DIRECTION

​The wishbone though.
Intact and delicate
like a canoe slicing
through the nothingness
that should have been
a heartbeat. Strength
so often gets overlooked
in the pink hour of
dried blood. And so we miss
the open mouth of determination,
the way a foot is lifted not
towards or away from
but against.

SEVEN IMAGES FROM THE SERIES 'ENDANGERED.'

VISION:
​
Butternutbutternut creates art inspired by conscious living, a bright and quirky take on a utopia where animals and humans coexist in harmony. For this series, Endangered, I wanted to hero endangered species to bring awareness to the alarming reduction in population. When we think of tigers, rhinos, orangutans, the general understanding is that they exist, freely, in the wild, but the truth is that we are close to extinction, and they only exist in conservation areas. This series in meant to humanize these animals, hence they are shown on human bodies, and start the dialogue on what we can do to help them, whether through mindful tourism, conscious buying of goods and services or donations. Over continued years of illegal trade, poaching, deforestation, and climate change, we are responsible for this tragedy, and now we need mass awareness to help save these species.
 

Butternutbutternut was started in 2018 by Shinjini Sur, a self-taught artist. Shin's vision is to create art inspired by conscious living - bright, fun, and quirky pieces critiquing social norms. Her iconic work shows animals on human bodies to personify and humanize them, ultimately bringing to life a utopian world where humans and animals coexist in harmony. She is currently experimenting with new materials and home decor - check out butternutbutternut.com for more of her work. *20% of all proceeds from shopping this collection goes to the World Wildlife Fund in support of endangered, critically endangered, and vulnerable animals.*

BUSHFIRE

There is one road in and out –
mountain to sea and back again.
We take it while we still can,
trail the steady line of traffic
climbing towards a choked sky.
 
Streams only travel in one direction
or dry up in heatwaves such as this.
The temperatures are still rising.
Last night, as the children slept,
we watched light streak across the sky
 
illuminating our shack on the hill –
the back steps built close
to jagged shrubs and grass.
This morning we packed everything
and left, shoved pink flip-flops
 
and beach-balls into the boot,
headed north. We saw flames
above the trees. By nightfall
that road was blistered, nothing
but a scorched leaf-littered underpass,  
 
a net for fiery embers and sparks.
Burning strips of eucalypt bark
leapt from one side of the black lake
to the other. We watch the news,
recognise place names, on digital maps,
 
not meant for tourists. We walked
those beaches where huge groups
gather, waiting for the ferocious fires
to burn themselves out, return again
to ash-dusted patches of land.

​Stephanie Conn is a poet and current PhD Researcher from Northern Ireland. Her first collection The Woman on the Other Side (Doire Press, 2016) was shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Award for Best First Collection. Her pamphlet Copeland’s Daughter (Smith/Doorstep, 2016) won the Poetry Business Poetry Competition. Her most recent collection Island was published by Doire Press in 2018. Stephanie is a multi-award winning poet, including the inaugural Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. She is the recipient of a range of Arts Council awards and has read her work locally, nationally and internationally. Find out more at https://stephanieconn.org/. Follow @StephanieConn2

8 POEMS: SENRYU, HAIKU, KYOKA, TANKA


I
How did she do it
Red Riding Hood, luring wolves
into extinction?
Was it expert marketing
or her flawless marksmanship?
 
 
II
Is this blazing earth
just angry - or signing
our Eviction-notice?
 
 
III
The heavens last night
Poured out their discontent heart
Flooding our basements
 
 
IV
Showers in forecast
After us comes the deluge
Our prospectless toast
Too drunk to dream a future
Our off-key drinking song
 
 
V
While the ice cap thaws
I'll regret my lusting for
Gentler winter winds
 

VI
Lonely ice flake floats
on lukewarm Arctic waters
      - my eyes are melting
The edges of existence
now bend toward depression
 
 
VII
Mid-summer sultry
tiny bug bites won't disprove
our insect collapse
I offer my scratchy arms
In pursuit of atonement
 
 
VIII
The city's humming
I listen for sounds of hope
through morning traffic

FLOTSAM

bottles plastic bags underwear gum wrappers 
receipts caps toothbrushes lighters cups 
 
end up in the sea’s vast net of light
waves heaving the weight of 
our waste back and forth
back and forth
 
the ocean 
tumbling shards of beer bottles
into oblong pebbles of sea glass
weaving bloated plastic bags 
into nooses for seagulls
breaking bottle caps 
into bait for lantern fish 
 
Our sparkling garbage dump
brims with cockles and crap.
 
our hands throw
trash overboard
 
the giver of life receives. 

