vibrant music scene and the ability to artistically grow. She has remained in Nova Scotia ever since and continues to hone her craft of songwriting.
Personal accolades include two Juno nominations, a Gemini award, two East Coast Music Awards and an Honorary Doctorate in Humanities from Mount Saint Vincent University. She is probably most well-known for “My Bonny,” her unique interpretation of the Scottish song “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”.”
She can be found at http://www.laurasmith.ca and concert dates here.
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“It goes without saying the sex was often amazing.”
1.
red cloth torn along the seam
frayed edged square
draped over palm
a pinch of tobacco
offered up
to the sky first
in thanks
then dropped to cloth
dusky yellow against
the red
pressed in
folded around
rolled
rolled
and finally tied
with gratitude
yellow dough cut out
into a perfect square
floured with delicate
fingers
folded
pinched together
in a curve
red ink on small
cuts of white
paper pushed
through the cooled seam
tiny words
of fortune
best wishes
unsolicited advice
2.
this is how I understand it
the parallels of colour
and intention
but fortune cookies
are not ceremony
they were just a product
to make Asian culture
palatable to American
consumers
made either in Los Angeles by a Chinese immigrant
or in San Francisco by a Japanese citizen
fortune cookies accompanied
the Westernized food
and other refined stereotypes
they are really more akin to
brown dolls
with fringe jackets
beaded headbands
and Made in China stamps
in the plastic
more similar than
my tobacco ties
and prayers
I never knew the real story of fortune cookies
as a child I read them with reverence
tiny truths holding wide wisdoms
I would one day understand
trying to take it in
to know it
this is the sort of prayer I make now
as I tie my tobacco ties
only it works outward
I press it in
and send it out
red cloth torn along seam
frayed edged square
draped over palm
a pinch of tobacco
offered up to the sky first
in thanks
♦
Katherena Vermette is a Metis writer from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Her first book, North End Love Songs (The Muses’ Company) won the 2013 Governor General Literary Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared several literary magazine and anthologies. Her recent projects include a novel, The Break (House of Anansi) and a short documentary, this river (National Film Board of Canada).
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“Broken can no longer be described”
This time would be different. He would leave behind all those jagged, ragged, useless things. Drop them in the road like stones. He would shake them off like dust from his sandals. He would leave behind the curses, the broken promises, the narrow beds and solitary half-empty glasses, the regret and revenge, the acid etch of envy. He would leave behind the taste in his mouth—bitter, salty and sweet as her skin. He would let the craving build as it must, let it swell and throb and spark, until it thundered and roared and burst the bars on the cage of his longing. He would grind his heel into what remained and it would stay where he’d left it. The air would clear. This time would be different. This time.
♦
Lauren B. Davis is the author of five novels… Against A Darkening Sky; The Empty Room; Our Daily Bread (long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize); The Radiant City (finalist for the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize); and The Stubborn Season, as well as two collections of short stories, An Unrehearsed Desire and Rat Medicine & Other Unlikely Curatives.
She can be found at: LaurenBDavis.com
*Photo credit: [someone sent this to me and I’ve misplaced the name; if yours, please let me know!]
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“this is the sort of prayer I make now/ as I tie my tobacco ties”
The only A she ever got
Second grade
Penmanship
from lead to ink
by mid December
Years of youthful curlicues
Swept across the page
ripe with wants and wishes
and everyday waking needs
at 24
she dropped the heart-shaped dotted i’s
third-stage went to four
lead and ink
by mid-December
♦
Deb Rankine is a national food writer, recipe developer and author of The Fridge Whisperer Cookbook Series. Her off hours are spent in torment over her work-in-progress, The Good Wife.
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“He would leave behind the taste in his mouth—bitter, salty and sweet as her skin.”
He has forgotten the sky. He walks across the dusty parking lot of what was once the arena he skated in as a child. An empty gravel lot now sprawls beside the chain link fence. He keeps red eyes on the dull brown dirt as he kicks pebbles with his worn boots. Last year’s leaves rattle and hum but he covers his ears. He is a ghost in this April town he has returned to, a place where no one walks. He takes the back paths and short cuts through parking lots for cars drive by on the main roads and he knows they say, “That looks like Lysander’s son. He never turned out to be much.” Among the singing leaves there is a flash of blue. He stops and plucks at it in the litter and dry grass. As he stands back up, he looks through the fence and sees where the house was, now just another parking lot on the other side, the spinster aunt’s house where he sat as a boy in the tangled garden in wooden lawn chairs with his mother, chairs painted the pastels of Easter eggs. They would teach him the name of the early flowers: sweet purple violet, ragged red robin, white lily of the valley, periwinkle, and the pale blue forget-me-nots. He clutches the money like some sort of holy paper, and as he looks up, sees the sky broken into pieces, but blue none the less.
♦
Christy Ann Conlin is the author of three novels, Heave, Dead Time, and The Memento, (Doubleday, April, 2016). She hosted the national summer radio series, Fear Itself, in 2012 and is an online instructor at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies Creative Writing Program. She also works with California painter, Marie Cameron, in photographic and oil painting collaborations. Christy Ann lives in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, with her three children and her husband, Andy Brown, a publisher of graphic novels.
christyannconlin.com
www.instagram.com/christy.ann.conlin/
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“at 24 she dropped the heart-shaped dotted i’s”
The Litter I See Project 