Sheniz Janmohamed (MFA) is a firm believer in fostering community through collaboration, compassion and creativity. In her own practice, she strives to embody words through performance, land art and writing in the ghazal form. A poet, artist educator and land artist.

Sheniz has performed her work in venues across the world, including the Jaipur Literature Festival, Alliance Française de Nairobi and the Aga Khan Museum.  Her land art has been featured at the Aga Khan Park, the Indian Summer Festival and the Art Gallery of Mississauga.
 
Sheniz is also the author of two collections of poetry: Bleeding Light (Mawenzi House, 2010) and Firesmoke (Mawenzi House, 2014).
 
Sheniz visits dozens of schools and organisations each year to teach, perform, and inspire creativity in her students. In 2015, She was awarded the Lois Birkenshaw-Fleming Creative Teaching Scholarship, and holds a Artist Educator Mentor certificate from the Royal Conservatory of Music (Toronto).
 
Sheniz is also the founder of Questions for Ancestors, a blog that encourages BIPOC writers and artists across Turtle Island to ask questions of their ancestors as provide advice for their descendants.
 
Sheniz is currently working on her third collection of ghazals.
 
 
www.shenizjanmohamed.com
​

DISCOURSE OF THE LAST BLADE OF SENSITIVE SHY GRASS

Oceans recede and Henry Darger
was tracing all along.
Boys are carrying banners and I am
not home.
If my bedroom light is burning
you’re hallucinating
electricity and the on-switch.
Your dryer is done,
go on.
That’s not a claxon.
Wind blows that way—alright,
wind blows other way—okay
 
 

BOYS

Marta Balcewicz's poems and stories appear in Tin House Online, AGNI Online, The Malahat Review, and elsewhere. She is the fiction editor for Minola Review and lives in Toronto. Find her at www.martabalcewicz.com.

HOPE OF THE HUMMINGBIRD

For the past decade, severe wind storms have battered the little community I live in on the Pacific Coast.
 
Leg-thick tree limbs have busted roofs, littered lawns, flattened bushes, and felled old trees in our adjoining forest.
 
This spectre is climate change. Elsewhere, the world is burning. What can one person do?
 
Our solution is simple. During fall, we hang up a hummingbird feeder, seed feeders for larger birds, and a suet feeder for winter.  We nourish the most vulnerable creatures of the forest, without discouraging their natural ability to forage.
 
The small, bright glow of hope of our hummingbird friends inspired this poetic honouring:
 
 
Shimmering red tweed on green
 
our tiny guest
 
wings beat time
 
its needle dips deep
 
into the slit of our offered feeder’s
 
yellow plastic petals
 
your forest retreat thinned
 
climate-peril windstorm
 
our serving a small buffer
 
against a grievous global surge
 
of natural tragedies
 
one shock-absorber stands firm

To Aliens (all)
 
we fucked up
the planet that is
not by choice
well not by my choice
and not by a lot of people I know
it was sort of an accumulative fucking up
so you probably shouldn’t come back here
or visit for the first time right now
you should probably just wait
until this part of humanity is gone
because while we have fucked it up currently
i don’t have much hope that we’ll be around that much longer
to continue fucking it up
and after that you can come visit again
the things that come after us will probably be hotter anyways
 
 
 
 
 
To plant life (all),
 
you show what you heal
in your very makeup
the cellular structure of what you are
giving us a map to all that means to be alive
 
seen in valerian root
shaped like a nervous system
used to calm our nerves
and send us to sleep
 
seen in strawberries
cut in half
the picture of a human heart
used to heal our hearts
 
seen in St. John’s wort
bright yellow flowers
calling forth joy
used to heal depression
 
you show us and
sadly, only some of us see

Francine Cunningham is an award-winning Indigenous writer, artist and educator originally from Calgary, AB but who currently resides in Vancouver, BC. She is a graduate of the UBC Creative Writing MFA program, and a recent winner of The Indigenous Voices Award in the 2019 Unpublished Prose Category and of The Hnatyshyn Foundation’s REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. Her fiction has appeared in Grain Magazine as the 2018 Short Prose Award winner, on The Malahat Review’s Far Horizon’s Prose shortlist, Joyland Magazine, The Puritan Magazine, and more. Her debut book of poetry is titled ON/Me (Caitlin Press). You can find out more about her at www.francinecunningham.ca.

BOTTLED

Light slow as honey
in its antique shell, rubber stopper
lazy at the end, snarled curl
 
of the lip ring silver
round glass—yes glass, but thick,
the kind that keeps you guessing,
 
stretching feeble for the other side.
The way a frenzied starling
builds her nest in May,
 
one flimsy clutch of twigs
at a time. The light unclaimed
through my delay, seeping in
 
as if from nowhere, stilted,
clotted as in the white-shelled
tank I saw
 
one inverted summer day
in Melbourne, where a squid lay
slumped in a corner
 
like a pile of unwashed laundry,
her eye a steady accusation
before the rounded window
 
that glimpsed our own grey-glimmer world.


 
TRY TO HATCH FISH AND STONES*

know what to do
with your chalky misfortunes.
Revive dreams
like mammoths, an old
relationship. Await the birth
of a patience, eternal,
yet to be mastered
in any hemisphere. Know what to do
with disappointment. If lucky,
lucky. In the long quest
for an everyday, don’t forget
to revise your expectations.
Protect the charge
that is your wanting. If queer,
well. Know
what to do
with heartache. Hitch your wagon
to a laboratory. Keep that hope
within your belly,
under the perfect tuxedo flap
of skin, snug
beneath your lungs. 
 


*“Berlin gay penguins adopt abandoned egg.” BBC News from Elsewhere, 12 August, 2019. Reporting by Martin Morgan.

THROUGH ALL KINDS OF WEATHER
 
Channel 45
They’re down to the final four on So You Think You Can Text? The judges have locked in their scores and Richard is going home. To costal Regina.
 
Channel 46
The party’s off to a slow start on Orgy Pad. Contestants can’t concentrate. Not with the roof missing. There’s mood-killing daylight in the Velvet Room. And all that blurred-out flesh moves with virtually no enthusiasm.
 
Channel 47
Flash floods in Fredericton. Wildfires in Winnipeg. Tornados in Toronto, the CN Tower plucked, planted needle-down, piercing a pipeline. It’s Russ and his State of Emergency roundup.

“Is this the end? This reporter thinks so,” he says to empty living rooms across the country. “Is anyone out there? Maybe you’re flipping through the channels, looking for something mindless to take the edge off.”

Russ hits a button. It brings up a banner graphic with his cell phone number.

“Russ is going full telethon. All Russ all the time. Call me. I don’t want to die alone.”
 
Channel 48
Undercover Brute. In which Rico discovers the smog-related respiratory illnesses plaguing his deadbeat clients. He’s moved to tears. He gives them another week to pay up before he breaks their legs.
 
Channel 49
Knife Swap. A cleaver for Rita. A carver for Ted. Because it’s getting crazy out there, people.
 
Channel 47
Russ has the whiskey out. And his clothes off. He’s draped over the anchor’s desk checking his phone for missed calls.

“Anyone? Anyone?”

The banner graphic with Russ’s phone number is still on screen.

“Call me. You can’t live for tomorrow. Tomorrow is happening and it’s an arid wasteland. Fucking disease and tumbleweeds. And I want to live. I want to find you and make post-apocalyptic love. So pick up the phone and—”